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Collected Prose
The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910–1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse.
The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia.
Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.
The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia.
Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.
490 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 1997
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106 people want to read
About the author
Charles Olson
175 books80 followersCharles Olson was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."
Olson's first book was Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick which was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University.[5] In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the breath of the poet and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.
His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.[6]
Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of", manifest a sincere, original, accessible, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.
In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.
Olson's first book was Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick which was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University.[5] In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the breath of the poet and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. The poem "The Kingfishers", first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), is an application of the manifesto.
His second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.[6]
Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of", manifest a sincere, original, accessible, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" from The Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.
In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems, a project that was to remain unfinished at the time of his death. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The final, unfinished volume imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 10, 2010
I didn't love or follow every essay here but it would be insane not to give this much scholarship or this much good odd writing by a poet about poets (and Melville of course and D.H. Lawrence and Havelock Ellis' intro to Plato . . . ) five stars. It's a dip into and out of collection for me, and a riveting one, reasonably so, for many. He sure can write though I prefer the Maximus poems of Olson's. This is a good read. There you have it.
April 29, 2008
essential post-modern ideals. great style.
Read
May 25, 2008enormously useful and energizing. Olson has been a major breath for me.
August 24, 2025
"feeling and desires and breath/
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will
Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
is redeemed, and history/
and all that politics,/
and 'State' and Subjection/
are for once, done away with,/
as the reason/
of writing"
(Olson, "Places and Names," 1965)
Consisting of seven discrete segments ("Call Me Ishmael," "On Melville, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Pound," "Human Universe," "The Present is Prologue," "Poetry and Poets," "Space and Time," and "Other Essays, Notes, and Reviews,"), this collection of the prose of esteemed poet and theorist Charles Olson is filled with a panoply of prose pieces, everything from reviews of books, to poems themselves, to an almost book length exposition of the sources of Melville's "Moby-Dick," to meditations on the nature of knowledge in general and the sources of culture (and language) in the Semitic Near East. To say that Mr. Olson has access, in that capacious mind of his, to wide sources of study and arcane knowledge is to analogously suggest that Einstein liked to tinker in the laboratory: this man has the chops, both poetic and academic, to put much better known figures to shame! And these wide 'fields' (to use a term appropriate for the theorist of "Projective Verse") are communicated in gnomic fashion, as if just a tincture or touch of the 'stuff' (knowledge) was enough to elicit a cascade of thought that will have no end in sight! And, in the some of the areas, I was able to keep up with the weighty and lofty (and serious) ideas inherent in Mr. Olson's obtuse, syntactically-rich prose. However, due to my newness towards is oeuvre, perhaps, he left me behind at some points, struggling to maintain coherence as I processed his febrile mind's machinations and workings. This is not to say that I did not gain much from acquaintance with this prose, for the knowledge here is controversial, filled with a sense of 'agon,' and as such is well worth the needed time to decipher its contents. It just felt, to these neophyte eyes, that a 'context,' such as a classroom centered on Olson's thought, would be a necessity if one desires to truly conquer the "Everest" that is Olson's thought. In the end, this work should be seen, I would attest, as an exemplar of all that is deep and profound in 20th century poetic thought, but you need a "Virgil" to help conduct your way through the 'hell' of Olson's thought, the better to achieve the 'paradiso' at its conclusion. Mixed bag this book is!
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will
Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
is redeemed, and history/
and all that politics,/
and 'State' and Subjection/
are for once, done away with,/
as the reason/
of writing"
(Olson, "Places and Names," 1965)
Consisting of seven discrete segments ("Call Me Ishmael," "On Melville, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Pound," "Human Universe," "The Present is Prologue," "Poetry and Poets," "Space and Time," and "Other Essays, Notes, and Reviews,"), this collection of the prose of esteemed poet and theorist Charles Olson is filled with a panoply of prose pieces, everything from reviews of books, to poems themselves, to an almost book length exposition of the sources of Melville's "Moby-Dick," to meditations on the nature of knowledge in general and the sources of culture (and language) in the Semitic Near East. To say that Mr. Olson has access, in that capacious mind of his, to wide sources of study and arcane knowledge is to analogously suggest that Einstein liked to tinker in the laboratory: this man has the chops, both poetic and academic, to put much better known figures to shame! And these wide 'fields' (to use a term appropriate for the theorist of "Projective Verse") are communicated in gnomic fashion, as if just a tincture or touch of the 'stuff' (knowledge) was enough to elicit a cascade of thought that will have no end in sight! And, in the some of the areas, I was able to keep up with the weighty and lofty (and serious) ideas inherent in Mr. Olson's obtuse, syntactically-rich prose. However, due to my newness towards is oeuvre, perhaps, he left me behind at some points, struggling to maintain coherence as I processed his febrile mind's machinations and workings. This is not to say that I did not gain much from acquaintance with this prose, for the knowledge here is controversial, filled with a sense of 'agon,' and as such is well worth the needed time to decipher its contents. It just felt, to these neophyte eyes, that a 'context,' such as a classroom centered on Olson's thought, would be a necessity if one desires to truly conquer the "Everest" that is Olson's thought. In the end, this work should be seen, I would attest, as an exemplar of all that is deep and profound in 20th century poetic thought, but you need a "Virgil" to help conduct your way through the 'hell' of Olson's thought, the better to achieve the 'paradiso' at its conclusion. Mixed bag this book is!
February 10, 2018
[provisional - didn't read everything]
call me ishmael & projective verse are the ones
call me ishmael & projective verse are the ones
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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August 1, 2007http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/...
also some readings at ubuweb
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/...
also some readings at ubuweb
August 16, 2012
awesomely strange -- field poetics -- spatiality -- strangely awesome...
December 20, 2007
projective verse is just the beginning...
December 1, 2008
Olson is good on why and how.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews