After Completion

The Later Letters

by Charles Olson, with Frances Boldereff, edited by Sharon Thesen

tagged: diaries & journals

Description

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.

About the Authors

Charles Olson (1910–1970) was a giant of a man in physical stature, critical and intellectual range, and imaginative power. His masterwork, The Maximus Poems, stands beside Ezra Pound’s The Cantos as one of the two great American long poems of the twentieth century – indeed, it can be seen as a democratic and relativist response to Pound’s absolutist manifesto. Olson’s boundless energy, penetrating curiosity, and limitless dedication to his craft made him and his work the syncretic centre of the evolving discourse of mid-twentieth century poetics in English. Olson’s first two books, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville’s Moby-Dick, and The Mayan Letters (1953), written to poet 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 extensively in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography (1951). Olson was a visiting lecturer and then rector at Black Mountain College in its last years, 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 (1953–1975).

Educated at the University of Michigan, Frances Boldereff (1905–2003) 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. As a production manager, designer, and marketing administrator, Boldereff worked at The New Yorker, American Weekly, D. Van Nostrand Company, and Doubleday. In 1947, Boldereff introduced herself to modern American poet Charles Olson when she wrote to him in praise of Call Me Ishmael, his study of Moby-Dick. Thus began a passionate romantic and intellectual relationship that spanned more than twenty years and which played out in extensive correspondence comprising hundreds of letters (now archived at the University of Connecticut). 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. As a scholar and exegete outside of the academy, Boldereff wrote about sources in James Joyce and published, under her own privately funded imprint, books such as Reading Finnegans Wake (1959), A Blakean Translation of Joyce’s Circe (1965), and Hermes to His Son Thoth (1968). Her research also focused on Arthur Rimbaud, whose work she not only studied but also translated – most notably his poem “Credo in Unam” (later titled “Sun and Flesh”).

Poet, editor and teacher Sharon Thesen (born Tisdale, SK) has spent almost all her life in British Columbia. After studies at Simon Fraser University, she began teaching in 1975 at the then-Capilano College in North Vancouver, where for many years she edited The Capilano Review. Artemis Hates Romance, her first book of poetry in 1980, was followed by thirteen more, three of them finalists for the Governor General's Award: Confabulations, 1984; The Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; and The Good Bacteria, 2006. She edited The Vision Tree, a selected poems by Phyllis Webb (Governor General’s Award, 1982), two editions of the The New Long Poem Anthology (1991 and 2001), and, with Ralph Maud, two volumes of correspondence between American poet Charles Olson and book-designer and Joyce scholar Frances Boldereff (1999 and 2012). At UBC Okanagan, where she taught from 2003 to 2012, Thesen and poet Nancy Holmes co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. The Receiver (2017) is her most recent collection, and in 2021, The Wig-Maker was published, a book-length poem created in concert with Janet Gallant from Gallant’s memoirs. Since 2020, the annual “Sharon Thesen Lecture” at UBC Okanagan honours Thesen’s contribution to poetry and poetics. Her archives are held at the McGill University Library in Montreal and at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections in Burnaby, BC.

Excerpt

[a letter from Boldereff to Olson, during his years at Black Mountain College]

Brooklyn to Black Mountain
[26 November 1953]

Thanksgiving

Charles dear—

A very nice black special delivery man brought the exquisite package last night—and I stayed up to read it through—It is now before breakfast and I hasten to tell you, though as you can guess, there is very much which I am not sure of at this first reading, that the primary adjective which comes up to me is clean—that in some marvelous transposition the very air of a Gloucesterman's boat has somehow been made to blow—that the pages are intensely clean and male. That they come to me as Ishmael did with a wondrous healing at an hour most needed (I had precisely at five last night a big blow out with my boss). But above all, I want to tell you that this last two weeks I am steeped in Rimbaud's La Chasse Spirituelle which I ordered from France and in the light of all that sacred holy thing discloses of Rimbaud's sufferings (I cannot wait to show and talk to you about it) in that high light--where I was touchy and fussy as a priest in his sanctuary—Maximus seems the next direct step—it comes over big, Olson--clean as clean—and while it requires, as always, very much hard work on my part to decipher in detail--it has already delivered its message to me and I would say comes out as in absolute, direct succession to La Chasse.

I have found a book which you also must see, "The Sacred Tree Script"—explains things in Rimbaud, in Plato and refers in ways I want to discuss with you to your "Gate and the Center"—very wonderful discovery, to me, and I now think--I can practically draw a literal line of exactly how and where the thing has traveled from the beginning of "man's motion"—is not that what you called it?

There were several beautiful things that struck me as I read so hastily—

"In the midst of plenty, walk..."

this whole passage through to the end of this Song is genuine song and I hope will be made a song and sung by someone who feels its music as I do and can hum a tune, as I can not.

It is a strange thing to be a woman—to be as full of your thing you could burst—and yet to have no outlet—I feel my thing growing to a size and a clarity inside me that you'd think it would have to break through in some form—yet I can neither sing, compose, write prose or verse, draw, sculpt or any of all those blood passages--perhaps I can squeeze it out into my house, which I am still determined to build before I die!

One other thing—I have an article from the architect Deitrick, on his terrific State Fair Arena at Raleigh, N.C. Most exciting building of the modern world—go to Raleigh if you possibly can—and see it—as I plan to whenever I can swing the money—Charles—in that building you will find everything which makes genuine polis--one of the great achievements. And the result of what cooperation and creative joint activity. Please hunt up Engineering News Record—February 5 1953 an article "Curved Roof on cables spans big arena" and you will thrill to see proof that Gloucester is now in Raleigh, N.C.

Your loving Frances

I only realized a few days ago that the dwarf letter disturbed you --that was not innuendo, Charles—it was straight child—and referred to physical head only—and my remarks, to trying to delve into cause, why, against the obvious, I felt it to be so physically accurate. It all has to do with a play I saw as a child which has become a kind of legend to Lucinda and means something neither of us can convey but which we are clear about, completely, entre nous.

Contributor Notes

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.
Educated at the University of Michigan, Frances Boldereff (1905–2003) 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.
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, in 2005. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent The Good Bacteria (Anansi). Her books include a selected poems, News & Smoke (Talonbooks), Aurora (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 (1928–2014) 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.

Editorial Reviews

“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

“What is stunning about this collection is the density of intellectual and cultural observations by both participants in this dialogue ...”
—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. 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. 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

“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

“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

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After Completion

The Later Letters

by Charles Olson, with Frances Boldereff, edited by Sharon Thesen

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