An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson ed. by Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith, and: Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson by ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith (review)

These books fill a significant gap in the growing literature about innovative American poetry after World War II. They are complementary volumes, one containing the letters Robert Duncan and Charles Olson exchanged, the other eight lectures and a class discussion on Olson's poetics and the role Olson played for Duncan's own work and central ideas. In 1947 Duncan and Olson, two of the foremost representatives of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century, met for the first time on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. What brought them together was their contact with Ezra Pound, whom both had visited at St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC, where Pound was interned. While they abhorred Pound's allegiance with fascism, both considered him the central figure of American poetry of the first half of their century. He would remain a common point of reference for them not only in their publications but also in their correspondence.

At the time of their first meeting, Duncan, the Californian, was already well known among the Bay Area poetic community; he is remembered today as the leading figure of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. Olson, the Easterner from Massachusetts, was visiting UC Berkeley to collect archival material for his project on the American West. Duncan is usually associated with San Francisco but spent a number of years in the East, including some time as a student and later, when Olson was rector there, as a teacher at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Olson, on the other hand, is usually connected with Gloucester, Massachusetts, the central place, image, and idea of his Maximus Poems, but he was interested in the concept of the American West and published a series of poems on the topic (The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, edited by George F. Butterick, U of California P, 1987, 593–600). In his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, Olson extended the concept of American space to include the Pacific, just as his Maximus Poems did with the Atlantic, as Duncan was to point out. Thus, the two poets represent East Coast and West Coast but also an exchange between these two intellectual centers of the nation.

Although Duncan's senior by nine years, Olson had begun publishing poetry only in 1946, and Duncan did not immediately take his poems seriously. As he would later confess, he threw the copy of the chapbook Y & X that Olson had sent him into his wastepaper basket. But his stance was soon to change. Both writers took to each other and developed a friendship and a literary and intellectual exchange that lasted until Olson's early death in 1970. The nature of this relationship can be deduced from the many expressions of closeness found in their correspondence, now edited by Dale M. Smith and the late Robert J. Bertholf, tireless expert on "the New American Poetry" (to use the title of Donald M. Allen's groundbreaking anthology of 1960): "we are such damn brothers, or at least I know you are brother of mine, so vividly and surely do you so often invoke me . . ." (Olson to Duncan, 1955, Open Map 87); "You are, dear Charles, first of [my sense of kin]. . . . Haven't you, from 'Wisdom as Such' on, given me myself" (Duncan to Olson, 1957, Open Map 127–28). In his "Against Wisdom as Such" Olson had brought the friends' epistolary discussion about the proper use of source material from philosophy, esotericism, and other fields in poetry...