Literary Collections Diaries & Journals
After Completion
The Later Letters
- Publisher
- Talonbooks
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2012
- Category
- Diaries & Journals
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889227064
- Publish Date
- Sep 2012
- List Price
- $24.95
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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
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. As an editor, she has published two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology (Talonbooks), a Governor-General’s Award-winning edition of Phyllis Webb’s poetry, The Vision Tree (Talonbooks), and, from 2001 to 2005, the literary and visual arts magazine The Capilano Review. She co-edited, with Ralph Maud, a correspondence between the poet Charles Olson and book designer Frances Boldereff, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Corresepondence (Wesleyan University Press).
Sharon co-edits, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: a journal of arts and environment, which is housed in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and continues to be a contributing editor of The Capilano Review. At UBC Okanagan, she teaches at all levels, including graduate workshops and undergraduate topics courses in the long poem and lyric essay.
Her book A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and The Good Bacteria was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award, the ReLit Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Two earlier books also were finalists for the Governor-General’s Award, and in 2002 Sharon was a member of the jury, along with American poet Sharon Olds and Irish poet Michael Longley, for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.
Thesen’s research interests are modern, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, lyric essay and philosophical autobiography, the relationship between poetic imagination and “the real,? and the Canadian long poem. She is also interested in the aesthetics of theological and mystical writings by women, as well as the relationship between psychology and ecology, and eco-poetics.
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”).
Frances Boldereff's profile page
Sharon Thesen
Sharon Thesen was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, in 1946. She moved to the British Columbia Interior in 1952 and lived in Prince George and Kamloops before settling in Vancouver in 1966. She is the author of several books of poetry and the former editor of the Capilano Review. She currently teaches English at Capilano College in North Vancouver and writes reviews for the Vancouver Sun.
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before coming to UBC Okanagan in 2005. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent The Good Bacteria (House of Anansi). Her books include a selected poems, News & Smoke, and several titles from the 1980s and '90s from Coach House Press in Toronto.
Sharon has been involved in the Canadian and Vancouver poetry scene for many years. As an editor, she has published two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, a Governor-General’s Award-winning edition of Phyllis Webb’s poetry (The Vision Tree), and, from 2001 to 2005, the literary and visual arts magazine The Capilano Review. She co-edited, with Ralph Maud, a correspondence between the poet Charles Olson and book designer Frances Boldereff (Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Corresepondence, Wesleyan University Press).
Sharon co-edits, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: a journal of arts and environment, which is housed in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and continues to be a contributing editor of The Capilano Review.
Her book A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and The Good Bacteria was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award, the ReLit Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Two earlier books also were finalists for the Governor-General’s Award, and in 2002 Sharon was a member of the jury, along with American poet Sharon Olds and Irish poet Michael Longley, for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.
In addition to teaching literature and creative writing at Capilano College, Sharon has taught poetry workshops at a number of summer writing colonies, including the Banff Writing Studio, Echo Valley and St. Peter’s College, and for many years has informally mentored younger poets and writers. She has given readings at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, the Blue Metropolis Writers’ Festival in Montreal and the New Zealand Writers’ Festival in Wellington, NZ.
Sharon’s research interests are modern, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, lyric essay and philosophical autobiography, the relationship between poetic imagination and “the real,” and the Canadian long poem. She is also interested in the aesthetics of theological and mystical writings by women, as well as the relationship between psychology and ecology, and eco-poetics. She is married, with one son and one stepson. She lives in Lake Country, BC.
Excerpt: After Completion: The Later Letters (by (author) Charles Olson; with Frances Boldereff; edited by Sharon Thesen)
[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.
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.”
– The Capilano Review
“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. ... [Boldereff's] 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. 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
