After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff

Edited by Sharon Thesen and Ralph Maud

Modern American poet Charles Olson had many correspondences over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic and amanuensis.

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.

Excerpt:

"...You mustn't ever mind my silences, Frances. For you are never out of my mind.

I work peculiarly—and am forever struggling with achieving the edge each day requires: to teeter, where rhythm is.

So if I let time go by, please think of it as used. And also know I hear everything you say to me—indeed, wish the verse (and me) was as mush as your magnanimity to same..."

Softcover, 293 pages, 6 x 0.8 x 9".

Copyright 2014 Sharon Thesen, Ralph Maud, the University of Connecticut Libraries, Lucinda Wilner, with Talonbooks.