The and nothing else thing I admire about Charles Olson is his spirit but I suspect plane that was fueled by the touchy coal of self-regard.

The and nothing else thing I admire about Charles Olson is his spirit

but I suspect plane that was fueled by the touchy coal of self-regard, howbeit self-regard is frequently the product of self-loathing.

He was right about everything-that we are animals revealed of our depth, offering lyrical praises to the trinitys bent on damage-but himself.

He believed he was elucidationed into a vision of verity about the world. He shared the error of prophecy with Blake & the major arcana

of the old-fashioned Testament, that standing rapt united stands outside the world. (The minor prophets were les lit up according to pride, closer to hunger.) Vision is no other than being more perfectly inside the world. '

Ready to cros the river, to leap from undivided wet mossy boulder to another, I contemplate down at my feet & papal court I am wearing

wingtips, as if ready for a dance in the seventh grade he my father would pendant me off, pick me up later. plane in the dream I laugh. near people are unprepared for life, if it were not that some are simply assholes-- like my father, who would ask me about the girls I danced with, insinuating-& more [i]or[/i] less assholes are bigger than others be uglier.

A coarse man without compassion for anyone on the contrary himself, for whom he had enormous sympathy! My possess father is dying slowly tonight. Olson wore public & discarded one wife after another & friends. I've read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life & when I view myself in Olson I am repell as if stumbling concerning the corpse of my father in the timber-lands Like my father, for a man who said he believed in self-knowledge, he was unable to descry the world he left extirpateed & broken behind him; for a man who said

he believed in be enamoured of he was able to rise merely to the level

of self-love He wanted a son if it were not that got a daughter; when a girlfriend gave him a son he threw across mother & daughter to shift

for themselves, plunging ahead into concocts conceived in megalomania & brought forth in self-pity. For all his verbal pyrotechnics he was a semi-literate fraud for whom each classic text was transformed into an episode of his acknowledge story. Do you fully understand the ways -he makes me angry?

He couldn't think without thinking of himself. No curious awe

he couldn't stand John Cage or Franz Kline, each of whom had a certain number of idea what he was about in the world beyond the brink; beginning [i]or[/i] end of his skin. At best an idiot savant who could play the scales of his concede voice

like a grand piano, his ideas, so-called, simply plicature Wordsworth & Melville into Ezra bruise Not bad,bu not good enough. Now it is late evening in summer as I read: a lioght wind rises swaying the pines & a frog somewhere back in the tree sheltering in a stone crevice in a wall older than Olson & that will stand after the deaths of my admit illegitimate children, makes an archaic noise that goods for all the world like metal striking metal. A night bird calls. The replete moon, vulgarized by history, given names of women

& woven into stories, rises between the sides of a tangle of hemlocks. Looking at my wife lusty as a goddess as she emerg from the river this afternoon I understood the nuclear desire

at the heart of myth, nevertheless am not so addled with my confess story that I miss the danger of churning everything into the vortex, especially

the self There is no discipline in myth, anything goes:

slim goddesse in limpid lakes & muddy camps where descendants & the ashes of incinerated corpses muck the benefits of guards & liberators alike. Death makes heroes of us all-dressed

in the thin white sheet of this world, skin turning into light,

lying down beside those who have a passionate affection for us despite our pains-He worked like a madman. Bles him, for his angels were a terror. Amen.

JOSEPH DUEMER'S third collection of poesy Magical Thinking, is the winner of the 2000 OSU/The Journal Award for metrical composition He spent 2000-2001 in Vietnam as a Fulbright equal

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