Projective Verse (Paperback)

The first independent book publication of " the essay that changed American poetry" is reintroduced with new perspectives on its ongoing significance by six critics and poets. " Postmodern poetics begins with Olson's seminal essay " Projective Verse" (1950, 1955) and this urgent and remarkable statement of poetics continues to influence new generations of poets with its bold, dynamic, and energetic rush of provocative ideas about how a poet lives and writes in a postmodern world." (John Faulise, PhD).

Charles John Olson (27 December 1910 - 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. Today, Olson is generally considered a key figure in moving American poetry from modernism to postmodernism. Ammiel Alcalay, poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar, is the author, co-author or translator of over thirty books, including After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, a little history, Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999, Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues, and Faraj Bayrakdar's co-translated A Dove in Free Flight. Recent books include CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books; the co-translation of Nasser Rabah's Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece; and a book of essays, Follow the Person: Archival Encounters. A new book of poems, Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine, in collaboration with the Pales-tinian artist Kholoud Hammad, is forthcoming. While bringing works from other parts of the world to the US via translation and advocacy, Alcalay has helped reconfigure contemporary US literary and cultural history through his publishing, pedagogical, and public project, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, recognized in 2017 with a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. At Queens College, CUNY, he is former chair of the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation. At the CUNY Graduate Center, Alcalay is a member of various faculties. He was named Distinguished Professor in 2023. Miriam Nichols is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley where she taught literary theory, Canadian and American literature, and international modernism. Her publications include scholarly editions of the poet Robin Blaser' s The Fire: Collected Essays and The Holy Forest: Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and The Astonishment Tapes (University of Alabama, 2015). She is the author of Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Alabama, 2010) and A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor (Palgrave, 2019). She currently works for Harbour Publishing in Madeira Park on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. Robert Kelly was born in 1935 in Brooklyn. He has published scores of books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He has taught at many universities, but mostly, and for 60 years, at Bard College. His most recent books are the collection Linden Word, the experimental series Listening Through, and Symphonies. A new collection, Metalogues, is forthcoming from Station Hill. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the French translator Charlotte Mandell. Michael Boughn is the author of Measure's Measures-- Poetry and Knowledge (Station Hill, 2024), and several books of poetry, including Cosmographia-- A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic, Hermetic Divagations-- After H.D., City-- A Poem from the End of the World, and The Book of Uncertain-- A Hyperbiographical User's Manual, Books 1 & 2. He was co-editor of Robert Duncan' s The H.D. Book, and from 2016 to 2020 together with Kent Johnson produced the online Temporary Autonomous Zone known as Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. Ed Sanders left Kansas City, Missouri for New York City in 1958, and was in jail (for the first time, but not the last) by 1961 for opposing the launch of nuclear armed submarines. Among other things, he went on to write " A Poem from Jail," open an essential bookstore (Peace Eye), launch a ground-breaking mimeo magazine, Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts, found the still performing proto-punk rock band, The Fugs, write the d