Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereﬀ, a book designer and typographer, 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 follows on from an earlier edition, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereﬀ: A Modern Correspondence, that spans three years and more than three hundred letters. Published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press, that edition concludes with a crisis that amounted to a "completion" of one of the major phases of their relationship. After September 1950, no longer would Boldereﬀ believe so wholeheartedly in Olson's work - or in his promises to spend time with her. After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of letters written between 1950 and 1969 - approximately 140 letters over a nineteen-year span. 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.

Out of Stock

After Completion

Publisher

Talonbooks

ISBN

0889227063

Language

en

Release

2014

Pages

293

Categories

Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures

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About the Author

Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff

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