John Olson, Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2008)"John Olson’s poetry is a linguistic burlesque show. Every aspect of the English language gets done up in feathers and spangles to shimmy and titillate, and you can almost hear the bawdy trombone accenting John Olson’s post-structuralist puns, his sonic shenanigans. He announces as much in the first line of this excellent compendium: “The exhilaration of poetry is in its gall, its brassy irrelevance and gunpowder vowels, its pulleys and popcorn and delirious birds.”
This exhilaration is far from what critic Ron Silliman calls the “School of Quietude.” With every word and part of speech, nothing is commonplace and everything is loud and out of school. Olson makes a poem by recording his superhuman sensory experiences as accurately as possible. Here is “Xylophone”: “a hive of bells / pollinating rhythm / and beryllium / beaten into rain.” Can you hear it?" - Travis Nichols
"John Olson shoots from the hip. He is not really a hippy, nor a hipster. He is not a cowboy either, though he is fond of jerky. He is fond of a lot of words. John Olson is unbridled. You could call him an outalw. He is a straight-shooter that peppers his targets. His bullets are words. He chooses them well. He loads their shells with lead so they carry weight. Olson shoots these words into space. What kind of space? To quote Olson himself:
“The space in which I believed there to be a cat and there was no cat was that delicious space we call fiction. As when a word doubles for something not actually present.”
John Olson is free. John Olson lives on the Puget Sound. I only mention that because I like the name of it, the way it sounds, pugety. Why am I going on about John Olson? I was recently asked to do the cover for his next book, Backscatter that Black Widow Press is putting it out. I had the pleasure of reading it of course so I could do the cover. It has some pieces from The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat, which I had the pleasure of publishing. It also has select pieces from his other books, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity and Echo Regime. I'm sure I'm forgetting others, he is prolific. And there are plenty of new pieces too. I guess you could think of it as a greatest hits double album with new material, like Rattle & Hum. But better. So if you haven’t checked out Olson, now’s your chance.
Doing a cover for a book is in a sense a review. Covers are designed to say buy me. Or at least open me. They are the superficial glossing of what to expect inside, all those words compressed into a 6" x 9" image, if such a thing is possible. It is not an easy thing to sum up John Olson on a 2-dimensional page. He does not take to being corralled. He has a knack for being all over the place at the same time. He is so wrapped up in words, the stories they weave are incidental epiphanies. Here’s a blurb by Rebecca Spears that encapsulates Olson well, from a review that just appeared in Sentence 5:
"To be sure, Olson's poetry works the reader, wakes up the mind, and makes one wonder that someone first named an object or action, that someone once sculpted those "bits of air called words." And if, centuries ago, a person gave name to a thing, then why not the poet now? Why not pry word from the meaning or give expression to something seemingly nonsensical that may after all make sense? This is what poets do in the realm of art."
Olson does not always get such “good” reviews. He has been known to get “bad” reviews. He gets some people by their goats. Like me, Olson cares more about the etymology of “get your goat” than he does about such reviews. Or their choice in words. Anyhow. Backscatter is the name of this new book. To quote myself quoting something I heard (I can do that right?), in a piece I had recently in QAE 13, “When Rutherford discovered the true nature of the atomic nucleus, the shock of the discovery was like shooting a bullet at tissue paper and having it bounce right back at you.” That’s what I think of when I think of “backscatter.” This QAE piece, This Could All Fit in a Wadded Tissue, has nothing to do with backscattering. The sentence after this line is, “He teaches him to keep flasks of blood out of direct sunlight.” Olson’s Backscatter is also not really about backscattering. I suspect he just likes the word and it's implications. That’s the way he works. He also likes the words “bee” and “tuba”. These are things I felt needed to be on the cover. The crumpled tissue paper was more my projection. As was the inclusion of Little Jack Horner. Is anyone else old enough to remember Little Jack Horner? He was this kid who sat in a corner eating a Christmas pie. The one that stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said something like, “what a good boy am I.”
I don’t want to give too much more away. There was no cat where Olson believed there to be a cat. Just like for Rutherford, there was an atomic nucleus where he believed there to be plum pudding. Olson accepts what he sees and believes what he can’t see. Like Rutherford, he is a true experimentalist. Reading Olson is like shooting a shotgun at Kleenex. Not every word bullet hits, but when they do, Eureka!" - Derek White
"One can only be astonished at John Olson's apparently limitless invention. Backscatter compensates those of us who regret not having been present at the birth of Surrealism or of a planetary system, for both described a novelty at its most scintillating and various. Olson's elements are, of course, words: "Words are instruments a biology snatched out of the air stills from a movie puddles of sound... a ballad of lanterns." In sixty-six prose poems unencumbered by gravity or any other obstacle to ascent - in fine, epithalamia to language and to the imagination at play - Olson unspools strings of spontaneous images, which are nothing less than the dna of the subconscious as it is sometimes fortunately transcribed by its most eminent sorcerers. I read Olson when I require an intoxication born of sentences that observe only and always a syntax of joy. His is one of contemporary literature's most far-ranging verbal anarchists. I commend him to you." - Norman Lock
"The poem selection in Backscatter, from a half-dozen previously published editions plus several new works, is excellent, and the book’s preface is Olson’s extraordinary essay on poetic autonomy and other matters (“gunpowder vowels,” natch, are mentioned). Unfortunately, in the six months since publication, Backscatter has been noticed about as often as gegenschein in a brightly lit city.
