This exploration of the influence of Mayan hieroglyphics on the great American poet Charles Olson (1910–1970) is an important document in the history of New World verse. Olson spent six months in the Yucatan in 1951 studying Maya culture and language, an interlude that has been largely overlooked by students of his work. Like Olson and Robert Creeley, Olson’s disciple who published Olson’s letters from Mexico, the poet Dennis Tedlock taught at the University of Buffalo. Unlike his two predecessors, Tedlock was also a scholar of Maya language and culture, renowned for his translations from indigenous American languages, notably the Popul Vuh, the Maya creation story. In The Olson Codex, Tedlock describes and examines Olson’s efforts to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, giving Olson’s work in Mexico the place it deserves within twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how. The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States. The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and new textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

“Staying Open, Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences” investigates the inter-disciplinary influences on the work of the mid-Century American poet, Charles Olson. This edited collection of essays covers Olson’s diverse non-literary interests, including his engagement with the music of John Cage and Pierre Boulez, his interests in abstract expressionism, and his readings of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essays also examine Olson’s pedagogy, which he developed in the experimental environment at Black Mountain College, as well as his six-month archeological journey through the Yucatan Peninsula in 1950 to explore the culture of the Maya. This book will, therefore, be a strong research aid to scholars working in diverse fields – music, archeology, pedagogy, philosophy, art, and psychology – as it outlines methods for close inter-disciplinary work that can uncover the mechanics of Olson’s creative, literary processes. Building on the straightforward scholarship of George Butterick, whose Guide to the Maximus Poems remains indispensable for readers of Olson’s work, the essays in this volume will also guide readers through the thick allusions within The Maximus Poems itself. New interest in the wide-ranging and non-literary nature of Olson’s thought in several recent academic works makes this book both timely and necessary. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After by Peter Middleton as well as Contemporary Olson edited by David Herd have started the process of uncovering the extent to which Olson’s inter-disciplinary interests inflected his poetic compositions. “Staying Open” extends the preliminary investigations of Olson’s non-literary sources in those volumes by bringing together a community of scholars working across disciplines and within a wide variety of humanistic concerns.

Robert Duncan’s nine lectures on Charles Olson, delivered intermittently from 1961 to 1983, explore the modernist literary background and influences of Olson’s influential 1950 essay “Projective Verse.” These transcribed talks pay tribute to Olson and expand our knowledge of Duncan’s vision of modernist writing.

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.

One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume II focuses on the second half of her prolific career, showcasing reviews from 1995 through her 2017 reconsiderations of Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric and William Empson’s classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. In this volume Perloff provides insight into the twenty-first-century literary landscape, from revaluations of its leading poets and translations of European poetry from Goethe to the Brazilian Noigandres group and interart studies and performance art. Key issues of the past few decades, such as the controversy over the role and function of poetry anthologies, receive extended treatment, and Perloff frequently voices a minority view, as in the case of the acclaimed British poet Philip Larkin.