Here's a BIG poster I designed for an Olson Now gathering a few years ago. The snapshot is of the boss poet himself teaching in Buffalo, not far from the renovated church where the conference was held. Speakers at the event included Anne Waldman, Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Basinksi, Robert Bertholf, Ben Friedlander, Mike Kelleher, David Landry and Jonathan Skinner. I've got a few copies of the poster with everyone's signatures in black ink inside the towering electric yellow letters. Henri Ferrini screened his new movie, Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, and Bill Sylvester brought down the house when he reminded us that "the soul is an onslaught." I've been brushing the dust off the talk I wrote for the occasion, rereading his work for the first time since friends and myself asked Bob Creeley to head a reading group on Olson's Melville. First published in Ralph Maude's Minutes of the Charles Olson Society, Mike Kelleher posted the syllabus on the Olson Now blog, which you can find here. If you would like to download the audio and text files of Olson's talk on Melville at Goddard College that Aaron Levy put on his Slought Foundation site, click here.