Two of the new poems in Backscatter deserve special mention. “Kinema” is a three page prose poem centered on Olson’s admonition that you should make a movie. Not a camera and film movie, but one (as Olson puts it near the poem’s end) “right there at the frontier between the external world and the life of the mind...” The idea that the imagination can make one hell of a motion picture is common. Olson’s poem stands out because it persistently posits pulchritudinous plentitudes of possibilities for your mind-movie. Here’s a typical suggestion from the poet-auteur:
put a tornado in it a larynx of dark whirling air an old man affirming an iron hatred in a rocking chair in West Virginia a doorknob wrestling free of a door a watch ticking on a train rail protestors clashing with police a plumber moving to the back of a French restaurant a mirror whistling like a ghost a parachute opening over Damascus the pulse of sedition in a wrist of words the sincerity of earth cough up pennies and mountains Bob Dylan driving a semi light breaking on a rose a man standing on a rock overlooking an alpine lake a blue so intense so extreme it constitutes another world.
Throughout the poem, the suggested scenes and shots relentlessly pile up, one after another, some hard and real (“[t]he punishing evidence of asphalt”), some real but not so hard (“[s]team from a laundry vent whipped, jerked, whirled by the wind”), some hard, real, and trending toward the out there (“a disease called real estate absolved by octaves boiling in the leg of a thundercloud”) and a few just giddy giggle fun (“Tarzan working at a car wash in Mozambique scrubbing SUVs with a loincloth”).
Reading “Kinema” reminds me of Andre Breton’s story about how he and his friend Jacques Vache would see movies in Nantes during World War I. The two would go into a theater not knowing what film was playing or when it began. They’d just go in and see whatever was on the screen. When they’d seen enough, they’d leave and rush off to another movie house and do the same thing, and then move on to another, and so on. Breton called the experience “magnetizing” (italics his). So too is reading Olson’s poem. It’s a cluster-bomb of kaleidoscopic images that attract at an elemental level and re-orient the mind to the true north of creative imagination.
Another of the mind-blowing new poems is “The Taste Of Ocher Forth,” a twelve-part, twenty page prose poem. “I’m constructing a dream of words,” Olson writes in the first section, and he arranges hundreds of sentences which for most part must be taken as one would the most oneiric of Joseph Cornell’s box-constructions. Olson’s words are recognizable enough, and so too is the concern in the poem about language and certain philosophical concerns. But just as the familiar can become fluid or torque in dreams, so too the referents and syntax in this poem. “Energy Saturday did bark,” reads one sentence, or, even more plastic, “Absolution raft since length is one husky pummel bolt that need to pump is even what tracks a throat a chatty interlude pushed into all institutions up where the mocha is pressured into since.”
Yet “The Taste Of Ocher Forth” also has moments – also similar to dreams – when word bursts become pyrotechnics of colorful illumination suddenly here then gone. “That ecstasy is lush that dreams itself an egg,” writes Olson, or “Poetry is the engine we all envy for its episodic onyx and indiscriminate parallels.”
“Never interview an elegant dream,” Olson suggests, and that advice seems wise. This dream-poem’s questions and answers are its own. We readers are but witnesses to the ignition of its high-energy reveries, and that’s mighty fine. We’re crazed Stetson-waving Slim Pickens straddling the poem-Bomb, ecstatically yee-hawing and ooh-ya-hoooing as we free-fall to a massive explosion of otherness." - Steven Fama
“[E]very day is a reprieve.” That’s what John Olson says in “Some Wanton Reflections” from Backscatter. I believe him. I need to. We need reprieves. (Some of us need them every day.) We need them like the earth needs seasons. (see flowers, Orpheus, Jesus, etc. in Heuving, above). Poetry can both reprieve us and give us something to do in our reprieve. How might we move nearer to the divine? That is the real question, Olson continues this same poem. Wow. The poet isn’t fretting about if there is a divine or not, the poet assumes it. The real question is then (is only?) how to get closer to it. Think about that: the assurance the divine is there, the assurance that it is get-near-able-to. As confident as taken for granted as a season. Which is not to diminish the poem: The poem is not a tool, says the first piece in Backscatter, which calls itself not a poem but an essay though they are kind of the same in word-world made by the alchemical Magus Olson. The words of poets cannot be used for anything (“City of Words.”), the poet Olson cries out in the urban-ness like an Old Testament Prophet. Poetry IS enough by its existence, and by the existence of Russell Edson, Shakespeare, Basho, the Beats, Stein, Rimbaud, all of whom drive through this book.
I also kept thinking, reading these Olson’s, of Whitman. Sort of like Olson is in the Whitman/Blake line. Ecstatic, loud, embracing bigness, multiplicities, cities full of fullness. Let’s make a great big noise. Everything is boiling, sparkling, splattering and bright. (A Big Noise). If Heuving is the sound of a tuning fork, a ringing with ripples rippling out, Olson is Brian Eno doing the “Hallelujah Chorus” with everyone at once starting on whatever note they hear in their head, but everyone knows the song and sings it loud and the notes and keys are different but over the course of it they find they same note and then you recognize it." - Rebecca Brown
"Noah Eli Gordon: This year saw the release, on Black Widow Press, of Backscatter, your new and selected poems. The press itself, which is relatively new, has been busy reprinting historical Surrealist texts along with contemporary work with a strong Surrealist affinity. Would you talk a little about your relationship to Surrealism?
