An Open Map: Robert Duncan and Charles Olson

What is it about?

An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2017, and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson. Ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2017. The two excellent books fill a significant gap in the growing literature about innovative American poetry after World War II. They are complementary volumes, one containing the letters exchanged by Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, the other Duncan’s lectures and a class discussion on Olson’s poetics, the role Olson had played for Duncan’s own work and his, Duncan’s own central ideas. In 1947, Duncan and Olson, two of the foremost representatives of American Literature in the second half of the twentieth century, met for the first time. The two volumes bear testimony to their friendship, to their mutual influence and to the decisive role they, together with Robert Creeley, played for the development of open form poetry and poetics in America and beyond. The editors have made the texts accessible by their excellent introductions and by adding extensive (not always consistently handled) notes, bibliographies, and “glossaries” containing the names and short biographical notes on persons occurring in the books or explanations of some important terms.

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