“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.

A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries. Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.

An imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins challenges us to acknowledge how far our practices have drifted from our ideals, asking: What would it look like to build a college from the ground up to support self-discovery and personal integration? What does it mean to be a public university, and are there any left? How can the humanities help the job-ified university begin to take vocation seriously? Cutting through the underbrush of received ideas, Higgins follows the insight where it leads, clearing a path from the corporate multiversity to the renaissance in higher education that was Black Mountain College and back again. Along the way, we tour a campus bent on becoming a shopping mall, accompany John Dewey through a midlife crisis, and witness the first "happening.” Through diverse and grounded philosophical engagements, Undeclared assembles the resources to expand the contemporary educational imagination.

Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of 'British Poetry' as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.

The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

What is the difference between the 'I' of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry. Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period. By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of 'lyric'>. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.

“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.

The Maximus Poems is one of the high achievements of twentieth-century American letters and an essential poem in the postmodern canon. It stands out, in Hayden Carruth's words, as "a huge and truly angelic effort," matching the dimensions of its hero's name and returning poetry to its Homeric and Hesiodic scope. This complete edition of The Maximus Poems brings together the three volumes of Charles Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975, and long out of print) in an authoritative version edited according to the highest standards of textual criticism. Errors in the previous editions have been corrected, twenty-nine new poems added, and the sequence of the final poems modified in the light of the editor's research among the poet's papers. --University of California Press.

An incandescent biography of the inventor of "projective" verse, this comprehensive portrait distinguishes the convivial, bluff public figure from the tormented inner man. A lapsed Catholic, Olson (1910-1970) turned to Sumerian myths, Mayan legends and Islamic mysticism for cosmic insights that would inform poems of cyclic sweep. Torn by contradictory feelings toward his proud, stern father—a Swedish immigrant postman in Worcester, Mass.—the poet found a father-figure in mentor Edward Dahlberg and later in Ezra Pound. Reclusive self-absorption sapped his two common law marriages; he harbored enormous guilt over his neglect of his two children and over second wife Betty Kaiser's death (in a car accident), which may have been self-inflicted during a severe depression. Clark, author of books on Kerouac, Celine and Ted Berrigan, reveals that Olson grappled with homosexual impulses, took hallucinogens and dominated those around him, seeking periodic release from inner demons in frenzied floods of images.