After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff

Description

Modern American poet Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, James Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis. After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff continues from the point at which earlier letters, collected in A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), left off. Spanning three years and more than three hundred letters, that edition concludes with a crisis on Labor Day weekend 1950 that amounted to a "completion" of one of the major phases of their relationship. After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of nearly 150 letters written between 1950 and 1969. In this period of the correspondence, we witness the intensity of the letters flare intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldereff try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magnificent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud. The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters letters that were to become essential to Olson's working out of his poetics. Boldereff's interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldereff an incalculable effect on twentieth-century poetry.

Charles Olson (1910--1970) was a giant of a man in physical stature, critical and intellectual range, and imaginative power. His masterwork, The Maximus Poems, stands beside Ezra Pound's The Cantos as one of the two great American long poems of the twentieth century--indeed, it can be seen as a democratic and relativist response to Pound's absolutist manifesto. Olson's boundless energy, penetrating curiosity, and limitless dedication to his craft made him and his work the syncretic center of the evolving discourse of mid-twentieth century poetics in English. Olson's first two books, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville's Moby-Dick, and The Mayan Letters (1953), written to poet Robert Creeley from Mexico, cover a range of subjects--mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history--and use the fervent informal style that were to distinguish all his discursive prose. Olson's manifesto, Projective Verse, published in 1950, was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams's Autobiography (1951). Olson was a visiting lecturer and then rector at Black Mountain College in its last years, 1951--1956, and taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1963--1965. Settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he devoted most of his time and energy until his death in 1970 to The Maximus Poems (1953--1975). Educated at the University of Michigan, Frances Boldereff (1905--2003) was a James Joyce scholar, typographer and book designer, and single mother who raised her daughter in Brooklyn, New York, while working in the male-dominated publishing industry of the 1940s and 1950s. As a production manager, designer, and marketing administrator, Boldereff worked at The New Yorker, American Weekly, D. Van Nostrand Company, and Doubleday. In 1947, Boldereff introduced herself to modern American poet Charles Olson when she wrote to him in praise of Call Me Ishmael, his study of Moby-Dick. Thus began a passionate romantic and intellectual relationship that spanned more than twenty years and which played out in extensive correspondence comprising hundreds of letters (now archived at the University of Connecticut). As a scholar and exegete outside of the academy, Boldereff wrote about sources in James Joyce and published, under her own privately funded imprint, books such as Reading Finnegans Wake (1959), A Blakean Translation of Joyce's Circe (1965), and Hermes to His Son Thoth (1968). Her research also focused on Arthur Rimbaud, whose work she not only studied but also translated -- most notably his poem "Credo in Unam" (later titled "Sun and Flesh"). Sharon Thesen, a poet and editor, is professor emerita of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Her research interests -include American mid-century and projectivist poetics and the Canadian long poem. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Oyama Pink Shale, The Good Bacteria, and A Pair of Scissors. She has edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, an award-winning selected poems of Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree, and, with Ralph Maud, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence and After Completion. She was an editor of the Capilano Review when she was teaching English at Capilano College (now University) and continues as one of its contributing editors; at UBC Okanagan she co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. Ralph Maud, a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnography of the Pacific Northwest, is professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson -Literary Society. He is the author of Charles Olson Reading, Poet to -Publisher: Charles Olson's Correspondence with Donald Allen, and Charles Olson at the Harbor, and the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews. Maud's work on ethnography -includes Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories, and A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend.