stealing and giving odour.

Olsen Olsen is the title of the first song by Sigur Ros I ever heard. The album on which Olsen Olsen is featured, Ágætis Byrjun or A Good Start, was mostly written in a language that the group had created. There are familiar words and phrases relating to their mother tongue of Icelandic, but is mostly unrecognizable without their translation.

I feel the same came from most of Charles Olsen’s essay.

Cryptic and coded in an insider’s language that maybe even scholars and cohorts might find murky and unnecessarily complicated. So my comments related to his perspective came from a few moments of clarity between his nonsensical tangents. Of course that is only my subjective perspective whereas it probably another’s fountain of refreshment. With a greater understanding of his historical relation to poetry and circumstances behind his zeal I probably wouldn’t be as hung up with the way this essay was written.

The first break-through was when he said “…USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem…” His passion has some transferable utility for me, because the points in which a poem must be written should all be considered important. Consider everything related -history, syntax, other’s writing style, your writing style, etc.- but don’t allow their dogma’s to control you. It is a dichotomy that we must face without letting it become our burden.

“Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at moment, under the reader’s eye, in his moment.”

This idea reminded me of a quote from Paul Klee, a Swiss painter:

“Drawing is like taking a line on a walk.”

The process of transcribing our ideas is important the whole way through. Like following a swing through completely when your bat has made contact with the baseball. Any slack will be noticeable by our parents in the stands, and most especially the fielders in the grass. The slack in the transcription is lost energy that can carry your concepts, or, “sap the going energy of the content towards its form.”

The following paragraphs were really engaging because I felt the language he used connected poetry with the science of physics. The terming is similar, like calling the whole poem a FIELD, whereas a similar idea is the PLAIN in which energy is observed. The former is the management of lines in relation to each other, while the latter is the nature and behavior of energy in certain circumstances. The syllable, line, image, sound and senses are the form of what energy is occurring, while the objects of reality that he is discussing comes through in a kinetic solidity, that is to say the description of ethereal in the event. The open poem is a divine lens in which obscure and mundane can be interpreted for participants.