John Olson

• Poetry Selections
  • Curtains
  • Mutiny on the Borborygmus
  • Nebraska
  • Flourescent Frontier
  • Writing with Light
  • Adherence

About the Poet

John Olson's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, such as Another Chicago Magazine, B City, Caliban, Exquisite Corpse, New American Writing, The Raven Chroncles & Sulfur. Much of the work I do is about nothing, though I believe the omelette is an important oeuf. Most of the time I feel concurrent as a ripple. If language is a wire, the poem is a voltage, a binomial sputum floating temperatures of meaning. Pitch, tone, duration, skin. Incidents of Fiji. Swimming is a fervor of form. Possessives are ice, a jealous sketch of circumference. One must be haggard to coo at the donors of limbo. But it is delectable to commit a gable to a treatise of scale.

Walnuts: a statement concerning the lust of a literature

The impulse to write is very strange. It's a superfluity. What Levi-Strauss calls a "surplus of signifier," which has to do with the Shamanistic "cure" brought about by an "empty constellation of pure signifiers in which the free-floating unexpressed and inexpressible affectivity of the patient can suddenly articulate itself and find release." I'm very invigorated by this. I feel a strong affinity for superfluity. It's like a sex organ waiting for something to do, or a museum imbued with a richly diffused, Romantic light. The tendency is to sweep the light into a metaphor, & later dump it into a poem. (A poem is a landfill of connotation & seagulls). In many cases the impulse to write intensifies with age. This has to do with the hole in the bottom of the bag Williams talked about in Paterson. "It is the imagination/ which cannot be fathomed./ It is through this hole/ we escape." Keep in mind that time in this context is a geology, not a monotonous ticking. It's an expression of landscape, how words roll around or crawl, or hop, or graze, like the animals on the cavern walls of Lascaux. Only this isn't a cave. This is a piece of paper. (Although a cave is an exciting place to be). Poetry is the crackling blaze in the cave. (Which in this case is a real cave; as real as a voice). It's what kept the shaman/ artist warm while they depicted the world outside. In today's world (which is the same world, with mastodon-trollies hooked on wires) the poem is a block of air. A cube of vowels. A bucket of blobs of scraggly signification. A pen. A wrist. A punch. A hole in the bag. A system of sounds to which ../../images are attached, like walnuts.

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