After a long break from posting a blog entry on this site, I am starting up again as a lead-up to the ALA Conference in May and the Olson Panel there. The topic and the Call For Papers is listed at the bottom of this posting.

What prompted the topic is the continued reference to "Projective Verse" as though that is the definitive and concluding statement of Olson's poetics. Also, prompting this panel topic is the characterization of Olson's poetics as a "spontaneous poetics" by Daniel Belgrad, understandable there given the broader scope of his work (The Culture of Spontaneity) and placing Olson within a larger cultural movement, and that characterization accepted verbatim by Eva Diaz in her recent book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (an excellent book). In the latter case, Diaz missed a chance to look at Olson's poetics and pedagogy in her larger framework...had she considered Olson's poem "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele," she would have recognized the inadequacy of describing Olson's poetics as one of spontaneity and might have given Olson at BMC greater play in her book.

Finally, the essays in the recent publication, Contemporary Olson, largely focus on the Olson of the early to mid-50s and, again, mostly refer to "Projective Verse" when discussing his poetics. There are notable exceptions in this book, and Elaine Feinstein's comment in her essay in this work could be taken as a prelude to this panel: "I sense a change in my own work after taking a fresh look at Olson" (132). However, one only needs to scan the book's "Index of  writings by Charles Olson" and the Index itself to see that the focus is on the Olson responding to Pound and what came before and not on the Olson of the mid- to late 60s.

Thus this panel:

Beyond Projective Verse: Olson's Developing Poetics from the Black Mountain College years to the late 1960s
Organized by the Charles Olson Society

American Literature Association
25th Annual Conference
May 26-29, 2016
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA

The Charles Olson Society invites abstracts (of no more than 250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/).

Olson's poetics continued to develop from his years at Black Mountain College until his death, but critical attention to Olson's poetics continues to focus on "Projective Verse." This panel calls for papers that track his developing poetics as evidenced in works from the Black Mountain years (The Chiasma, Shakespeare lectures, The Special View of History) through the Sixties and works such as "Proprioception" (1961-62), "Causal Mythology" (1965), and "The Animate versus the Mechanical, and Thought" (1969).
  
Please send abstracts or proposals to Jeff Gardiner (jeffreyjgardiner@gmail.com) and Gary Grieve-Carlson (grieveca@lvc.edu) no later than January 15, 2015.