Michael Boughn: "... Harvey Brown's connection with Charles Olson was immediate and intense. In so far as they shared a sense of political priorities, Olson fit into Brown's plans to use his money to further certain specific ends. Brown, through his connections with jazz musicians in New York and Cleveland, had started a recording company to further the work of struggling artists such as Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Clifford Brown, and Clifford Jordan. Brown understood the work of these artists to constitute the ground of a new American republic, the visionary incarnation of Winthrop's City on a Hill. It was an ec-centric community whose importance was both in its antithetical message, and in the method it had pioneered: improvisation based on the call and response of traditional African-American music (see Brown's fascicle 'Jazz Playing' in The Curriculum of the Soul). That method for Brown resonated precisely with Olson's sense of the projective, and that correspondence provided the basis for Brown's ongoing support for both the recording project, and for Frontier Press. His first act was to fund Niagara Frontier Review. After he arrived in Buffalo during the fall semester of 1964, he took over active editorship of the magazine. The Niagara Frontier Review eventually ran to three issues between 1964 and 1966, and became one of the centers for the diverse writers represented in Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry (1960). In addition to Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, John Weiners, Ray Bremser, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, and LeRoi Jone (Amiri Baraka), the magazine also carried work by John Temple, Diane DiPrima, Albert Glover, Fred Wah, the jazz musician Don Cherry, Stephen Rodefer, Herbert Huncke, Charles Boer, and Andrew Crozier. The third issue also carried Cantos CX and 116 by Ezra Pound. Olson's interest, however, extended beyond the magazine, and largely through his instigation, Harvey Brown expanded Frontier Press into book publishing. The initial idea was to publish books central to Olson's current thinking but otherwise out of print. The project soon expanded far beyond that, however, with the 'editorial' participation of Ed and Jenny Dorn, and Ron Caplan, so that the list eventually emerged out of a kind of uncentered collectivity. Deeply interested in the new poetries then emerging, Caplan had first met Olson in 1963 when he'd gone to visit the poet in Gloucester. As the book-publishing venture took shape, Olson suggested to Brown that Caplan, who had a small design business in his native Pittsburgh, be involved in designing the books. Given their shared interest, Caplan's involvement soon extended beyond design to participation in the selection of books for the press's list. The Dorn's had been in Buffalo that summer when Ed Dorn taught in the first Buffalo Summer Program in Modern Literature. The process was so open, that it's almost impossible at this point to know who was responsible for which books. ..."
Olson's Buffalo (provides context)
W - Niagara Frontier Review
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