Olson Among the Letterers

Abstract

Abstract The third chapter is concerned with the seminal experiments of Charles Olson, a key transitional figure between early modernism and postwar poetry. The first section, ‘The New Ear, Breath Stops, and the Beats’, argues that the breath poetics of ‘Projective Verse’ for which Olson has become famous are supplanted by the labour of typography when he writes The Maximus Poems. In ‘“A full graphics-knowing man”: Black Mountain College and Ben Shahn’s Print Shop’, I argue that Olson conceives of mid-century America as mired in the advertising culture’s graphical malaise; with lithographer Ben Shahn, he envisages Black Mountain College as a centre of typographical resistance and re-education. Olson also becomes preoccupied with the poet’s interactions with the typographer and the printer. In ‘The Poet and the Typographer: Frances Motz Boldereff, David Jones, and the Labour of Verse’, I argue that this question of poetics comes to life in Olson’s relationship with the typographer Frances Motz Boldereff. Measuring space is figured as an art of verse, which is manifested in Olson’s drafting and compositional practices. Olson begins to conceive of typography as key to the work of poetry. His critique of discourse and Aristotelian logic convinces him that language needs to be spatialized, I argue in ‘“Metric then is mapping”: Olson, Prynne, and the Language of Space’. Through his correspondence with J. H. Prynne, Olson formulates the grammar of a spatial language. Typographical calculations, though, rather than the syntactical complexities formulated with Prynne, form the spatial language of The Maximus Poems. In the final section, ‘Literal, real realty: Typography, Topology and Property’, I claim that Olson’s later verse and essays rewrite poetics in metaphysical terms modelled after the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. I argue that territory and ownership is critiqued through the typography of Olson’s poetry. Experimental typography, I conclude, is how Olson attempts to offer a true map of the world, apprised of buried geology and history.