Charles Olson (1910-1970) is credited with inventing the term 'post-modern'. Father of the Projectivist movement and one of the great teachers of his age, he is also one of its great poets, a writer whose work has had an abiding impact on radical currents of American and British poetry. He owes much to Pound and Williams, but Maximus is not an unproblematic child of the Cantos and Paterson. What these poems have in common is that they are unfinished and unfinishable.
    Son of working-class immigrants, he grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, north of Boston, on the sea, and Gloucester is at the heart of his mature poetry. He studied at Harvard and became a scholar and teacher. He worked for the Roosevelt government during the war, and later taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where as rector in the early 1950s he attracted creative artists and spearheaded the campaign against the New Criticism. A number of important artists and writers were associated with Black Mountain: De Kooning, Kline and Rauschenberg, John Cage, John Dewey. Robert Creeley's Black Mountain Review was an ambitious magazine.