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’s 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.
Frances Motz Boldereff was a typographic designer by trade; by vocation, an independent scholar and exegete. After graduating in 1926 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor with an honors degree in philosophy and English, Boldereff worked the New York Public Library, taking advantage of its extensive collection of rare Irish books to study Irish literature and history. Boldereff's passion for James Joyce and her research into his sources began there. Boldereff also loved all things Russian, and studied Russian language. She later worked in the production department of the New Yorker before founding the journal Parnassus and later managing publications at Pennsylvania State College ? it was here that Boldereff first met Charles Olson in 1947.
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, British Columbia, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, 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. 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.
Ralph Maud is Emeritus Professor of English and Associate of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He founded the Charles Olson Literary Society. He is the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996) and the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000) and Olson's Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010). He has edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930?1934 and The Broadcasts, and is co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934?1953 and Under Milk Wood.
