Why Olson? Why Now?

Here’s what four of the conference participants said when asked the question: Why Olson? Why now?

Why Olson now? Because as we go over country and world borders, little fruit markets are disappearing as big conglomerates spread. Money and power de-localizing our lives. There is a big effort to look the same and talk the same. Because our days and words can be over technologically processed, abstracted, digitally zoning out. Why Olson now? To see, hear and celebrate the particular, the memory of the particular and the familiar and the interaction of the historical and mythical voices in our present lived lives. And to connect to our bodies and our breath and our particularities. A geography of consciousness. That's why today Olson is important to me.
--Barbara Henning

Despite occultation of Olson's reputation a return to his ideas and writing is more urgent than ever. Olson is the poet who introduced scale and ontology into poetics, radically revising natural history into the human universe. He was also the exemplary poet of the Cybernetic Age. With the earth on the brink of ecological disaster and language enmashed in the age of information, Olson appears as a prophet and perhaps a destroying angel.
--Steve McCaffery

Charles Olson's work seems particularly apposite now because it was at the root of the contemporary notion of line as based in the body's natural music, which, in turn, was to posit that the body has a natural music---as expressed by breath, pulse, and other rhythms---and that poetry is uniquely capable of revealing it. This concept, radical when Olson first proposed it, has become so accepted as to be taken for granted, to the point that many young writers don't even know where it came from. When a central principle becomes that ingrained, it's more than time to bring it out for critical and creative examination.
--Cole Swensen

In this frantic dominating election season Democrat Jared Polis, a civically minded, gay activist who quotes Allen Ginsberg at his rallies, just won the congressional primary in Colorado. For months we’ve had the sign “Polis” stuck in lawns all over Boulder. Imagine the delight of this Olsonian - borrowed and expanded - syncretic “zone”-word, this “logos” and “topos” permeating the landscape. At every street juncture, I’ve thought why still Olson, why now? The polis needs continual attention, obviously. And the culture needs its poets who obviate political master agon-narrative of the “demon box”. Paltry mainstream TV coverage, I noted, of the very informative symposium I attended yesterday at Denver Press Club on voting fraud, so little of what is going outside, - outside the official convention on the streets of Denver, the “Funk the War” march etc. CSPAN broadcast from the Mercury Café where Code Pink holds headquarters. But it’s exciting, inside or out the halls of ambition, what a poet may do, point to & I am thinking again, epistolary virtual modalities. I think of Olson’s desperate civic letters re: the devastation of Gloucester, and what is lost to that polis. And yet the people I know who continue to work there, strive there in gloucestermegalopolis, I think of the polis in our virtual space, what Barack Obama has spurred through the Internet. Are we all our own “democracies” now? Hyperconnectivity begets mimeses begets hyperempowerment? Is this a good thing? So along those lines….. the interactive view of the history of life on earth….and all of us “hot for the world they lived in”, “another kind of nation” & send out a report….
--Anne Waldman