CHARLES OLSON was born in 1910 in Worcester, Massachusetts and grew up in Gloucester, a seaport north of Boston. He studied at Harvard, and taught there for a time, before working for the Roosevelt government during the war. In 1948 he took a post at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where as rector from 1951 to 1956 he was instrumental in attracting a circle of creative artists to the college. He later taught at the State University of New York, but continued to live in Gloucester, the setting of the Maximus Poems (1960-68). His important writings include his essay 'Projective Verse' (1950), which influenced Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and others; In Cold Hell, In Thicket (1953); and his critical work Call Me Ishmael (1947). Charles Olson died in 1970. RALPH MAUD is Emeritus Professor of English and Associate of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He is a major editor of the work of Dylan Thomas. He is also author of Charles Olson?s Reading: A Biography (1995), What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson?s ?The Kingfishers? (1997) and editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000). He knew the poet from 1963 to 1965 when they were colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo.