Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life

by Tom Clark

Book Overview

An incandescent biography of the inventor of projective verse, this comprehensive portrait distinguishes the convivial, bluff public figure from the tormented inner man. A lapsed Catholic, Olson... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393029581
• ISBN13: 9780393029581
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 403 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

thoroughly readable portrait of an iconoclast

and by iconoclast its not possible to sugarcoat the very real personal destruction that olson wrought on everyone around him, though he was one of the most brilliant exponents of some of the very best strains of modernist poetry. as someone who has studied, admired, and been engaged with olson over the last two years, and his prophetic calls for "an earth of value", and "proprieception", among many other ideas that went way beyond the inventions and drug induced nihilism of the beats, clark's biography gave an insight in to the man's extremely complex relationship with everyone around him, and i mean everyone. yes olson was exploding off the page with ideas, but his attempts to live the ideas fell far short of his high flown naturalistic bent, and some of his behavior, both pre and post amphetamines, was frankly incredible; particularly his 5 years at black mountain, which although may have been doomed from the start, (an experimental college in mccarthyist america) it was still a testing ground for olson's "polis has eyes" that may have changed a lot in the postsecondary educ. system. a great insight in to a man that was brilliant, a visionary, and an inventor, but also a petty, misogynistic, brute of a man that sacrificed many people to the great altar of ideas. i've never read anything else by clark, but he seems to have a pretty thorough approach to biography that tells a story in a straightforward narrative with plenty of documentary evidence; also, having picked up the first edition in a used book store, the comments of robert duncan, haas, creely, and edward dorn on the back flap give credence the portrait that clark paints. highly recommended to anyone wanting to understand the man who "invented" postmodernism.

Choppy Life

Found the book to lead me on great imaginings. Certainly not a pretty portrait of the artist, but within a tight 352 pages a sound introduction to his work and psychic torment which shaped it. The book led me into deeper investigations and further imaginings which is part of what a decent biography should do.