John Olson is the author of eight books of poetry and two novels. His most recent published collection is
Larynx Galaxy, from Black Widow Press. His two novels include Souls of Wind, about the exploits of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, where he meets Billy the Kid and digs for Pleistocene fossils in eastern New Mexico, and The Nothing That Is, a semi-autobiographical novel. The Seeing Machine, a novel about the French painter Georges Braque, is due out this November from Quale Press. He also keeps a blog, Tillalala Chronicles, here.
Friday
Nov
22
John Olson - Poetry
John Olson is the author of eight books of poetry and two novels. His most recent published collection is
Larynx Galaxy, from Black Widow Press. His two novels include Souls of Wind, about the exploits of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, where he meets Billy the Kid and digs for Pleistocene fossils in eastern New Mexico, and The Nothing That Is, a semi-autobiographical novel. The Seeing Machine, a novel about the French painter Georges Braque, is due out this November from Quale Press. He also keeps a blog, Tillalala Chronicles, here.
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John Olson Interview, with JP Reese
You had your first group of poems published just before your 50th birthday and have gone on to have nine books of poetry, two novels, and a series of essays published since then. Why so late in middle age? Did you always write or was the impetus for writing something that didn't manifest itself until you were older?
I'd been writing since about age 18. That's when I first fully assumed the identity of a writer and seriously began to work at it. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I felt confident that it was good enough that it wouldn't all be rejected. I think I just lacked confidence. And procrastination comes easy in your twenties and thirties. I also quit drinking, which I'm sure had a lot to do with it. When I drank, I spent all my weekends hung-over, moaning in front of the television. When I stopped drinking I suddenly had a lot more time available for writing and reading, with the additional motivation that writing provides for altering consciousness. Writing is a way to get high, as it were. It sharpens my perception, broadens my thinking, stirs my being. Burroughs said language was a virus. I say language is a drug. It has become a substitute addiction.
I'd been writing since about age 18. That's when I first fully assumed the identity of a writer and seriously began to work at it. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I felt confident that it was good enough that it wouldn't all be rejected. I think I just lacked confidence. And procrastination comes easy in your twenties and thirties. I also quit drinking, which I'm sure had a lot to do with it. When I drank, I spent all my weekends hung-over, moaning in front of the television. When I stopped drinking I suddenly had a lot more time available for writing and reading, with the additional motivation that writing provides for altering consciousness. Writing is a way to get high, as it were. It sharpens my perception, broadens my thinking, stirs my being. Burroughs said language was a virus. I say language is a drug. It has become a substitute addiction.
Steve Fama, in a review of your book of prose poems, THE NIGHT I DROPPED SHAKESPEARE ON THE CAT, says "his poems are from the age of rhythm and blues and rock 'n roll." That's certainly true of the first poem here, "Story for Brian Jones." Does music inspire your language choices in poems such as this? Do you research and read before you compose, or do the right words seem to come unbidden? I guess what I'm asking is how much sweat equity do you have to put into these pieces before you feel they are whole and can go out into the world?
Music is a huge influence. Primarily rock and roll. I do not myself play. I have no musical aptitude. Glee club in high school was a disaster. That's as close as I've ever come to actually making (or attempting to make) something that sounds like music. Consequently, I have a deep envy of musicians. Poetry is as close as I can come to making music without harming anyone's ears. As for "sweat equity," it can alter dramatically from work to work, but most often there is a lot of effort involved. Of course, revision is one of the luxuries of writing. I like to tinker on a piece like a car mechanic. There is a scene in the movieDrive where Driver (Ryan Gosling) is working on a car part, a carburetor maybe, at a table in his apartment. That's how I picture myself working on a piece. Parts to be assembled, screwdriver in hand, full concentration.
Music is a huge influence. Primarily rock and roll. I do not myself play. I have no musical aptitude. Glee club in high school was a disaster. That's as close as I've ever come to actually making (or attempting to make) something that sounds like music. Consequently, I have a deep envy of musicians. Poetry is as close as I can come to making music without harming anyone's ears. As for "sweat equity," it can alter dramatically from work to work, but most often there is a lot of effort involved. Of course, revision is one of the luxuries of writing. I like to tinker on a piece like a car mechanic. There is a scene in the movieDrive where Driver (Ryan Gosling) is working on a car part, a carburetor maybe, at a table in his apartment. That's how I picture myself working on a piece. Parts to be assembled, screwdriver in hand, full concentration.
