Charles Olson (1910–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Open Field ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Black Mountain

Actively writing in the 1950s and 1960s, poet and critic Charles Olson is a key figure of both the New American Poetry and the Black Mountain school. He is best known for articulating—in his essay ‘Projective Verse’—the idea of ‘open-field’ poetics, opposed to inherited stanza form, as well as for his exploration of the long poem in The Maximus Poems.

Chance, Time and Silence: the New American Verse

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Black Mountain Poetry

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.

Small is Quite Beautiful: Tarasque Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Small Press ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Broad Overview

The 1960s saw an explosion of mimeographed poetry magazines and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter four provides a broad overview of this ‘mimeo revolution,’ tracing its origins back to the do-it-yourself ethos of Black Mountain and the burgeoning of the ‘New American Poetry.’ As chapter 4 discusses, with this explosion of small-scale publishing, however, came more problematic issues of quality, both with regard to the production standards of the publications and the poetry they published. Chapter 4 examines how the British little magazine Tarasque and the eponymous small press established by Stuart Mills and Simon Cutts responded to this side of the mimeo revolution with a potent mix of trenchant irony and a championing of the small poem—as practiced by Finlay and Williams—that emphasized impersonal, constructed formal objectivity in answer to the expressive solipsism of the time.

Jonathan Williams: Beyond Black Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Strong Claim

This chapter examines Jonathan Williams’s activities as the editor of the seminal Jargon Society press and as a poet. In both respects, this chapter argues, Williams’s reputation has been distorted as a result of his early association with Black Mountain College and the school of poetry that emerged from it in the late 1950s. Although chapter three examines Williams’s links with the college and the formative influence that its rector Charles Olson had on his poetry and his publishing, it also makes a makes a strong claim for disassociating Williams’s reputation from the exclusive, binding labels of ‘Black Mountain poet’ and ‘Black Mountain publisher.’ Williams, it is argued, expressed considerable aversion to not only being labeled a ‘Black Mountain’ poet but to being associated with any poetry school or movement. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Williams has resisted and complicated the Black Mountain label, both in his poetry and in his publishing, by paying particular attention to his use of vernacular speech in his poetry and through an abiding fascination with what was initially an imagined England that would become more tangible as a result of his semi-annual residency in England from the late 1960s onwards.

The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition.

1994 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 608
Author(s):  
Trent Keough ◽  
Stephen Fredman
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Charles Olson

scholarly journals Contemporary American poetry in Slovenian criticism and translation : 1945 - 2005

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Divjak
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
New York School ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Contemporary American Poetry ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Black Mountain

The article presents the Slovenian reception of five major groups in American post-war poetry -the Formalists, the Confessionals, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School poets - as well as the reception of those prominent authors who cannot be classified in any of these groups. The analysis reveals which groups have attracted  most interest of the Slovenian critics and translators, when was the peak of their reception, which methods of interpretation have been used by the Slovenian critics, and to what extent has their judgement about certain contemporary American authors gradually changed.

scholarly journals Suburban Identity in the Poetry of John Updike

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-54
Author(s):  
Jiří Flajšar
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
John Updike ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Suburban Studies ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.

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