Collects the commentary of the later years and last days of one of America's most powerful and unique poets

". . . The celebration of a point of view that Paul is uniquely equipped to communicate. . . . It provides an excellent treatment of the development and practice of a powerful poetic force in modern poetry today, showing the theoretic coherence of Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Williams, and particularly, Olson, as originators and practitioners of 'open' forms." --Thomas Merrill"This book is going to be of value to a number of different readers. For teachers and writers it is a resource and a stimulus for participating in an open poetics. On a utilitarian level it will help to respond to the recent

An essential anthology of an innovative American poet Edward Dorn was not only one of America’s finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn’s comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. This new volume brings together poems from Dorn’s entire career, including previously uncollected work.

The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after Robert Duncan and Charles Olson first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson's death in January 1970.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.