Dale Smith. The Circle of the Bee-Hive: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson

Dale Smith explores the correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson as a pivotal moment in mid-twentieth century American writing, drawing on ideas of form and place in the making of poetry vs. what Duncan called “the mania that a nation is.”

Dale Smith is a poet, critic and scholar of poetry and poetics on the English faculty at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is the editor, with Robert J. Bertholf, of An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both University of New Mexico Press). A critical study of poetry and public culture, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship and Dissent After 1960 (University of Alabama Press), was published in 2012. Smith’s writing has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Poetry 2002, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Walrus. His recent book of poetry, Sons, was published by Knife/Fork/Book, and Slow Poetry in America was released by Cuneiform in 2014. Other poetry includes American Rambler (2000), The Flood and the Garden (2002), Black Stone (2007) and Susquehanna (2008). Recent reviews, essays and other writing can be found in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brick and Poetry.