Charles Olson Quotes

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

What does not change is the will to change

Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist's act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man's problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from.

The body

whips the soul. In its great desire
it demands the elixir

In the roar of spring,
transmutations.

What pudor pejorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl - a bit like Crab Nebula - do for now.

I was playing catch with the European audience.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

Atlantis will rise again.

If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.

What can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere

I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

One loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

Love is form, and cannot be without
important substance

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

Of rhythm is image/ of image is knowing/ of knowing there is/ a construct

My life

has been given its orders: the seasons
seize

the soul and the body, and make mock
of any dispersed effort. The hour of death

is the only trespass

Wholly absorbed into my own conduits to
an inner nature or subterranean lake
the depths or bounds of which I more and more
explore and know more
of, in that sense that other than that all else
closes out and I tend further to fall into
the Beloved Lake and I am blinder from
spending time as insistently in and on
this personal preserve from which
what I do do emerges more well-known than
other ways and other outside places which
don't give as much and distract me from
keeping my attentions as clear
Charles Olson, "Additions", March 1968 - 2

By night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill

and us, are busy.

And all now is war
where so lately there was peace,
and the sweet brotherhood, the use
of tilled fields.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?

A poem is a 'line' between any two points in creation.

All that matters is that the thing be the thing of the thing.