Charles Olson

Charles Olson (December 27, 1910 – January 10, 1970) was an influential American poet, credited as one of the thinkers who coined the term postmodern.

The Kingfishers (1950)

 * As published in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (1987), edited by George F. Butterick · Full text online, at the Poetry Foundation


 * What does not change / is the will to change
 * Part I, 1

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.”
 * When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter,
 * Part I, 2

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.
 * '''The legends are
 * Part I, 2

Where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields.
 * And all now is war
 * Part I, 3

leaps in     even the stones are split they rive
 * When the attentions change / the jungle
 * Part I, 3

not accumulation but change''', the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law When fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same? is not a possibility'''
 * '''Not one death but many,
 * Into the same river no man steps twice
 * Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up
 * '''To be in different states without a change
 * Part I, 4

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'''
 * We can be precise. The factors are
 * Part I, 4

what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve '''what stalks this silence'''
 * with what violence benevolence is bought
 * Part II

Quotes about Charles Olson

 * He (Bob Creeley) introduced me to Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg-and Ginsberg has been a major model of mine. Olson has been a major model.
 * Paula Gunn Allen Interview in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets by Joseph Bruchac (1987)


 * In the early 1960s Denise Levertov introduced me to the work of Creeley, Duncan, and Olson. Also, of course, Williams, though I'd read him a bit before. But my own life, also, was pushing me into kinds of poetry I hadn't written before. Over the years, I was to draw in my own way on their (very different) poetics, but more on the poetry itself. The title and epigraph of The Will to Change are from Olson's "The Kingfishers."
 * Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)