The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s

Abstract

In the three volumes of The Maximus Poems Charles Olson constructed a poem based on the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, while in his ‘Lunch Poems’, Frank O’Hara traced his walks through the city of New York. Both these writers spanned the period from the 1950s to the 1970s and, in very different ways, were exploring the production of a mid-century American space. Despite his early death in 1966, Frank O’Hara’s influence has grown as a poet whose methods and poetic procedures relate not simply to people and places, but also to ideas of sexuality and space. Charles Olson, a key figure for the post-war avant-garde, wrote both poetry and a range of critical and theoretical works that describe and explain his methods, and was influential in the development and dissemination of ideas relating to ‘projective verse’ and to ‘open-field’ poetry. The Maximus Poems, in their form and content, deal directly with ideas of place, of space and spatialization, and relationships between the geographical and the historical.