He thought of himself not as a poet or a writer, but as an “archaeologist of morning.” In The Maximus Poems, his epic work, which he partly wrote while in the Yucatán visiting Mayan temples: “I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking / for oneself for the evidence of /what is said…” He believed that poetic meter should be based on a poet’s breath, rather than stresses and syllables, and that for a poem to succeed it should be both aural and visual. His essay “Projective Verse” was a manifesto of sorts, and was very influential within poetry culture in the 1950s and 1960s. In it, he expounds passionately that “a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it” to the reader; a poem is a matter of kinetics; “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge”; “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT”; “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”; and advised poets to “get on with it, 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.” Charles Olson was certainly a highly energetic being; listening to his audio recordings absolutely tires me out.
-Morgan English