NEH Black Mountain College Workshop

The week long NEH workshop whirled through the curriculum at BMC: touching on courses and activities of Josef Albers, MC Richards, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson... Little was done on Olson's teaching at BMC. Olson's teaching is still largely unexamined in the writing about his work yet he delivered three prolonged series of lectures and presented in them material that shaped his later writing. The three main lecture series that he delivered were The Chiasma: Lectures on the New Sciences of Man, lectures on Shakespeare (over 100 pages of text), and The Special View of History. The latter is the only one that is still in print. Of the Shakespeare lectures, only his brief essay "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays" has been published. The Chiasma published in the last issue of the Olson Journal in 1979.

Generally, there is a large gap in the Olson canon due to the lack of a volume on Olson's Black Mountain Writings and Lectures. Such a volume would be longer than the existing Collected Prose and would only duplicate a fraction of the texts in that volume.

Back to the BMC Workshop. Impossible to cover much in 5 days, but enough was done to show other influences on Olson's thinking that have barely been touched upon. Albers "color" course...is that the backdoor to a phrase in the last line of the Maximus poems? Are the three pillars of "Projective Verse" all indebted to his exposure to ideas from other faculty members at BMC?

• typos (from Klee by way of Albers?)
  
• tropos (Cunningham and dance?)
  
• topos (the work on topology done by BMC math teacher, Max Dehn?)

Have the studies of Olson's thought and poetics been too literary?

What was he talking about in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains? How much of that talk came over into his poetry and prose?