Charles Stein

Writer-in-Residence

October 20, 1998 (Tuesday) at 8:00 p.m.
Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
University at Albany, Uptown Campus

4:00 Afternoon Seminar, Humanities 290

Charles Stein is the author of ten books of poetry including The Hat Rack Tree (1994), Parts and Other Parts (1982), Horse Sacrifice (1980), and Poems and Glyphs (1973). Robert Kelly has called Stein, ". . .a poet with all the means of his craft at hand. . .one of the smartest men of his generation, and one of its most exemplary poets." Stein also is the author of the critical study "The Secret of The Black Chrysanthemum" (1987, Station Hill Press), a critical study of Charles Olson's poetry and prose, and the editor of Being = Space x Action: Searches for Freedom of Mind in Mathematics, Art and Mysticism(1998).

Stein has collaborated and continues to work with George Quasha in the production of "dialogical" criticism: innovative approaches to the discussion of literature, art, and related concerns. He is the inventor and practitioner of a species of "Sound Poetry" and has published "Text-Sound Texts" arising from his work in both music and literature.


Charles Olson and C. G. Jung: Giants of the Century--yet this is the only book that understands them together. Congratulations on your perspicacity, Charles Stein! - James Hillman

Stein's is a superb book. Grounded in a love and respect for Olson that does not entail docile acceptance, it builds beautifully from careful scholarship to intelligent readings to finely handled conceptual distinctions showing how Jung (and Olson) can be seminal by opening areas where this kind of exemplary careful rethinking becomes necessary. - Charles Altieri

Stein's book is the best study yet of Olson's appropriation of Jung's intricacies of thought and processes of structured discourse. This is not an expose of influences, but a carefully argued and skillfully written study on how Olson transformed Jung's work into the mix of his poetics where Melville and Whitehead already played out their forms. Olson scholarship comes to a new maturity with this book. - Robert Bertholf