Charles Olson Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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.

Charles Olson
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.

Charles Olson
The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms

are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything.

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

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

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

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

and us, are busy.

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

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

Charles Olson
The body

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

In the roar of spring,
transmutations.

Charles Olson
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

Charles Olson
We can be precise. The factors are
in the animal and / or the machine the factors are
communication and / or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest is change, presents
no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it,
when it is pressed together and condensed,
loses it This very thing you are

Charles Olson
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

Charles Olson
With what violence benevolence is bought
what cost in gesture justice brings
what wrongs domestic rights involve
what stalks
this silence

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

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

Charles Olson
When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter,
he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself
in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, The kingfishers!
who cares
for their feathers
now? His last words had been, The pool is slime.

Charles Olson
The legends are
legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting,
still the waters, with the new year, for seven days.
It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters.

Charles Olson
Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is
the law

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

Charles Olson
When the attentions change / the jungle
leaps in even the stones are split
they rive

Charles Olson
An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.

Charles Olson
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!

Charles Olson
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

Charles Olson
Get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen... So there we are, fast, there's the dogma.

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

Charles Olson
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