Charles Olson & Robert Creeley (The Complete Correspondence: Volume 1)

The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world. The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This correspondence of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.