Olson & Love
The Transformative Correspondence of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff
by Sharon Thesen
This hand-stitched chapbook features poet Sharon Thesen’s riveting essay on the correspondence between Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff. Presented originally as the Charles Olson Memorial Lecture at the Gloucester Writers Center, Olson & Love dives deep into the erotic and intellectual current that charged one of the 20th century’s most influential poetic correspondences.
Thesen argues persuasively that Olson’s groundbreaking work—Projective Verse, The Maximus Poems—cannot be separated from the catalytic role of Boldereff. Her bibliographic insight and passionate engagement shaped the trajectory of his poetic thought. This limited-edition chapbook is an essential artifact for Olson scholars, lovers of epistolary literature, and readers of literary biography and poetics.
Hand-stitched chapbook / limited edition of 100 signed copies
Date of Publication: July 2024
ISBN 979-8-89298-543-7
Stonehenge cover with deckled edge
Indigo flysheets
Pages: 36 pages
Size: 5.5” x 8.5”
Price: $25.00 (price includes shipping in the Continental USA)
Olson & Love
(A note here to everyone present: if you don’t want your secret correspondence published after your death, make sure you don’t leave it lying around.) ... [Boldereff] does seem to have been powerfully seductive. Minus its erotic energy, the correspondence would have stalled and died. Rather than having temporarily abandoned his true course, as Odysseus did, Olson discovered his ... Her bibliographic leads seemed to be exactly what Olson was looking for next. I am proposing that the trajectory of Olson’s work from “Projective Verse” and The Maximus Poems onward, is inextricable from his love affair with Frances Boldereff.
-Sharon Thesen
About Sharon Thesen
Sharon Thesen is a poet, writer, and editor living in Lake Country, BC. Among her dozen or so publications are Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems (ed. Erin Moure); Olson & Love: The 2022 Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Watershed Press), and Day Song (Broke Press). She edited Cascadian Prophets, Paul Nelson’s interviews (1999-2023) with Cascadian poets, and has been a member of various online poetry groups sponsored by Paul Nelson’s Seattle Poetics Lab. Sharon is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She taught English and Creative Writing there and earlier at Capilano College in North Vancouver, where she was editor of The Capilano Review for a time. With Nancy Holmes, she co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment at UBC’s Okanagan campus. She has given poetry workshops in Lake Country and will be giving a workshop on Investigative Poetry at the 2025 Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle.