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An Open Map - (Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century) by Robert J Bertholf & Dale M Smith
About this item
Highlights
- The correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson is one of the foundational literary exchanges of twentieth-century American poetry.
- Author(s): Robert J Bertholf & Dale M Smith
- 328 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, General
- Series Name: Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century
Description
About the Book
The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after Robert Duncan and Charles Olson first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson's death in January 1970.Book Synopsis
The correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson is one of the foundational literary exchanges of twentieth-century American poetry. The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after the two poets first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson's death in January 1970. Both men initiated a novel stance toward poetry, and they matched each other with huge accomplishments, an enquiring, declarative intelligence, wide-ranging interests in history and occult literature, and the urgent demand to be a poet. More than a literary correspondence, An Open Map gives insight into an essential period of poetic advancement in cultural history.
Review Quotes
"Arranged in five chronological sections, theirs was an often recondite correspondence, by turns cryptic or dramatic, essentially small essays on poetics and exchanges of latest works or comments on their reading. The letters are also full of affectionate greetings ('my dear Dunk') and humor."
--The Times Literary Supplement"In these two companion volumes (An Open Map and Imagining Persons) . . . the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents' moment and our own."
--Jacket2"An essential correspondence between two [of] the most innovative and visionary poets in American literature. In these letters is contained the generative energies of some of the best poetry written in the twentieth century."--Peter O'Leary, author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness
"Invaluable archival documents. . . . Bertholf and Smith also supply a strong accounting of the context of Olson and Duncan's correspondence in their introduction to An Open Map."--Eric Keenaghan, Journal of Modern Literature
"These letters illuminate and inform many of the most important discussions in US poetry of the time."--Daniel Katz, American Literary History