After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff

Modern American poet Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, James Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis. After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff continues from the point at which earlier letters, collected in A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), left off. Spanning three years and more than three hundred letters, that edition concludes with a crisis on Labor Day weekend 1950 that amounted to a "completion" of one of the major phases of their relationship. After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of nearly 150 letters written between 1950 and 1969. In this period of the correspondence, we witness the intensity of the letters flare intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldereff try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magnificent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud. The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters-letters that were to become essential to Olson's working out of his poetics. Boldereff's interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldereff an incalculable effect on twentieth-century poetry.

About the Author :
Born in 1910, Charles Olson's first two books, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville's Moby Dick, and The Mayan Letters (1953), written to Robert Creeley from Mexico, cover a range of subjects-mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history-and use the fervent informal style that were to distinguish all his discursive prose. Olson's manifesto, Projective Verse, published in 1950, was quoted generously in William Carlos Williams' Autobiography (1951). Olson was rector of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1951-1956, and taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1963-1965. Settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he devoted most of his time and energy until his death in 1970 to The Maximus Poems, his most substantial work. (19052003) was a James Joyce scholar, typographer and book designer, and single mother who raised her daughter in Brooklyn, New York, while working in the male-dominated publishing industry of the 1940s and 1950s. (Talonbooks) and several titles from the 1980s and 1990s from Coach House Press. She has been involved in the Canadian and Vancouver poetry scene for many years. Ralph Maud (19282014) was the author of a number of books on Charles Olsen as well as the editor of a number of books on Dylan Thomas. He was also a noted ethnographer and editor of ethnographic books. Maud was a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Review :
“Lovers to the end, Olson and Boldereff remained faithfully bonded by the central role that imagination and art played in each of their lives. Their mutual admiration for each other’s intellect was left untarnished by any personal failure. In this volume of letters, it is Boldereff who appears the stronger of the two on all accounts. She never wavers in her interest in Olson as both a man and an artist. … If there’s any benefit to come from having this correspondence made available, it should surely bring about greater attention to the sharp interrelating of Joyce and Blake accomplished by Boldereff in her books. Her work receives too little the acknowledgement it richly deserves.” — Bookslut “Boldereff, while appearing to serve her pantheon of ‘great men,’ puts them into her service. This book is not the fiery Olson workshop of the previous volume. Boldereff here enters the period of her own working, beginning with her manifesto Credo in Unam … it is a call for a new woman, a woman who is strong, independent, sexually liberated, and within whose ambit man can find his own maturity, as they enter the new age together … Boldereff’s books are strange but not delirious. Her work on Joyce is substantial … ” – The Capilano Review “Lovers to the end, Olson and Boldereff remained faithfully bonded by the central role that imagination and art played in each of their lives. ... [Boldereff's] work receives too little the acknowledgement it richly deserves.” — Bookslut “What is stunning about this collection is the density of intellectual and cultural observations by both participants in this dialogue – and the ways in which Boldereff and Olson’s mythopoetic shoptalk quickly shifted in and out of the amorous and plainly erotic, which here so often serve as the groundwork of the intellectual and cultural materials.” —Andrew Mossin “Boldereff, while appearing to serve her pantheon of ‘great men,’ puts them into her service. This book is not the fiery Olson workshop of the previous volume.” – The Capilano Review “What is stunning about this collection is the density of intellectual and cultural observations by both participants in this dialogue ...” —Andrew Mossin