John Olson: It begins with drugs. More specifically, an essay by Aldous Huxley titled “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds” that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post October 18th, 1958. I discovered it circa 1963, at age 15. Our high-school English class had been assigned Huxley’s Brave New World, and in the process of doing a book report I came across that essay. I cannot exaggerate the effect that essay had on me. A frontier opened before my eyes, though technically the frontier was behind my eyes. The frontier was that sprawling ineffable thing in our skulls called a mind and I wanted to be Daniel Boone. In his essay, Huxley talks about a kind of feeling or intuition, a sense that the divine is not an abstract deity ensconced in the heavens but that it exists within us: ecstasy, rapture, a sense of oneness with all things. He remarks that ordinary waking consciousness is very useful, but that it is by no means the only form of consciousness. I could not wait to get around to experimenting with drugs. Around the time I turned 18 I spent a short period of about six months experimenting primarily with amphetamines and LSD. It was ultimately unsatisfying, and my last acid trip was horrific; I believed that I had lost all corporeality and was just a cloud of molecules walking around, somewhat like those episodes on Star Trek when the transporter breaks the crew members up into glittering atoms and beams them through space. When my feet touched earth again, that was it. I put an abrupt halt to my experimentation with hallucinogens. I remained in agreement with Huxley’s quixotic ambition to improve society by expanding consciousness, but I could now clearly see that there were dangers and limits in attributing such change to drugs. Furthermore, I did not like the idea of taking something to heighten my awareness. It seemed materialistic, an aspect of consumer society. Hence, I moved toward poetry. I discovered among poets such as Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg ample support for the idea that poetry contained a dynamic in and of itself conducive to states of reverie and rapture. In an interview that appeared in the Paris Review in 1966, Ginsberg wondered if “certain combinations of words and rhythms actually had an electrochemical reaction on the body, which could catalyze specific states of consciousness.” There were numerous others such as Whitman and Blake that led in this direction, but it was Rimbaud with whom I connected most strongly. “The Drunken Boat” blew my mind. The language heaved with antinomian force. It had color, turbulence, intensity. I thought wow, this is it, this is what I want to write. But how? How do I achieve that level of delirium on paper, with ink instead of absinthe, syllables instead of psilocybin? I found my answer in Surrealism. The Surrealists had developed writing techniques that helped you attain the same delirium, the same sense of the marvelous, by incorporating chance and spontaneity into poetic construction. It was hugely liberating. Suddenly nonsense ceased to be simple nonsense and acquired the status of revelation.
Is the original revolutionary thrust of Surrealist philosophy—the notion of changing the world through conjuring paradox and cracking open the possible—something you subscribe to?
Yes, absolutely. Poetry is the antithesis of dogma. It is the opposite of absolutes. It is a mode of inquiry. It puts words into semantic collision, contagious dispersal, and the less sure it is of its results, the more it tends to approach a state of ecstasy, a glorious agitation. But this duality is misleading. Hui-Neng, the Sixth Patriach of Zen Buddhism, remarks, “As long as there is a dualistic way of looking at things there is no emancipation.” Poetry delights in paradox because its primary attraction is toward the ineffable. In a world so given over to commerce, this is a very subversive energy. Poetry is the ultimate anti-commodity. Art’s power is in its negativity. It stands in opposition to the actual, which suppresses it. It is a possibility impelled by its own impossibility.
I consider your work to be aligned with what Andrew Joron calls Neo-Surrealism, which is to say that although it’s informed by the original Surrealist struggle it employs aesthetic techniques that mark it as forward thinking rather than dogmatic. Here, I’m thinking especially of textual materiality, abstraction, negation, and speed. And yet, the critical reception thus far of your work, especially when it attempts any sort of historical positioning, seems so preposterously off the mark. Why do you think reviewers have such difficulty talking about what you do?
Good question. I have no idea why. Well, I have some idea. Some critics see it as a species of Surrealism, which it is, but only in the way that a kinkajou and a lama are both mammals. I’ve argued with one critic about parataxis; he maintained that parataxis is over and done with, he’s tired of it, end of story. Some people have called me original, but my writing is the opposite of originality. It is a conglomerate, a heterogeneous mass of Surrealism, Modernism, Constructivism, Deconstructionism, Hedonism, Egoism, Synergism, Sillyism and Dada held together by a cementing matrix of syntax. You mentioned textual materiality, which is a crucial matter for me. I love the way certain writers such as Gertrude Stein, Clark Coolidge and Jackson MacLow are able to foreground the thing-ness of words. It is pertinent to mention that I wrote the entry on Jackson MacLow for the 20-century volume of the Encyclopedia of American Poetry. This is an affinity I would like to emphasize because MacLow is not associated with Surrealism, perhaps because there is a certain funny pragmatism to his experiments with language. His fascinations, like mine, have more to do with the radical empiricism of William James, with identifying strangeness in sensible realities, words as they are directly experienced, which is inherently experimental. How do thoughts become words? How do words become thoughts? How does ice become steam? How does steam become ice? You also mentioned my resistance toward the dogmatic. Absolutes make me feel claustrophobic. Religious fundamentalism is one of the things destroying our culture. Dragging it into the Dark Ages. Everything, all experience, should be in a state of suspense, a mode of constant questioning. Otherwise you’re really not living. You’re sleeping.
For me, one of the most striking aspects of your writing is its speed, the way your poems seem to steamroll their own subjectivity, allowing in what might initially feel tangential, and yet in the end giving one a palpable sense of inevitability—a smooth road of winding thought. Would you talk about your conception of consciousness as it relates to speed?
