Peter Riley Pairs The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H.Prynne With Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre

At Fortnightly Review, Peter Riley delves into two similar, yet very different, books about poetry: The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H.Prynne (ed. Ryan Dobran) and Don Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. Riley explains that "on October 3rd 1962 J.H.Prynne sent to Charles Olson a list of 60 surviving port books in English libraries, which registered vessels leaving the ports of London, Poole and Bristol between 1622 and 1646." From there: 

This was preparatory to an offer to search himself the contents of such books as Olson indicated were important to him. This work continued intermittently for the next three or four years mixed in with a great deal of bibliography on many different subjects, and this function of “feeding information” is probably how this correspondence has been generally characterised. Prynne’s role has even been called “Olson’s poetic research assistant”. But what Prynne mainly sent to Olson, on the basis of a perceived affinity, was a complete education, not in “Prynne’s theories” but in the world. This was not a pre-formed programme awaiting an American poet, though the most expository account is in the first two letters. It arose, took body and dispersed again in the exchange of letters and documents for as long as it could, with more give than take but with Olson’s alert ear always there to activate the discoveries into his own poetics. Poems by Olson were conceived and first exercised in these pages, as were, less reactively, the first poems Prynne accepted as canonical.

Read on at Fortnightly Review.