Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Literary Criticism. Editor Joshua Hoeynck has given the poetry world great service by uncovering two key essays from the Charles Olson Archive at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, that together form PROJECTIVE VERSE II, an important continuation of one of Olson's most important poetic works. Olson writes "that the conceptual, no matter how 'mental,' and as such the dipolar to perception, still a powerful discrimination is basic, it is this, the actualities have to be felt, while the pure potentials can be dismissed. This the great distinction between an actual entity (nothing is there except for feeling) and an eternal object (idea). A poem is made up of both." This essay brings the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into the central work of Olson's thinking about poetics.

Author City: GLOUCESTER, MA USA

A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson (1910-1970) has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His work is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. Olson's themes are among the largest conceivable: empowering love, political responsibility, historical discovery and cultural reckoning, the wisdom of dreams and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and cooly demanding. His books include The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (University of California Press, 1997), The Maximus Poems (University of California Press, 1983), and The Collected Prose (University of California Press, 1997).