#Charles Olson

[hyperions-fate]

If there are no walls there are no names. This is the morning, after the dispersion, and the work of the morning is methodology: how to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession. I am an archaeologist of morning.

Charles Olson, 'The Present is Prologue' (1952)

[stoicmike]

I’m always up for some poetry that makes my head explode! -- Michael Lipsey

[garadinervi]

«Trobar», No. 5, Trobar, Brooklyn, NY, 1962 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

Contributors: Rochelle Owens, George Economou, Charles Olson, Robert Kelly, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, John Wieners, Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), Anselm Hollo, Theodore Enslin, and others

[sivavakkiyar]

Charles Olson, from The Kingfishers

[gravity-rainbow]

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

[someplacein-between]

from Variations Done For Gerald Van De Wiele

Charles Olson

[nuncaestarassolo]

Charles Olson

[headlightsforever]

It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness, and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.

It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on. With this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical. Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so scrupulous, the exaction must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is purchased at the highest—40 hours a day—price. For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance…

I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed…

it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.

Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”

[camsquotenotebook]

“Poems should be more like essays and essays should be more like poems.”

- Charles Olson

[theblackestofsuns]

Letters For Origin 1950-1956 (1970)

Charles Olson

Paragon House

[hyperions-fate]

Charles Olson, Paris Review Interview (1970)

[louderfade]

[izvletchenie]

“He [Melville] sought prime. He had the coldness we have, but he warmed himself by first fires after Flood.”

Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael

[sivavakkiyar]

from Harvey Pekar’s The Beat Generation

[gravity-rainbow]

when is it you remember

Larry Eigner, from At Death Olson's

For Charles Olson, died 10 January 1970