I love speed. Charles Olson characterized the poem as a “high energy construct,” which I think is perfect. How do you build a high energy construct? He states it very simply: “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception . . .keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, use use use the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must move, instanter, on another!” Add to this another formula, by Pierre Reverdy, that “the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality,” and you’re on your way. This might not be everybody’s cup of tea. A lot depends on one’s attitude toward amusement parks. The lights, the crowds, the energy, the weirdness. The wonderful discordancy of gears and machinery in play for no other purpose than to create screams and excitement. That picture of me on the back of Backscatter was taken by Alice Wheeler at the Seattle Center Fun Forest. The Fun Forest is a small amusement park. It’s about to disappear, alas. One of my ambitions is to one day do a coffee table book on amusement park rides. Remember Ferlinghetti’s book of poetry A Coney Island of the Mind? That’s exactly what poetry is. Whirls, twirls, bumps and collisions. Sudden shifts, accelerations, dizzying velocities. I should also mention rock ‘n roll. It has been a profound influence on my life. Bo Diddley doing “Who Do You Love,” or Koko Taylor doing “Wang Dang Doodle,“ is an approximation of the sublime for me. High octane. Something must also be said for the reader, or listener, of poetry. Poetry is AC/DC. It is an alternating current. Without someone to respond to what is written on the page or uttered into the air you do not have a complete circuit. This is why work that is too deeply rooted in the subjective, or too labored and virtuosic, feels so dead. So stale. The dance of the intellect requires a partner. Someone, ideally, not so full of themselves that they step on your toes. Or too self-conscious to get up and make a fool of themselves.
Your work started really speeding up when, after Echo Regime, you apparently abandoned the use of verse in favor of prose. Was the line holding you back?
My first response is to say no, because I delight in lines. The line is a convenient framing device; it allows the reader to focus on an idea or image before moving on to the next, and creates the possibility of surprise, of frustrating expectations and introducing an unanticipated idea or element in the next line. George Oppen and Michael Palmer are supremely good at this. But the truth is, yes, the line was channeling energies that wanted to go elsewhere. My objectives changed. I needed a broader form. I began reading Proust pretty heavily, and L’invisible et l’invisible by Merleau-Ponty. I became increasingly fascinated by the nature of consciousness and perception, particularly the interphase between language and the external world. That space between the subjective and objective. That’s an extremely volatile junction. Language is a bridge. But words and syntax are notoriously unstable. Poets and politicians exploit that instability. The prose poem is a better tool for exposition than lineated poetry, which leans more toward lyrical effects, constructing a verbal artifact whose form contributes to its significance. The prose poem is a departure in poetry from the tyranny of the lyric “I.” Without the artifice of verse, of outward form, the prose poem opens language to the flux of consciousness in its more actual condition. Baudelaire states it beautifully: “Which one of us, in their moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and knocked about enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the turbulence of consciousness?”
Are your prose poems then a closer approximation of consciousness, a kind of map of the thinking that they display?
Yes, but as much as I love maps (I can stare at a map all day), I like to compare them to clouds. The philosopher Karl Popper once said, “life is not a clock, it is a cloud.” Clocks are predictable: mechanical, orderly, and rational. Clouds are capricious. Their being is circumstantial. Clouds are the products of multiple events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, altitude. No two clouds will ever be alike. It is the same with experience. Experience is always interactive. The prose poem is most obviously the best vehicle for simulating life and consciousness as they are experienced. There is a very fine line between the prose poem and the novel or short story. My reading lately leans more toward prose than poetry. The novels I enjoy are fascinated by consciousness and perception. Proust, for instance, or Claude Simon. Virginia Woolf has a story about a mark on a wall. She notices a mark, a stain, a blotch, and in the process of trying to identify what it might actually be, her mind wanders and sprawls marvelously taking in and presenting a large swath of association. Words burst and burble in incessant association. This is how consciousness feels. The beauty of Stein’s Tender Buttons is her ability to present language itself as an exquisite sensation. “The constant surprise,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “at the new tricks language plays on us when we get into a new field.” The disruption of syntax is similar to what happens in a thunder cloud. Lightning and thunder are products of volatility and friction. Conflict brings everything alive. This is something I found vital to feed into my novel Souls of Wind. Because here it was a matter of story-telling, not disrupting syntax. The focus tended to be a bit more on people rather than words, although words were still an important part of the project.
Was there for you something inevitable in the move from verse to prose poem to novel?
I’m not sure I’d say inevitable, certainly not in any predestined way, but it was deliberate. I’m a word-oholic. The more I write, the more I need to write. It’s addictive. I sometimes envy poets like Claude Royet-Journoud and those highly condensed pieces of his in The Notion of Obstacle and Theory of Prepositions. Mathieu Bénézet calls it a “language within language.” The words are so evocative; they contain quantum realities. Ghostly particles changing flavor even as you read them. I’m astonished at how powerful just a handful of words can be. Radium of the word, as Mina Loy put it. For whatever reason, I tend to go in the opposite direction. Slather words all over the page. The writer I tend to identify with the most is Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy in particular. The prodigality of that book, the way it meanders and delights so unabashedly in its verbosity, is magnificent. Lush and equatorial. Maybe some day I’ll turn around and go in the other direction. Distillation, rather than dilation, will be my primary ambition.
Because your prose poems embody a wide formal range, from essay-like linearity (such as “The Mystery of Grocery Carts”) to flat-out explosive parataxis, did you find the writing of a novel to be at all limiting? Were there moments when you felt formally constrained?
