An Open Map - (Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century) by Robert J Bertholf & Dale M Smith

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

An essential correspondence between two [of] the most innovative and visionary poets in American literature. In these letters is contained the generative energies of some of the best poetry written in the twentieth century.--Peter O'Leary, author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness

Arranged in five chronological sections, theirs was an often recondite correspondence, by turns cryptic or dramatic, essentially small essays on poetics and exchanges of latest works or comments on their reading. The letters are also full of affectionate greetings ('my dear Dunk') and humor.
--The Times Literary Supplement

In these two companion volumes (An Open Map and Imagining Persons) . . . the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents' moment and our own.
--Jacket2

Invaluable archival documents. . . . Bertholf and Smith also supply a strong accounting of the context of Olson and Duncan's correspondence in their introduction to An Open Map.--Eric Keenaghan, Journal of Modern Literature

About the Author

Robert J. Bertholf (1940-2016) served as the curator of the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo for twenty-five years. He was the author and editor of numerous books, including several about Robert Duncan and his work.

Dale M. Smith is a professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is author and coeditor of several other books, including An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (UNM Press).