Quotes from Charles Olson

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

We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?

This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

What does not change / is the will to change.

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

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

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

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.

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

this is the abstract, this is the cold doing, this is the almost impossible

the soul is / proprioceptive

The original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself.

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

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

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 never changes is your desire to change

We all want what's been suddenly disallowed.

Atlantis will rise again.