This series of lectures given by the late poet of Gloucester Massachusetts and rector of Black Mountain College, Charles Olson, in the mid 1950s was published in 1970 in a limited edition. They offer a unique and active view of the poet's wide-ranging intellect grappling with his most important themes: the estrangement of culture from experience and how the estrangement can be overcome; the use of history in writing poetry and the conduct of ordinary life. The book includes an essay by poets George Quasha and Charles Stein on the relevance of these lectures to present-day poetics, and remarks by some of Olson's contemporaries including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Edited and introduced by Ann Charters, biographer of Jack Kerouac.