Charles Olson’s insistence that the public value of any articulation is inseparable from the particulars of the time and place of its origins resulted in the proprioceptive methodology of his composition—in his speech and his writing, in both poetry and prose. Olson did not “lecture”—he “talked.” His encyclopedic knowledge of the subjects that interested him engaged in a manner always as surprising to himself as to his listeners. This element of discovery was to him a true measure of what is authentic in language, and it exhibits itself most in the impromptu exchanges of which Muthologos is mainly composed. Olson once de?ned “Muthologos” as “what is said about what is said,” which encompasses a breadth of discourse that would de?ne the near and far range of where the poet’s mind went in a lifetime’s intent to go places. In this new compilation of Charles Olson’s transcribed lectures and interviews, we “nally get all of what is preserved of a life of talk, allowing Muthologos to stand, along with The Maximus Poems, Collected Poems, Collected Prose and Selected Letters as one of the “standard texts” of this great poet’s oeuvre.

Ralph Maud’s second edition of Muthologos, some thirty years after George Butterick’s “rst, adds several new items: “At Goddard College, April 1962”; a second Vancouver 1963 discussion, “Duende, Muse, and Angel”; a short addition to the “BBC Interview”; a second “On Black Mountain”; and a further hour of Olson’s conversation with Herb Kenny. In addition, all the available tapes of these talks and interviews have been listened to again, and many of their previous transcription errors have been corrected. Textual notes to each piece identify these corrections, and also reveal the provenance of the tapes and the particular way in which each transcription was created.

Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was based in Vancouver, BC, before joining the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, 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. As an editor, she has published two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology (Talonbooks), a Governor-General’s Award-winning edition of Phyllis Webb’s poetry, The Vision Tree (Talonbooks), and, from 2001 to 2005, the literary and visual arts magazine The Capilano Review. She co-edited, with Ralph Maud, a correspondence between the poet Charles Olson and book designer Frances Boldereff, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Corresepondence (Wesleyan University Press).

Sharon co-edits, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: a journal of arts and environment, which is housed in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and continues to be a contributing editor of The Capilano Review. At UBC Okanagan, she teaches at all levels, including graduate workshops and undergraduate topics courses in the long poem and lyric essay.

Her book A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and The Good Bacteria was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award, the ReLit Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Two earlier books also were finalists for the Governor-General’s Award, and in 2002 Sharon was a member of the jury, along with American poet Sharon Olds and Irish poet Michael Longley, for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.

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.

Charles Olson's profile page

Ralph Maud (1928–2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Pacific Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories — a collection of Henry W. Tate’s stories in Tate’s original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian work, published as an article: “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology” in American Ethnologist. Maud’s subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Ralph Maud's profile page

“By re-inserting, and supplementing, the tape-recorded era of Olson’s poetic life, Ralph Maud continues to sustain this material as consequential and amazing.”
—Fred Wah

“Maud depicts [Olson] functioning remarkably as a public poet, a poet thinking on his feet, and being absolutely delightful.”
—Pacific Rim Review of Books

“This new edition of Muthologos reiterates the intensity of attention that Olson brought to his final six years in the public performance of his immense poetic archaeology. These talks and interviews document the processual nature and intellectual hunger that situate his poetic imagination not only in the poem but in the range of perception that can be talked about “with some life.” When I heard him talk about his poem “Place; & Names” at UBC in 1963, the poem as discourse for place and history provided a crucial tap for my own sense of poetry’s possibility. His Beloit lectures on “The Dogmatic Nature of Experience” in 1968 coalesce and amplify his most singular pedagogy, “Projective Verse,” as the cultural shape shifter it has been. By re-inserting, and supplementing, the tape-recorded era of Olson’s poetic life, Ralph Maud continues to sustain this material as consequential and amazing.”
—Fred Wah