Yes. I felt constrained the entire time. I found the writing of fiction, a novel especially, to be extremely difficult. Inventing and developing characters, pacing, maintaining a sense of conflict and drama, are all very difficult. Maybe it comes naturally to some people. Not me. I felt ill-at-ease. Awkward. Ham-handed. But in time I became more adept at it. It’s a learned skill, like any other. Like carpentry, or surgery. What happened, in fact, is rather ironic. It had not occurred to me to write a novel. I was happy doing prose poems and a little flash fiction. Then, in 2002, I attended the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference. I had been invited to monitor a panel on poetry. The year before, I had managed to get an agent, who represented a non-fiction project; this was a long monograph on the subject of air. Everything to do with air: tornados, hurricanes, winds, the discovery of oxygen, thunder, lightning, etc. It didn’t sell. This was a huge disappointment because I had put an immense amount of work into that project. So, a year later I am sitting at a table in an immense room at the Hilton Seattle Airport and Conference Center participating in the autograph party. Sitting to my immediate left was a man in his early 30s. I asked to look at one of his books, which was titled How to Write a Great Query Letter.He was a literary agent named Noah Lukeman. This was one of his books. He asked to see one of my books, so I handed him Eggs & Mirrors, which was an early collection of my prose poems. He loved it. He said I had a great style. He asked if I had written a novel. I said no. He said, well, if you ever do, get in touch with me. So I thought holy cow, this is it, my big, long-awaited “in.” I began writing my novel a few days later. I finished the first draft in about six months and wrote a query letter to Mr. Lukeman. Apparently, it wasn’t a very “great query letter.” Or he wasn’t interested in Rimbaud, the American West, or Billy the Kid. A few weeks later I got an envelope with a tiny slip of paper and a formulaic phrase saying he wasn’t interested. No note. No signature. Nothing. I almost gave up. But I kept at it. And here is the irony: the book I found most helpful in learning the craft of fiction was a book titled The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, by Noah Lukeman. It was an enormously helpful book.
Okay, a novel about Rimbaud, the American West, and Billy the Kid! Do tell!
It’s 1880. Rimbaud has just left his job working in a rock quarry on Mt. Troodos in Cyprus and, rather than head for Aden as he did in reality, he travels to America by ship. He arrives in New York and has a tough time of it, but manages, after a time, to get a job as a waiter at Delmonico’s and save enough money to head west to St. Louis. He goes by train where he has his first encounter with Billy the Kid. There is a hint of the supernatural about this encounter. Arthur arrives in St. Louis, finds a room in a boarding house, and gets a job at a brick factory. On his day off, he visits a museum of wonders (modeled after the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles) where he meets an eccentric paleontologist and his daughter who loves reading Nietzsche. The paleontologist is planning an expedition to New Mexico to dig for Pleistocene fossils. He hires Rimbaud to come along. They travel to New Mexico by train, rent a wagon and some horses, and head out to the plains near Clovis (which actually is full of Pleistocene fossils). On the way, they pass through Fort Sumner, where Rimbaud has his second encounter with Billy the Kid. He also meets a curious fellow named Alias (Bob Dylan) whom I borrowed from Peckinpah’s movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
There are echoes there of your own prose poem “Arthur Rimbaud on Horseback.” I wonder, in this novel and in your other work, how important any sense of continuity might be, continuity in both form and content; which is to say, do you ever find yourself rejecting some of the things you write as not being “John Olson” enough?
I’m always trying to get away from John Olson. Not that he’s a bad person or anything, but writing has always been a way to vacation from myself. I really like something T. S. Eliot said regarding selfhood and language, “that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Eliot’s use of the word “past” might seem a little dry, but if I think of language itself as a living ocean containing both fossils and living organisms, it becomes a little more interesting. I’m frequently amused by the notion of originality. It is impossible for anyone to achieve actual originality, and yet the word has become such a positive modifier for anything intensely creative. Yet, what could be less original than making art out of a language that has been around for over a thousand years? If somebody were truly earnest about originality, they would first have to invent their own language. Then ears and eyes and tongues and hands. Ptarmigans, bees, and hermaphrodite brigs. Then cells. Then DNA. Then molecules. And so on.
In his essay “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” Paul Valéry writes about the connection between walking and writing, how one discovers a rhythm within the body, which can later be harnessed when facing the page. It’s interesting to me that you’re a runner, as we’ve already talked about the speed with which your writing moves. Is there a link for you between what’s done with (or to) the body and the subsequent shape of the work you’re producing? Which is to say if you’d taken up fishing, or bowling, or building scale models, do you think the trajectory of your writing would have been markedly different?
Absolutely. I’ll have to look into that Paul Valéry essay. That sounds interesting. I feel a strong affinity with the Italian futurists, Marinetti in particular, with the very definite exception of their political ideology. It’s their aesthetics that turns me on, not their fascism. It’s hard for me to believe those guys knew what they were talking about. Fascists tend to go for kitsch. Dogs playing poker. Tea towels displaying the Mona Lisa. Freckle-faced kids in Norman Rockwell paintings. Milan Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that people find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitized view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Kitsch is intimately linked with totalitarianism. It gives people a nice, self-congratulatory feeling that they are ennobling themselves by attending a so-called cultural event, even if all they are experiencing has been pre-digested and purged of anything too provocative or contradictory; anything, especially, that might cause them to question their reality. True art is inherently subversive; Kant’s paradoxical formulation, for instance, that what is beautiful is purposive without a purpose. That goes completely against the grain of industry and labor under capitalism. The Protestant Work Ethic. None of these things appear to have occurred to the Futurists, who went gaga over big machines and sweat and molten steel. I admit that some of those things can be pretty cool. But when Marinetti says things like “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” I know exactly what he means. That stuff gets me really excited. I’m not sure that bowling or fishing would have had the same impact on my writing as dada, the Blonde on Blonde Dylan, or Marinetti’s manifestos, but it’s an interesting notion. Another strong influence is laziness. Spacing out. Gazing out the window.
Does ambiguity have a place in poetry? What’s your evaluative take on it?