Were you classically schooled in poetry or is poetry simply an organic part of your life? How did you become a poet?
I went to school. I attended San José City College in 1966, 1967, then went to Humboldt State for a couple of quarters. I returned to San José, got married, and got my BA in English Literature at San José State. Of course, that was a mere rudimentary beginning. I continued to immerse myself deeply long after I left school, and discovered a lot of writers that hadn't even been mentioned in college such as Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara. Dada was never mentioned nor was surrealism. A college professor at San José City College with whom I became close friends introduced me to Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. Comte de Lautrémont. I also learned French on my own. My wife Roberta and I have also taken classes at Alliance Française. Learning a foreign language is extremely helpful to one's writing practice. It helps you to see how language works in general, and provides numerous additional insights into your mother tongue.
I went to school. I attended San José City College in 1966, 1967, then went to Humboldt State for a couple of quarters. I returned to San José, got married, and got my BA in English Literature at San José State. Of course, that was a mere rudimentary beginning. I continued to immerse myself deeply long after I left school, and discovered a lot of writers that hadn't even been mentioned in college such as Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara. Dada was never mentioned nor was surrealism. A college professor at San José City College with whom I became close friends introduced me to Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse, a.k.a. Comte de Lautrémont. I also learned French on my own. My wife Roberta and I have also taken classes at Alliance Française. Learning a foreign language is extremely helpful to one's writing practice. It helps you to see how language works in general, and provides numerous additional insights into your mother tongue.
Any poets in particular who served as mentors for you, either dead or living? If so, how did their work influence yours? Did you ever suffer from the condition Harold Bloom has labeled "the anxiety of influence?"
There were many. I've already mentioned Rimbaud. He was a giant influence and continues to amaze and enthrall me. I got so obsessed over the mystery surrounding his break from poetry that I wrote a novel about it calledSouls of Wind. Bob Dylan has been a huge influence. Gertrude Stein has been another ongoing influence. I do not have any anxiety at all over influence. Originality is silly, a total chimera. Once you realize that you did not invent the English language, or whatever language you may be writing in, you realize that you are simply a channel for thousands of other forces and enchantments and beings. My own body is not a single organism but a consortium of multicellular entities. I feel the same way about writing. The words are not my words. I love them, but I do not own them.
There were many. I've already mentioned Rimbaud. He was a giant influence and continues to amaze and enthrall me. I got so obsessed over the mystery surrounding his break from poetry that I wrote a novel about it calledSouls of Wind. Bob Dylan has been a huge influence. Gertrude Stein has been another ongoing influence. I do not have any anxiety at all over influence. Originality is silly, a total chimera. Once you realize that you did not invent the English language, or whatever language you may be writing in, you realize that you are simply a channel for thousands of other forces and enchantments and beings. My own body is not a single organism but a consortium of multicellular entities. I feel the same way about writing. The words are not my words. I love them, but I do not own them.
The relationship between words and sounds in your poetry seems to be a key to their excellence. Sonic patterns and echoes infuse your work. Are these inextricably linked for you and when do you know you've achieved the perfect complement of sound to meaning?
I never achieve anything like perfection. No. There comes a point where I feel I have done the best I could, but often when I see a work published in a book I wish I could continue to make changes. And I’m always maneuvering between semantic extremes. Sometimes I enjoy transparency, telling a story, presenting images, crafting smooth, solid sentences à la Flaubert or de Maupassant, and on other occasions I want total abstraction, semantic rupture, an explosion of semiotic play. I swing back and forth.
I never achieve anything like perfection. No. There comes a point where I feel I have done the best I could, but often when I see a work published in a book I wish I could continue to make changes. And I’m always maneuvering between semantic extremes. Sometimes I enjoy transparency, telling a story, presenting images, crafting smooth, solid sentences à la Flaubert or de Maupassant, and on other occasions I want total abstraction, semantic rupture, an explosion of semiotic play. I swing back and forth.
