Olson Charles. Letters for Origin. 1950-1956

New York: Paragon House, 1989. — 154 p. — ISBN: 1-55778-111-7.Among poets in mid-century America, Charles Olson is a dominating and influential figure. He is best known for The Maximus Poems, an epic sequence which Olson worked on for twenty years, f r om 1950 until his death in 1970. Set in the place where he spent summers as a child, the seacoast town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the poem was written in the tradition of William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Ezra Pound's, The Cantos, with the same complicatingly discursive allusiveness, mythological overlaying, and kaleidoscopic structure. Olson is also known for his theoretical piece, "Projective Verse," a manifesto that appeared in the magazine Poetry New York in 1950. Olson's point of departure in this piece is an extension and contemporary reinvention of Pound's notion of the vortex as an ideal poetic model. The manner of the piece, vibrantly hortatory, refuted the bland decorousness and formal restraints of the N ew Criticism, the prevalent school of poetic theory after the Second World War. Olson was fascinated by the kinetics of poetic movement. He saw the poem as an energy transfer, highly potent, very special, and, if successful, as meaningful as the most profound spiritual insights or messages. He claimed that the problem for the poet was an awareness of the process through which the energy that prompted the writing becomes the energy in which the reader participates. He believed that this interchange best occurred in as open a literary structure as possible, and Olson's key was transformation.