After Completion: The Later Letters

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldere, a book designer and typographer, Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis. After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldere follows on from an earlier edition, Charles Olson and Frances Boldere : A Modern Correspondence , that spans three years and more than three hundred letters. Published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press, that edition concludes with a crisis that amounted to a "completion" of one of the major phases of their relationship. After September 1950, no longer would Boldere believe so wholeheartedly in Olson's work - or in his promises to spend time with her. After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of letters written between 1950 and 1969 - approximately 140 letters over a nineteen-year span. In this period of the correspondence, we witness the intensity of the letters are intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldere try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magniFicent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud. The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters - letters that were to become essential to Olson's working out of his poetics. Boldere's interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldere an incalculable eect on twentieth-century poetry.