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.

Collected Prose

Friedlander, Benjamin

CREELEY, Robert

Allen, Donald

OLSON/CHARLES

Reference

University of California Press

This new, compact Selected Poems offers for the first time a balanced survey of Robert Creeley's entire sixty years of poetic accomplishment. It showcases the works that made him one of the most beloved and significant writers of the past century while inviting a new recognition of his enduring commitments, fluency, and power.

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

Literature & Fiction

Creeley, Penelope

History & Criticism

Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

A provocative overview of avant-garde American poetry of the past 25 years that raises important questions about the practice of criticism. 
Simulcast offers long overdue, highly opinionated, and penetrating examinations of a flourishing movement in American letters by one of its most perceptive practitioners. The four 'experiments' in literary criticism gathered in this volume vary in style and point of view. Taken together, they reassess the fundamental relationship between poetry and criticism.
 "The Anti-Hegemony Project" is a satire, employing the rhetoric of journalism and the colloquial exchanges of online fan groups to analyze one of the earliest appearances of a poetry community on the World Wide Web: the "Poetics List" maintained at the State University of New York, Buffalo. "Poe’s Poetics and Selected Essays" is a collection of polemical essays on subjects ranging from modernism to language poetry. The third experiment, "The Literati of San Francisco," is a detailed portrait of the figures and ideas at the heart of an important literary scene a decade after language poetry’s inception. The final essay, "A Short History of Language Poetry," provides a less polemical, more sober and even-handed analysis of that movement from its origins to the present and its prospects for the future.
 These critical interventions and essays are important studies of an evolving poetic field, but they also represent an evolution in criticism itself. Friedlander's unorthodox methodology is to create a critical text by rewriting prior examples of criticism, among them Jean Wahl's A Short History of Existentialism and Edgar Allan Poe's "Literati of New York City." The resulting critiques are themselves a kind of poetry. They explore the issues of style versus substance, artifice versus authenticity, and plausibility versus truth, while the shifts in perspective call into question the authority of any one critical account.

University Alabama Press

This study offers an overview of avant-garde American poetry of the latter 20th century - a flourishing movement in American letters. The four experiments in literary criticism vary in style and viewpoint. Taken together, they reassess the fundamental relationship between poetry and criticism.

Poetry. ".I was born a year after Wieners' first collection was published, THE HOTEL WENTLEY POEMS, and can't vouch for the accuracy of that book's depiction of 1950's bohemian life. Access may not be the right word anyhow to describe what it takes to read this poet. Dramatic to a fault, Wieners' work stages a gaudy spectacle of life: stages, and thus maintains at a distance. Identify? The poet as actor seduces and evades identification all at once. Seduces, by arousing sympathy, awe, desire. Evades, by remaining mysteriuos, out of reach, a trick of anxious language"-from LOSS.

Loss

Pressed Wafer Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Friedlander, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Friedlander, Benjamin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Friedlander, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Collected Prose

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Loss