Some poets write using legions of great, whirling words and can't seem to cut and trim where necessary to narrow a poem down to its essence. Your prose poems, although dense with words, seem to be self-contained, every word necessary to their thematic denouement, and they're often a series of startling, declarative sentences linked in a loose chain dangling multi-colored gems. Have you ever tried writing shorter poems? If so, was capturing an idea, an image, a point difficult for you in a more truncated form?
Yes, writing a smaller poem is quite a challenge. The model I have in mind is Claude Royet-Journoud. I love his work. His poems are small, but man they pack a wallop. They’re so highly condensed, examples of Mina Loy’s wonderful poem regarding Gertrude Stein,
Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
That’s a direction I may move toward some day.
Yes, writing a smaller poem is quite a challenge. The model I have in mind is Claude Royet-Journoud. I love his work. His poems are small, but man they pack a wallop. They’re so highly condensed, examples of Mina Loy’s wonderful poem regarding Gertrude Stein,
Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
That’s a direction I may move toward some day.
A line from your poem "House of Bone" states, "I find that truly great writing moves toward self-effacement and that a great cause of holes is brought about by sinking a shovel in the ground and taking away the dirt"that puts me in mind of Eliot's contention in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that "poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Do you agree with Eliot's claim?
Absolutely. Personality is flimsy. When I write, I feel that my tiny locus of perceptions and attitudes is hugely dilated once I am immersed in that great ocean that is language.
Absolutely. Personality is flimsy. When I write, I feel that my tiny locus of perceptions and attitudes is hugely dilated once I am immersed in that great ocean that is language.
Is there any question I didn't ask you that you'd like to answer here?
Maybe my concern over the demise of print media. I can’t visit the library or enter a coffeehouse without feeling utterly demoralized by the triumph of digital media. Laptops and smartphones. I keep a blog, and here we are conducting an interview online, so I am clearly not a Luddite and have embraced electronic media to a certain extent. But I know that it is impossible to read anything in an electronic format, such as Kindle, with the same quality of attention as when we read words in print, in actual books made of actual paper. There have been scientific studies proving this, some of which may be found inThe Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. In an ideal world, people could use the Internet and electronic media to access information quickly, and then, if there was something they wanted to pursue with greater attention, find it in book form. But this doesn’t happen. More and more books at the university library are being removed from the shelves for storage in the auxiliary warehouse. The whole periodical section, where magazines were once on display, is gone. This is such a great travesty, and a worry, because I’m already beginning to see the superficiality of attention grow rampant. It’s as if there were some sinister, systemic move afoot to divert people with superficial entertainments and prevent them from accessing their deeper, more authentic selves.
Another area of concern is reading in general. I was shocked recently when I was given the statistic that only 6% of the American public read more than one book per year. This trend toward dumbing down begins with our educational system, which is atrocious. This is a great worry. I feel that we are moving rapidly into another Dark Ages. There remains, however, an enduring culture of readers and people who read with great absorption and curiosity. This gives me hope. Morris Berman, in his bookThe Twilight of American Culture, has coined a wonderful term for these people: NMI, New Monastic Individual.
Maybe my concern over the demise of print media. I can’t visit the library or enter a coffeehouse without feeling utterly demoralized by the triumph of digital media. Laptops and smartphones. I keep a blog, and here we are conducting an interview online, so I am clearly not a Luddite and have embraced electronic media to a certain extent. But I know that it is impossible to read anything in an electronic format, such as Kindle, with the same quality of attention as when we read words in print, in actual books made of actual paper. There have been scientific studies proving this, some of which may be found inThe Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. In an ideal world, people could use the Internet and electronic media to access information quickly, and then, if there was something they wanted to pursue with greater attention, find it in book form. But this doesn’t happen. More and more books at the university library are being removed from the shelves for storage in the auxiliary warehouse. The whole periodical section, where magazines were once on display, is gone. This is such a great travesty, and a worry, because I’m already beginning to see the superficiality of attention grow rampant. It’s as if there were some sinister, systemic move afoot to divert people with superficial entertainments and prevent them from accessing their deeper, more authentic selves.
