Charles Olson wrote "The Kingfishers" in 1949 when his "stance toward reality" was quickening. Soon he would codify that stance and the principles of its expression in two position papers, "The Human Universe" and "Projective Verse," but in "The Kingfishers" we have perhaps the most dense rendering of the Olson posture. Later, in The Maximus Poems, the density will attenuate and the method will lose some of its aggressive presence, but in this earlier, briefer effort we have the advantage of a concentrate. The poem is Olson distilled, form obediently extending from content, a reliable index to the dogmatic complexity of its author. As Olson himself once put it [in Letters for Origin], "If you don't know Kingfishers you don't have a starter."… (pp. 506-07)

"The Kingfishers" is, to use a term Olson borrowed from Franz Kline, a "marvelous maneuver," the result of "… that wonderful sense that one does...