In this blog, John Faulise, the editor of The Special View of History: Revised and Expanded Edition examines how an archival encounter with the source materials at the Charles Olson Research Collection resulted in this new edition of Olson’s major statement on postmodern poetics.
The need for a new edition of Charles Olson’s The Special View of History, which was based primarily on class presentations he delivered at Black Mountain College in 1956, has been evident ever since the first and only edition, edited by Ann Charters, was published in 1970. Charters noted in her introduction that she found the papers that made up her edition crammed into manila folders among a “mountain of folders” in cardboard boxes on the floor of Olson’s apartment.[1] Despite her enthusiasm that this mass of papers from his tenure as a teacher at Black Mountain College could be made into a book, Olson expressed reluctance to sort through them and admitted to Charters that he had forgotten how he had wanted them organized. George F. Butterick, Olson’s future archivist, was present when Charters found these papers, and after looking at them, told her that they represented an earlier phase of Olson’s thinking that were not worthy of being published.
Undeterred by these challenges to continue this project, Charters persisted in her pursuit of making a book of Olson’s papers. Olson relented and sent her the folders but warned her that “the material wld be most successful if severely (practically) edited”.[2] Charters received no further editorial advice from Olson and relied on the contents of the folders to organize the book, including an outline written in pencil by Olson that suggested possible chapter titles. Charters completed a draft of the proposed book and sent it to Olson. He replied immediately that he wanted only one word changed— from the 1956 Black Mountain College course description for The Special View that Charters had placed before the first chapter of the book—there is no evidence that Olson read beyond this page.
In the conclusion to her introduction to The Special View Charters writes of her organization of the book that the “lectures, readings, and discussions” that compose it, have been by necessity “reconstructed from materials remaining in [Olson’s] manila folders in Gloucester.”[3] She continues with a catalogue of these materials which include: “typescripts [. . . ] rough drafts, notes from his reading [. . .] miscellaneous outlines, charts and drawings” as well as carbon copies of transcriptions of his lectures by students.[4] Despite the textual and editorial questions this “reconstructed” book might raise, it soon became the subject of both essays and book-length studies of the importance of it to Olson’s poetics.
By 2001 there was enough scholarly interest in republishing The Special View of History that Station Hill Press of Barrytown, New York, started making plans to reprint the original edition by Charters. As a favor to George Quasha and Charles Stein, the publishers of Station Hill Press, the Olson scholar Ralph Maud offered to look at The Special View file at the Charles Olson Research Collection (CORC) at the University of Connecticut. While examining The Special View papers Maud experienced what the scholar Ammiel Alcalay, writing about the importance of researching poets’ archives, has characterized as an “archival encounter [. . .] in which the pursuit of particular things (names, dates, titles, incidents), can explode a whole host of assumptions and received knowledge, creating a completely new set of relations.”[5] Indeed, Maud found not only textual issues, but more importantly, that The Special View papers contained notations by Olson, including dates and other information about his class presentations at Black Mountain College. He became convinced that a simple republishing of the out-of-print 1970 edition would not be useful, and that a revised edition was needed.
Excited as he was by his discovery of this information in The Special View file, Maud was amid his own explosion of scholarly output, publishing four books of Olson scholarship between 2003 and 2010. Since these projects often included visits to the CORC, Maud continued examining The Special View papers while there. Maud determined that the actual chronology of Olson’s work should be used for a new edition of The Special View. It would be based on three parts: the notes used for his class presentations, followed by his attempt at gathering them into a book, and finally the lectures he prepared for his 1957 visit to San Francisco: the disparate parts of The Special View had now found “a completely new set of relations”—one making it easier for the reader to enter into and follow.
Maud and I began helping each other with our various Olson projects in 2010—he would assist me with transcribing particularly challenging Olson manuscripts, and I in turn would do research for him at the CORC (he no longer found the 3,000 mile trek from his home in Vancouver, BC to the CORC appealing, whereas I lived a short drive from it).
One day 2013 he told me about his examination of The Special View papers and how nothing had come of a new edition with Station Hill Press or any other publisher. He wanted to finish work on The Special View and find a publisher. For the next year we worked on this project, using his chronological approach as an editorial tool to help decide on the order of the class presentations. I searched through the Olson papers outside of The Special View files at the CORC, particularly those written in 1956 and 1957, and this yielded two new additional items we included. We were almost finished with the project when Ralph became ill and could no longer work. One month after he informed me that I would have to continue without him, he died.
While Charters had to overcome the challenges of working with an unorganized jumble of papers, our work on this new edition of The Special View benefited from the expertly organized Olson archive maintained at the Charles Olson Research Collection. We were able to identify and restore three class presentations made by Olson in 1956 not included in the 1970 edition of The Special View. Several shorter sections of text were also restored, and many textual issues were resolved. Finally, while we examined notes on The Special View taken by others—like those typed by Olson’s student John Wieners—we relied solely on documents written by hand or typed by Olson himself for our transcriptions. The result is a newly arranged version of The Special View of History based on both the original and recently discovered Olson texts.
[1] Ann Charters, Evidence of What Is Said: The Correspondence between Ann Charters and Charles Olson about History and Herman Melville (Portland: Tavern Books, 2015), 71.
[2] Charters, Evidence, 73.
[3] Charles Olson, The Special View of History, ed. Ann Charters (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), 12.
[4] Olson, The Special View, 12.
[5] Ammiel Alcalay, “Follow the Person”: Archival Encounters (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2025), 107.
Ralph Maud, a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Pacific Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society.
John Faulise is a recipient of a Charles Olson Award from Simon Fraser University, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Maud/Olson Library at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Gary Grieve-Carlson is Professor Emeritus of English at Lebanon Valley College, where he served as interim vice-president for academic affairs (2004-05) and Director of General Education (2001-13).
Joshua Hoeynck teaches writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University, with courses on the American Western, the history of ecology in American literature, and Magical Realism.
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