Selected Letters – Charles Olson ed. by Ralph Maud (review)

338 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 results in potentially crippling guilts, insecurities, and profound doubts about one=s sexual identity, one=s authorship and originality.= There are many fine and lasting insights in these essays, and a generosity of spirit and professional courtesy that almost uniquely characterize Lowry studies. But there is something (sadly) missing here too B in both the particulars and the whole B which seems not only to apply to Lowry studies but (if one might generalize, probably unwisely, about such things) to much >postmodernist= criticism as well. It has to do with forests and trees, with grasping hold of the larger picture; and other lacunae within the postmodernist agenda: an absence or shirking of hierarchies, of ontologies, of aesthetic adjudications and values. This volume doesn=t quite live up to its own promotions as a centurial overview of the man=s worth. Though its intentions are commendable, and its findings suggestive, much is left unsaid or unexplored by these sorts of studies that isn=t self-evident and shouldn=t be taken for granted with such an exceptional literary figure. (MATTHEW CORRIGAN) Ralph Maud, editor. Selected Letters B Charles Olson University of California Press. xl, 494. US $60.00 Early in his writing life, Charles Olson began to reject the traditional roles, attitudes, and relations associated with a literary career. As his sense of mission grew, located in the understanding that he lived in a time when a new era in human consciousness (what he called early on the postmodern) was opening up, he also broke increasingly with the whole range of literary form, not to mention the very concept of literature. In searching for a way beyond the given, he began to articulate what he called the projective method, most famously in his philosophical essay >Projective Verse.= The projective, for Olson, was predicated on speed as a way of escaping the given, and speed, in Olson=s world, was achieved within the relations of a community at work. Whatever else such a community may be, in Olson=s practice it was a >place= where hierarchical/anti-hierarchical orderings were dissolved in a synergistic circulation of authoritative finitudes that egged each other on towards their further possibilities B which were the further possibilities of the self-revelation of community as well. For Olson, one of the most important places this energetic interaction arose was in correspondence, so that correspondence became for him the centre and fundament of his work. Ralph Maud makes this point clear in his introduction to the Selected Letters, where he argues persuasively that the letter is the central form of Olson=s work. Crucial Maximus poems significantly bear the title >Letter.= But in addition to that, Olson=s correspondence with Frances Bolderoff, Robert Creeley, and others was the site where the originating work was HUMANITIES 339 carried out. One of the marvellous revelations of Olson=s correspondence with Bolderoff (edited several years ago by Maud and the poet Sharon Thesen) was that the Maximus poems were born in the letters exchanged between the two. As Olson put it to Creeley, >I believe a man talks best straight and going out to another.= To say that Olson was a prolific letter writer is an immense understatement . He sometimes penned eight or ten letters a day, many of them, as he put it, >of consequence.= The correspondence with Robert Creeley, for instance, is now legendary. Over a thousand pieces were produced, the bulk of them written between about 1950 and 1955. Now in its tenth volume, the collected correspondence of Olson and Creeley has still covered only two years. His correspondence with others, while not quite so immense, was still voluminous. Given this prodigious output, Ralph Maud=s task in putting together a meaningful selection was Herculean, and he has done a terrific job. He has chosen to let Olson tell the story of his life in these letters (supplemented by a very thorough chronology of the poet=s life in the preliminary material), providing an important alternative to the skewed Tom Clark biography. The earliest is from a young Olson to his father, the last in response to an Indian graduate student=s query...