Ambiguity is a seduction. It lures us into the glide and glimmer of the poem like a svelte Mata Hari. There are poets who tell us what they think, and there are poets who reveal how we think. I’m far more interested in the latter. I have a preference for poets like John Ashbery who possess the magnificent ability to show us the play of consciousness as it blends among the materials of linguistic representation. I would go further than ambiguity and emphasize nonsense—delirium, absurdity, illogicality—as being an essential component of poetry. Nonsense is a quantum jump, an abrupt, exponentially enlarged disruption of one kind of information—the linear and utilitarian—to one of enchantment. The semantic play of the poem shifts its condition away from being a container of meaning to being an exponent of meaning. Ashbery presents us with the process of writing itself rather than its completion in a central, totalizing idea. It is a preference for movement rather than contents. Donald Revell talks about “writing into the accidents,” (“the trick is to write as far into the accidents as one can before collapsing into statement”), and in music there is the term ‘accidentals’ to describe the sharped or flatted notes that appear in the course of a piece without belonging to a prevailing key. I see a correspondence there between the chromaticism of music and the play of ambiguity in poetry. The in-between or borderline tones add an important dimension to music, and it is the same in poetry, where an appetite for ambiguity represents a preference for ceaseless modulation." - Interview with Noah Eli Gordon
John Olson, Souls of Wind (Quale Press, 2008)"If the philosophy textbook you kept from college managed to conceive a child with a dime-store Western, you’d find yourself in possession of Souls of Wind, a novel where Arthur Rimbaud sits across a dining car table from a pistol-twirling Billy the Kid; where “All Along the Watchtower” is composed and sung around a campfire one hundred years before Bob Dylan is even born, and where persistent attempts to photograph a man result in the small, perfect image of a hummingbird. John Olson, with his story of Rimbaud’s inner agitation and quest for beatitude in post-Civil War America, creates a novel of historical surrealism; Rimbaud takes to the frontier in an odyssey of heart, heat, and radical hunger with a paleontologist and his Nietzsche-loving daughter, seeking mammoth bones, enlightenment, and adventure."
"Olson’s spent the last decade making a name for himself through several collections of carnivalesque, probingly philosophical, yet no-less-immediate and, indeed, masterful prose poems. But Souls of Wind is a different sort of beast of hybridity—Olson’s foray into the poet’s novel. And, mind you, this is a novel, although it remains tethered to the prose poem via its main character, Arthur Rimbaud, the original enfant terrible of prose poetry. Instead of his mythic stint as a gunrunner in the Gulf of Aden, Olson’s Rimbaud travels to America in 1880, where he takes a job waiting tables at Delmonico’s before boarding a train to St. Louis and encountering his distinctly American double, Billy the Kid. Blatant riffs on the historical record aside, Olson excels at incorporating a lively and compelling set of props and backdrops for his character’s interactions, which he’s quick to explicate in exuberant detail; thus, one learns the rules of Mexican “Monte” thoroughly, as well as the dangers of the hydraulic elevator, the secrets of prestidigitation, and a veritable cornucopia of the nuanced particulars of life in the late nineteenth century. Rimbaud eventually finds work at a brick factory, visits the Museum of Unnatural History, and becomes infatuated with a paleontologist and his daughter, who, as an avid reader of Nietzsche, takes an instant liking to the ex-poet. Passing through Fort Summer on their travels to New Mexico to dig for fossils, the three encounter the aforementioned Billy, who’s begun to play Dionysian counterpart to Rimbaud’s newfound Apollonian temperament. The novel culminates in a Bonanza-style shootout, complete with bumpkin bandits. It is only after Olson’s satisfyingly unhinged moments of poetic illumination that one senses the obvious constraints narrative has put on a poet known for his wild and sprawling language." - Noah Eli Gordon
“The pen of John Olson creates spectral spectrums, ghostly gamuts, kaleidoscopes of concatenations coruscating across the nations of the understanding, spinning off the globe of the intellect far beyond the Kuiper Belt of the known human soul. His songs of possibilities and imaginings carry us into a familiar land we always longed to visit, but never quite knew existed. Let John's verbal cascades spray you with polyphonies of innuendo. Let his words lift your eyes to the heights of intuition that you may see what he cannot tell you. Enter into his limbo of infinite gradation, because its specters and spectrums will glow and harmonize only if you do so. You owe the personal experience of this book both to yourself and to the world of others John's pen has set free.” —Willie Smith
Praise for John Olson:
"John Olson is writing the most outlandish, strange, and inventive prose poetry ever in the history of the prose poem. Olson’s writing is so agitated with transformation that it can barely contain the skin of its own given language. It is a volcanic, fresh, and scalding rush." — Clayton Eshleman
"In the stream of these astonishing observations, science and surrealism are a single wave, charged with riotous particles, that only Olson Laboratories has the capacity to record. From DNA to the deep fields of space, to our world of shopping carts, birdhouses, and anchovies, John Olson’s ecstatic science tests for the truth of our chemicals, and our syntax, in bursts of intelligence, compassion, and delight." —Joseph Donahue
"There is something athletic and ruthless about the way Olson does so many things at once, as well as something strangely at ease. His writing is fully experimental and full of experience. It has range and urgency and poise. In every sense, it’s wild." — Christopher Frizelle
"Nature makes leaps; and the poetry of John Olson makes leaps. The series is exponential: Olson’s rejuvenation of realism follows the nonlinear lightning-path between world and word. Here, the simplest ingredients interact to produce unprecedented complexities, global cloud-systems of passion and insight. Fed into this vortex, everyday verities are quickly accelerated to the velocity of the Marvelous. The Olsonian sentence is an explosion fixe sparked by the uncanny coincidence, a speech-act spinning like an unknown home, making infinity fit for human habitation." —Andrew Joron
"Performative bursts, fests of play and wonder, and nervous in the best possible way, these quivering prose poems directly address Language and its chief sidekick, Life. They pull the reader immediately into the thick of language’s plastic pretenses and hilarities. A great delight." — Stacey Levine
"John Olson can stretch the language to fit the most diverse and delicate of subjects. With a sensibility both comic and dark, he shows the rest of us how deeply complex and various English can be. Olson is at the cutting edge of writing today." —Edward Foster
John Olson,The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat (Calamari Press, 2006)"The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat is not for the faint of heart. John Olson is an ardent explorer of language for whom poetry is “a whirl of energy in a shell of sound.” He embraces impulse and his poems thrive on autonomy. As he puts it, “Bees moving in and out of a hive. Words moving in and out of the mind.”
