USAmericans LOVE their dead poets. Especially those who they can’t or aren’t able to understand during the poet’s life. Charles Olson is another case in point. Living in poverty at the end of his life in 1970, Charles Olson was the subject of a major panel, reading and exhibition in Tucson, Arizona (of all places) in October of 2008. Charles Olson: Language as Physical Fact happened at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and was sponsored by CHAX Press. A few more details are available here: http://chax.org/eoagh/issuefive/olson.html
Curriculum of the Soul, a Charles Olson Centennial Conference, happens June 4 through 6, 2010, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where their Special Collections Library specializes in Beat and Black Mountain literature.
Of course, one of the best spots for Olson news is the OlsonNow blog: http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
