Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences

Joshua Hoeynck’s Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences sheds further light on Olson’s inspirations and offers renewed perspectives that should find a prominent place in the canon of Olson studies. Framed by John Livingston Lowes’ ideas on the imaginative process, the intellectually stimulating essays in this volume weigh the origins of Charles Olson’s theories and verse as they relate to diverse areas of study—from the physiological and psychological to the ecological and epistemological. By hearkening to Lowes’ process of creative association, this study reminds us of the seemingly endless connections between, and permutations of, Olson’s ideas, his words, and our world.

-John Woznicki, editor of The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later

“One makes many,” Olson wrote, and the essays in this wide-ranging collection take us on a compelling journey outward through his own multiplicity. Whether encountering pedagogical spaces or philosophical texts, the music of his contemporaries or the art of indigenous cultures, Olson was both made and remade by his sources. By mapping these relationships, Staying Open substantially expands the field of Olson studies while offering us a valuable case study of the synthetic, worldly assemblage that is poetics.

-Paul Jaussen, author of Writing in Real Time

Staying Open marks an important addition to the recent flowering of scholarly work on Charles Olson, such as Ben Hollander’s Letters for Olson, Ammiel Alcalay’s a little history, and David Herd’s Contemporary Olson.

-Gary Grieve-Carlson, editor of Olson’s Prose

Each of the invaluable essays gathered here brings to bear a wealth of source materials on topics ranging from pedagogy and Black Mountain College to the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, Anni Albers, and Pierre Boulez; from Olson’s use of Mayan and Aboriginal materials to his consideration of race. Most importantly, going against so much of the current academic grain, the whole collection is permeated by the very quality that ought to drive enduring scholarship: the genuine desire to find out more and continue illuminating the paths trod before us.

-Ammiel Alcalay, author of a little history