I first learned about John Olson in early 2001 from Philip Lamantia. Philip told me that Olson was “extraordinary,” had “made a discovery,”and was writing “the greatest prose poetry [he’d] ever read.” TNIDSOTC is Olson’s third book of prose poems in three years, and at 160 pages -- comprising 70 works, including an essay on poetics - it is the largest of the bunch. He is clearly on a roll.
TNIDSOTC includes many kinds of prose poems. There are meditations on particular things, narratives, autobiographical pieces, poems responding to art, and philosophical reveries. There are poems that mix these genres and poems that can’t be classified at all. You never know page-to-page what you will find. This unpredictability is a big part of why the book is so fun and such a challenge.
The poems which meditate on particular things, such as “City of Water," “Unconscious,” “Laundry,” and “Starlings,” are among the more conventional works in the book. Francis Ponge is the obvious precursor in this genre, but Olson writes with more energy and stronger beats. His poems are from the age of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll.
“City of Water” is presumably about Seattle, where Olson has lived for the last three decades. The poem engagingly evokes the region’s foremost geographic feature (over 40 percent of the area is water) and its well-earned (although usually over-stated) reputation for wet weather. It begins, “I live in a city of water. Water in all its forms. Vapor, clouds, drizzle. Fountains, rivers, lakes. Inlets, ports, sounds. There is water everywhere.”
The poem continues for a page, mostly in short vigorous anaphoric sentences. Olson riffs on the ubiquity of liquid in his city, using sharp details and poetic leaps that are hallmarks of his writing. Here’s an excerpt:
“Water punctuating the earth in commas. Puddles promiscuous as nickels. Puddles impertinent as pickles. Water streaked with whorls of delinquent oil. Everywhere the sheen and luster of water. Rivers in reveries of water. Water pushed to extremes. Water falling from cliffs. Water sprayed over melons. Water in beads on the blade of a fern. Water in rivulets on a window. Water impelling a current water moving in a kind of languor water moving reflectively from rock to rock.”
The poem ends with an unexpected image of movement and stasis, enlightenment and color: “Water wiggled under a Buddha in jade.” Seattle ought to pass a resolution making “City of Water” its official poem.
A few works in TNIDSOTC, such as “The New Neighbors” and “Monsieur Dupont,” are poetic short stories. “Monsieur Dupont” is an entertaining yarn about a poet with a big house who travels through time (so yes, it’s a sci-fi prose poem too). This paragraph from the poem-story seems to reflect Olson’s own views:
“There are numerous advantages to being a poet. Poets can work at home. It may be to one’s advantage to go out into the world occasionally to seek imagery and wisdom, but on balance, the information that goes into a poem is not limited to the debris and data of external reality. Much of what goes into a poem is spun from the silk of one’s own mind.”
In addition to the stories and poems about things, TNIDSOTC also has a few works that respond to art. “Miro’s Blues” concerns a series of large paintings (Blue I, II, III) by the Spanish surrealist and is especially impressive. For almost ten pages Olson puts the paintings under a microscope and launches reveries about what he sees. Here’s an excerpt about Blue II; typical for Olson, its associational train is both focused and freewheeling:
“Running diagonally across the canvas, from right to left, is a thin black line. It is barely perceptible. It is so thin and delicate that it assumes the power of eternity. A skeleton trumpeting death. The joy of candy. Spray from a rock. Electricity in lemons. A head full of heaven.”
TNIDSOTC also has a few purely autobiographical poems. The book’s title piece is six long paragraphs concerning B.B. King heard at a distance, seeing the Rolling Stones on French TV, the spin of information on CNN, classified ads for sex, the movie version of Julius Caesar, the meaning of “that delicious space we call fiction,” and, yes, the night Olson dropped Shakespeare (the heavy Riverside edition, accidentally) on his cat. This last scenario may cause alarm, but without giving anything away I can assure everyone that no animal was harmed in the making of the poem.
Another autobiographical poem is “Philip Lives: A Lament for Lamantia.” Written after the San Francisco surrealist’s 2005 death, it is a moving remembrance and celebration of a poet who Olson obviously greatly admires. (Olson’s poetic and aesthetic pantheon includes many innovators; he has published poems or essays acknowledging the importance of Rimbaud, Stein, Ashbery, Mac Low, Dylan (Tarantula), and Dubuffet, among others.) “Philip Lives” also shows how Olson allows his impulsive poetic energy to take over. Here’s a paragraph from near the start of the poem; notice how its simple directness pivots and takes off:
“Philip lived and breathed poetry. He called poetry a miracle in words. Which is precisely what it is. A miracle in words. Rhapsodies of pain passionate wavelengths tortured minerals sublimated into bubbling autonomy. Delicious anomalies paradisiacal pancakes morning prayer in the bowl of dawn. Fireworks in Mexican villages. The aroma of dragons. Analogues parallels pantisocratic parakeets.”
TNIDSOTC also has poems that are philosophical reveries (for example, “A Bee Is a Predicate With Wings”). It also has poems that begin as one type of poem (a Ponge-like piece, for example) but then bend or twist into something else. Olson is unpredictable even within the poems themselves.
