Links
The Charles Olson Research Collection
Charles Olson's papers are housed in the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/
Finding aid:
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research/speclib/ASC/findaids/Olson_C/MSS19690001.html
A biographic sketch by George Butterick:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Personal_and_Professional_Life/biography.htm
with links to a chronology of Olson's life (from
Butterick's A Guide to the Maximus Poems) and a partial bibliography
A searchable correspondence database:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Correspondence/index.htm
Brief biographies of Olson's "correspondents of note":
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Correspondence/correspondents.htm
A searchable 500+ photo database:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Photographs/index.htm
A terse listing of the more than 1700 books and folders from Olson's library housed at Storrs:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Personal_and_Professional_Life/library.htm
Olson's
Melville Project:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Works_in_the_Collection/Melville_Project/index.htm
"While researching the life
and works of Herman Melville, Olson transcribed the marginalia of hundreds of
books from Melville's personal library. . . includes a detailed description of
the project as well as searchable digital images of the marginalia."
"A Taste of Olson," poems and prose:
http://charlesolson.uconn.edu/Works_in_the_Collection/A_Taste_of_Olson/taste.htm
Includes "A Lustrum for You, E.P.," "La Preface,"
"Bagatto," "The Moebius Strip," "ABCs," "In
Cold Hell, In Thicket" and "This" (all in The Collected Poems); lead paragraphs of
"Projective Verse" and "Human Universe;" a fragment of Call
Me Ishmael; a
brief essay on prosody, "A Foot is to Kick With;" and a book review,
"It Was. But it Ain't." (all in Collected Prose). "To Bet," a dedicatory
poem found with the Maximus Poems IV, V, VI MSS at Storrs as a galley proof, is not in the
published work.
Olson in audio & text
Charles Olson at Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, April 12, 1962, discussing and reading from Maximus Poems III, Maximus Poems V and The Distances:
http://slought.org/content/11091/
Olson's talk on Herman Melville at Goddard, April 14, 1962:
http://slought.org/content/11092/
A complete transcription of the above in PDF:
http://slought.org/files/downloads/transcriptions/Olson_transcript.pdf
The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, recorded by Fred Wah and presented as streaming media files on the Slought Foundation website:
http://slought.net/toc/Vancouver1963/
Included are Olson's readings on August 14 and 16 and several discussions in which he participated.
Olson reading in San Francisco, 1957, at PennSound, the
digital poetry archive of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs
in Contemporary Writing:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Olson.html
I,
Maximus of Gloucester, to You [Letter 1], The Songs of Maximus, Letter
7 (Marsden Hartley's / eyes. . .), Letter
10, Maximus, to Gloucester / Letter 14 and Letter 15, The Twist, Second
Century Song, Anecdotes of the Late War, The Love of Anat, the
O'Ryan Poems
Olson pages
OlsonNow, a poetry and poetics blog established September 2005 by Michael Kelleher and Ammiel Alcalay:
Robert Creeley's appreciation of Olson, written in 2000 as a preface to the second (paperback) edition of Tom Clark's Charles Olson: Allegory of a Poet's Life:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olson/creeleyonolson.htm
Robin Blaser's 1983 essay "The Violets: 'A Cosmological Reading of a Cosmology'" on Olson's understanding of Alfred North Whitehead:
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2534
Robin Blaser's presentation at the 1987 Charles Olson Lectures, SUNY Buffalo, introduced by Robert Creeley, in streaming audio in the poetry and Literature section of the Factory School Digital Audio Archive, in 6 parts:
http://www.factoryschool.org/content/sounds/poetry/blaser/lecture01.ram
Review of Olson's Selected Poems by Peter Quartermain:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/quartermain/quartermain.olson
Review of Olson's Selected Letters by Michael Boughn in the University of Toronto Quarterly:
http://www.utpjournals.com/product/utq/711/olson121.html
On the website of the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, Asheville, NC, there's a gallery of Olson-related material:
http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/index.html
"Meeting Charles Olson at Black Mountain" by Michael Rumaker:
http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/bmcmac/gallery/rumaker.html
"Black Mountain College: A Golden Seed" by M.C. Richards:
http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/bmcmac/gallery/richards.html
Photographs by Jonathan Williams:
http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/bmcmac/gallery/williams.html
Two responses to the Charles Olson Festival, August 12, 1995, Gloucester, Mass., on the Electronic Poetry Center website of the SUNY Buffalo:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/o-rpt.html
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/funkhouser/olson.funk
Olson by mail
Outtakes from the 1966 USA:
Poetry feature on Charles Olson for purchase on videocassette,
and an audiotape of Olson reading in San Franscisco in 1957, from the
Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University:
http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/catalog/index.html
The 1975 album Charles Olson Reads from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI is available on cassette or CD from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings:
http://www.folkways.si.edu/index.html