Charles Olson 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.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

I was playing catch with the European audience.

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

Atlantis will rise again.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

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

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

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

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

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

I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

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

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

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.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

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

bees dig the plum blossoms

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

We all want what's been suddenly disallowed.

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

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

The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations.

I have had to learn the simplest things

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

What does not change is the will to change

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

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

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

There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.

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.

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

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

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

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

The flowers are ravined by bees, the fruit blossoms are thrown to the ground, the wind the rain forces everything.

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

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

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

by night only crazy things like the full moon and the whippoorwill and us, are busy.

Not one death but many,

love is form, and cannot be without important substance

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

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

Were all moving, moving, moving. Isnt it nice?

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

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.

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