Rick Livingston on Leap Before You Look

Poet Charles Olson played a central role at Black Mountain College between 1948 and 1956, serving as instigator and theorist of some distinctive forms of interartistic experimentation: founding the Black Mountain Review, collaborating with painter Ben Shahn and dancer Katherine Litz on the famous “glyph exchange,” and standing on a ladder during Theater Piece No. 1. This talk will explore Olson’s relationships—friendly and contentious—with various artists in the Black Mountain orbit along with his signature poetic, aesthetic, and political viewpoints.

Rick Livingston is associate director of The Ohio State University Humanities Institute, with a PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and an abiding interest in modernist poetry and poetics.