Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences

“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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1 Projective Verse and pedagogy
Michael Kindellan
Chapter 2 Olson’s poetics and pedagogy: influences at Black Mountain College
Jeff Gardiner
Chapter 3 Olson’s Dérive, near-far Boulez
Michael Jonik
Chapter 4 “By ear, he sd.”: open listening with Charles Olson and John Cage
Alexander Ruggeri
Chapter 5 “Mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick”: Olson’s stammer and the poetics of noise
Seth Johnson Forrest
Chapter 6 Shadow on the rock: morphology and voice in Olson’s later Maximus poems
Jeff Davis
Chapter 7 Charles Olson and his “post-modern” exploration
Joshua Gardner
Chapter 8 “what insides are”: history—gravitational and unrelieved
Kirsty Singer
Chapter 9 Revising the stance of “Projective Verse”: Charles Olson’s ecological vision of Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology
Joshua Hoeynck
Chapter 10 Olson, Peirce, Whitehead, and American process poetics
Daniel D. Fineman
Chapter 11 Maximus and Aboriginal Australia: antipodean influences on the archaic proprioceptive epic
Nathanael Pree
Chapter 12 An Archaeologist of Morning in the Mayab, 1951
Dylan Clark

Coda
Index

Joshua Hoeynck received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and his research focuses primarily on the confluences between process philosophy, Black Mountain poetry, and environmental criticism. His work has appeared in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, Contemporary Literature, and Process Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the correspondences between Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. Additionally, in conjunction with the Charles Olson Society, he is publishing a collection of expanded talks from the Society's American Literature Association panels. He teaches writing and literature in the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University, with courses on the American Western, environmental dystopia, the history of ecology in American literature, and Magical Realism.

Charles Olson, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Saunders Pierce, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Maya archeology, Maya hieroglyphs, Aboriginal culture, pedagogy and poetry, post-modernism, influence, inter-disciplinarity