Charles Olson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Kellogg

Critical Essay by David Kellogg

SOURCE: "Body Poetics, Body Politics: The Birth of Charles Olson's Dynamic," in Sagetrieb, Vol. 10, No. 3, Winter, 1991, pp. 63-82.

In the following essay, Kellogg examines Olson's shorter poems in light of the poet's own principles of direct experiential knowledge.

It's going to be somebody else's business to say, see, hear, eventually, what's been done.

-Charles Olson to Robert Creeley

Twenty years after his death, Charles Olson's 1950 statement to Robert Creeley still applies as much to the content of Olson's writing, a great deal of which remains unpublished or only narrowly available, as to questions of meaning or interpretation. If, as there is reason to believe, Olson's writing significantly challenges our conceptions of meaning in the first place, we may be tempted to wait until the drama of textual recovery is complete before attempting thoroughly to revaluate Olson's contribution to contemporary poetry...
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