The majority of the poems in TNIDSOTC don’t fit into the categories already discussed, or perhaps any category at all. I call these unclassifiable works “out there.” The term is used as shorthand for the poems’ singular wildness and nonconformity. Olson in “The Fabric of Fabrication” writes that “anything can be constructed out of words.” In the “out there” poems he shows just how immeasurable and mysterious “anything” can be when built with language in the free play of imagination.
In the “out there” poems, sentences usually have no overt connection to one another, and the same can be true of at least some words within the sentences. “Meniscus,” a more or less typical example of the “out there” poems, begins as follows:
“The flamboyance of trout awakens the cadence of water. It is a symptom of birch. Piano and rocking chair confirm the belt of Orion. The fungus did to the salami what the salami did to the harmonica of fable. It became a scrap of royalty, an amaryllis by the bay. Everything turned quiet as a mountain trumpet.”
The poem continues in this way for more than a page. Olson relentlessly introduces images and associations, stretching and re-inventing language and meaning.
Some readers will be put off by the “out there” poems’ mix of wild energy and experiment. Those looking for messages or logical development will be disappointed. Olson at least gives fair warning to readers in a few sentences towards the end of “Delinquent Circuitry,” the first poem in the book. “Do you seek meaning and wisdom in a poem?,” he asks, and then writes, “I seek the occurrence of sound in protein. In propulsion. In bas-relief.”
The only way to take these “out there” poems are on their own terms. Readers able to love them as they are - with their sui generis energetic oddness, indeterminancy, freedom and occasional warts - will find them compelling and fun. They are uncompromising invigorating adventures into the possible. Each poem is “a leopard of thought moving... through a jungle of words.” That’s a quotation from Olson’s “This Other World: An Essay On Artistic Autonomy,” a seven page essay on his poetics which ends the book (and from which the quotations in the first paragraph of this review are taken).
All the poems in TNIDSOTC are marked by an almost otherworldly richness of language. Not rich in an overly-luxurious or heavy way, like caviar or chocolate mousse, but something far more nutritious and necessary. Olson’s prose poems are mother’s milk for healthy imaginations. His sentences are full of life. Life that is eruptive, wiggly, maniacal, and unquantifiable, to again borrow words Olson himself uses, in “This Other World,” to describe his writing.
Olson writes in “Free Will Is Not A Profession” that “astonishing coincidences surge ceaselessly everywhere.” His dedication to this aspect of our existence, especially as it manifests within language itself, animates his writing. Olson’s sentences, particularly in the “out there” poems, are full of surprising chance encounters between words and images. “Values in the egret city were such flippers as to hair the swells with suites of honeyed obscurity,” the first sentence of “Other Than Carrots,” is a typical example.
Occasionally, the surge of coincidences comes so fast that sentences are pared down to a word or two or three. The last part of a paragraph in “A Bee Is a Predicate With Wings,” for example, has a sentence of conventional length (“An aperture in the mind dilates into orchards and monkeyshines”) and then the following: “Resolute buccaneers. Rope and canvas. Mermaids. Fiddles. Verbs.” This staccato not only drums up rhythmic variety but also serves as an object lesson of the astonishing surge that nourishes Olson’s poems.
Olson only sparingly uses certain of the poet’s tools, such as metaphor and simile. But when he does, watch out! “Time is but a jackknife between mayhem and rhapsody,” Olson asserts in “Native Emulsion.” In “Absorption Spectrum” he writes, “Reading is like pouring a famished eye on a page of fluorescence and ore.” Pierre Reverdy, who counseled poets to bring together the most distant and distinct realities, surely would approve.
One tool not used sparingly is sound. Sound may be the outstanding feature of TNIDSOTC. Most of Olson’s poems beg to be read aloud. The sounds are varied and can be huge. The first sentence of “The Conservation of Strangeness” reads, “It is keen and convincing to quiver a who.” I’ve been repeating that aloud to myself and friends for weeks now. I love how the hard consonance and other alliterations resolve into a hoot-owl exhalation: “It is keen and convincing to quiver a who.”
Olson unleashes an onomatopoeic ornithological alliteration for the ages in “The New Neighbors,” a lovely long rant about the people who moved into the apartment upstairs. Near the end of the poem he describes the noises he hears, including the mating calls and snoring of frogs (the new neighbors are quite unusual), and then writes:
“To this was added the cacophony of birds. Thousands of birds. Golden-rumped tinker barbets, Burchell’s coucals, Klass’s cuckoos, spotted dikkops, purple-crested louries, and tambourine doves.”
The extraordinary vigor of this passage is emblematic of how words rock and sing in TNIDSOTC as a whole.
With its variety and number of poems, overall length, and richness of language, TNIDSOTC is massive and dense. It can take weeks to take in its many pieces. This may discourage readers. These days, a poetry book is commonly a short chap or a 100 page or less perfect-bound edition. Although I sometimes prefer a quick hit of a writer’s work, or a longer focused collection, I am grateful that Olson published this profuse potpourri of prose poetry. It’s a book to read not for day or a week, but a season or two, and to re-read for a long, long time.
John Olson has earned a measure of recognition in his hometown of Seattle. Two years ago he received a “genius award” from the city’s weekly newspaper, and currently his writing notebooks are on display at the University of Washington’s Henry Museum. But elsewhere his work is not nearly as well appreciated. This is partly due to the fact that Olson was a late bloomer in terms of publication. His first book (a chap) did not appear until just before his 50th birthday. Next year [2007], he will turn 60. I hope he has a very long life. His poems, I believe, most certainly will." - Steven Fama
