Imagining Persons
264 pages, 6 3/25 x 9 1/4
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Dec 2017
ISBN:9780826358912
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Imagining Persons

Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson

University of New Mexico Press

Robert Duncan's nine lectures on Charles Olson, delivered intermittently from 1961 to 1983, explore the modernist literary background and influences of Olson's influential 1950 essay "Projective Verse." These transcribed talks pay tribute to Olson and expand our knowledge of Duncan's vision of modernist writing.

Invaluable archival documents. . . . Those familiar with Duncan's essays will find in these lectures his characteristic syntactical complexity and conceptual denseness.'--Eric Keenaghan, Journal of Modern Literature
In these two companion volumes (An Open Map and Imagining Persons) . . . the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents' moment and our own.'--Jacket2
In these lectures, Duncan explores the meaning and context of Olson's poetry and dynamic presence as poet and innovator, while also providing a broader representation of poetry and thought, ancient and modern, delivered with wit, intelligence, curiosity, and care. Essential reading for anyone interested in . . . the work of two of the most important poets of the postwar period.'--Peter O'Leary, author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness

Robert J. Bertholf (1940-2016) served as the curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo for twenty-five years. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including several about Robert Duncan and his work. Dale M. Smith is an associate professor in Ryerson University’s Department of English. He is the author of Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 and Slow Poetry in America.

Preface
Dale M. Smith
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text

Introduction: Advocating Projective Verse Aesthetics
Dale M. Smith
Vancouver Lecture
Ideas of Primordial Time in Charles Olson's Work
Timing and the Creation of Time in Charles Olson's Maximus
The Power of Imagining Persons: The Poem as an Interior Play
The Fatefulness of Ongoing Identifications: The Poem as the Recall and Adventure of Self in Projection
"Forth on the godly sea": The Daemonic in the Realm of Poetry
The World Felt as Presence
Projective Project: Charles Olson
On Projective Verse

Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

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