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Stephen Fredman asserts in his latest work that American poetry is groundless--that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and discovers for itself fresh meaning. His argument focuses on four pairs--Eliot-Williams, Thoreau-Olson, Emerson-Duncan and Whitman-Creeley--and illustrates how Williams, Olson, Duncan and Creeley are all influenced by these predecessors to some extent but that ultimately their poetry is paradoxically grounded in an essential groundlessness. In order to demonstrate how approaches to groundlessness have persisted over time, Fredman explores the measures taken by these American poets to provide a provisional ground upon which to build their poetry: inventing idiosyncratic traditions, forming poetic communities, engaging in polemical prose, assessing all the dimensions of particular places, and treating words as emblematic and mysterious objects. At the very center of the book stands Charles Olson, whose work so dramatically articulates the whole range of issues arising from the American poet's anxious search for, and resistance to, an authentic and unified tradition. ... Read more

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Reductio sensorum
Charles Olson exasperates, even with lines that echo in our minds. One source of exasperation in his poetry is allusiveness, which is even higher in "The Kingfishers" than in T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Ralph Maud explicates the allusions in "The Kingfishers" and its sequel, "The Praises" from a wide range of sources including Olson's work, reading and friends. Where Mr. Maud cannot be definite he is plausible. He interprets with reasonable respect and not hushed reverence.We can be grateful for his extensive labors, not the least of which is reducing Olson's habit of redaction: for Olson as writer was a putter-in and not a taker-out. ... Read more

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memoir of Olson's last months while teaching in CT ... Read more

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A remarkable series of letters between Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and his most ardent reader. ... Read more

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Charles Olson is often described as one of the most influential American poets of the last quarter century; some would rather describe him as a cult figure, prophet of the Black Mountain poets and their descendants. Both judgments refer to an influence exerted as much through theories as through poems. Here is an examination of Olson's understanding of poetry that is cogent and a pleasure to read. It provides the framework needed for understanding Olson's work.

Mr. von Hallberg shows us the Olson of the 1950s, who tried to bring change through teaching, who wanted poetry to communicate knowledge, as well as the more private poet of the 1960s, turning from history to myth. Olson's ambitions for poetry were based on his sense of cultural politics, and the author studies the relation between Olson's politics and his poetics. He traces too Olson's relation to older poets, especially Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. His book will interest anyone reading contemporary American poetry.

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The Perfect Society through the Perfection of Language
Carla Billitteri's book is an insightful, long overdue round-up of the Cratylic tradition in American poetry - the assumption that "the word", as Borges put it, is an "archetype for the thing", that "In the letters of 'rose' is the rose / and all the Nile flows through 'Nile'." The introduction superbly lays out the different forms that this theory has taken historically, and notes its peculiar persistence in America, as well as its application to the constitution of the society. At the heart of the Cratylic impulse, she writes, is "a desire for the perfect society achieved through the perfection of language." This is followed by brilliant and patient readings of Whitman's "poems of these states", and later incarnations of the theory - Charles Olson and Laura (Riding) Jackson. These demonstrate the omnipresence of Cratyllic theories of language in modernist American poetry, making this book key reading for anyone interested in the area.
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