Annual Charles Olson Lecture with Sharon Thesen
Saturday, October 29
1:00 p.m.
Presented with the Gloucester Writers Center
CAM Auditorium, 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA
Free and open to the public
Live-streamed on Facebook and Vimeo.
Author Sharon Thesen will give this year’s annual Charles Olson Lecture, presented with the Gloucester Writers Center. Thesen will talk about working with Ralph Maud on the Olson/Boldereff correspondence (two editions, A Modern Correspondence, published by Wesleyan in 1999, and After Completion: The Later Letters published in 2014). In this lecture, Thesen will show how Olson’s love affair with Frances Boldereff set his compass intellectually in his move toward the recovery of what could be found in the archaic as a guide or inspiration for a new poetics.
This year, the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives acquired the Ralph Maud/Charles Olson Library from the Gloucester Writers Center, a collection of 4,000 volumes owned, read, or referenced by Charles Olson, the celebrated 20th-century Gloucester-based postmodern American poet. This library is now housed within the Janet & William Ellery James Center at the CAM Green.
To mark this new acquisition, on the occasion of the Annual Lecture, the Museum will be offering a tour of the Maud/Olson Library at the CAM Green on October 29th at 11:00 a.m. Now unpacked and shelved next to its sister library the Vincent Ferrini Library, visitors will be able to see Ralph Maud’s work on display and get an insight into his, and Charles Olson’s, practices.
Any attendees registered for the 1:00 pm talk are welcome to join the tour at 11:00 am. For more information on the acquisition, click here.