Charles Olson (1910-1970), the very influential second-generation modernist poet and essayist, was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets of New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance. This year, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Olson is being feted at conferences and symposia at several universities and poetry centers, including the University at Buffalo, where he taught from 1963 to 1965.