After Completion : The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff

Charles Olson had many correspondents over the years, but Frances Boldereff, a book designer and typographer, Joyce scholar, and single working mother, embodied a dynamic complexity of interlocutor, muse, Sybil, lover, critic, and amanuensis.

After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff follows on from an earlier edition, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence, that spans three years and more than three hundred letters. Published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press, that edition concludes with a crisis that amounted to a “completion” of one of the major phases of their relationship. After September 1950, no longer would Boldereff believe so wholeheartedly in Olson’s work – or in his promises to spend time with her.

After Completion picks up the correspondence post-crisis, and consists of letters written between 1950 and 1969 – approximately 140 letters over a nineteen-year span. In this period of the correspondence, we witness the intensity of the letters flare intermittently, sometimes explosively, as Olson and Boldereff try to maintain some continuity in their separateness. In these later letters, we also experience their magnificent mutual embracing of Arthur Rimbaud.

The correspondence taken as a whole presents a passionate relationship realized mostly in letters – letters that were to become essential to Olson’s working out of his poetics. Boldereff’s interventions, which provoked Olson to articulate a projectivist poetics, claims for Frances Boldereff an incalculable effect on twentieth-century poetry.