Another area of concern is reading in general. I was shocked recently when I was given the statistic that only 6% of the American public read more than one book per year. This trend toward dumbing down begins with our educational system, which is atrocious. This is a great worry. I feel that we are moving rapidly into another Dark Ages. There remains, however, an enduring culture of readers and people who read with great absorption and curiosity. This gives me hope. Morris Berman, in his bookThe Twilight of American Culture, has coined a wonderful term for these people: NMI, New Monastic Individual.
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Story for Brian Jones
Morphine burns in the arm, then diffuses into the blood bringing the sweetness of oblivion. I take a lobster for a walk. There are balms for broken hearts, and this is one of them. Morphine gives my biology a home. I go swimming in a light bulb. I come out sparkling and vascular. I want to touch your strawberry. I want to feel the mohair of your sweater. The sidewalk coughs up a Christmas tree. I step over it. The lobster goes under it. Wherever I go, I bring my lobster. I went to the airport to catch a plane to Paris and brought my lobster. They wouldn’t let me on board with my lobster. Next time I will hide him under my hat. I have a large hat. It has a broad brim and an ostrich plume. It is a haunted hat. It is haunted by the ghost of a piano. A dead piano. Whose keys were made of ivory, and whose strings were taut with destiny. The piano died a long time ago. You can hear it in the song “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones. You can hear it in the silence of a December night. You can hear it in the distillation of cognac, and the effusions of mist drifting over the surface of a river on a calm morning. I have difficulty adapting to the world. I always have. It helps to have a good hat. And a lobster. And maybe a little morphine. Green tea, or honey. I can recommend a broad array of animals and pharmaceuticals. But if you were to press me for the essential, the really vital thing is music, because in music what is indeterminate is beautiful. Balls on a pool table clicking with variables. A man in a trance at an upright, his fingers mustering nerves of golden texture.
House of Bone
A noun explodes into predicates and a world is born. It is a novel made of blood and feathers. It is a knife with the shine of ceremony on its blade. I sense opinions in the pearls. The beards of France liberate consciousness from the punctuation of the face. Orchids play an important role in the formation of a delicate sensibility in which talk resembles a stew and we can continue to think the world is what we think it is which is a big round stone heated by a star. This wheel’s on fire someone sings and it’s true there is a huge wheel on fire rolling down the road. Space doesn’t bite but it does bark a lot. This is no time to joke about oblivion I know so I won’t I just want to say that the bread is delicious and I’m tied to the syndicate by some pretty ancient ties. I’m just sayin. Don’t get me riled. Adolescence was weird but now I’m old and getting old is a lot weirder. The head fills to the brim with reminiscence one reminiscence after another until the head gets so big and heavy you start seeing correlations everywhere. As I wade through the swamp I see a pair of eyes looking up at me. Take my hand I say and this thing emerges from the water big and purple and full of scales and tentacles and the heavy smell of muck. We think the world is real but really we just make it up as we go along. Swimming teaches you all this. The fluidity of water yes certainly but also the inherent buoyancy of the body if you make an effort to keep it afloat. Have you ever ridden in a balloon in the fog over the trees of the Amazon? That’s what I mean. Everything is happening. It’s happening all the time. Twigs give themselves to the mania of spring and every morning I shave with a bolt of lightning and a mug of intention. I find that truly great writing moves toward self-effacement and that a great cause of holes is brought about by sinking a shovel in the ground and taking away the dirt. Everything green and sparkling carries a proposition of seismic proportion. The willingness to drive is totally French. The life that brought us here is anybody’s guess. I need to be more aggressive. I always feel pushed by something. I don’t know what it is. But who doesn’t like walking barefoot in the sand? It’s just something nice to do, like pronouncing the names of the dead because there is still life in those names. I cry out for fantasy. I decorate pain with ink and geometry. The glaze of Hinduism equals the crackle of cellophane. Any time an image results from the stimulation of my nerves I say let’s get some fire under those beans and cook it up. Our music is starved for metaphysical embroidery. Cogs serve the movement of gears. The structure holds itself together by adapting its syntax to the dream of the moment. Henna stars on a white background. The ablution of tides. You name it. This is not just my story this is your story. It begins on a bus. It ends on a boat. I don’t know. You tell me. Is there anything more incidental than plywood? My toe still hurts. But that’s ok. The universe takes shape in the mind. But the mind takes shape in a house of bone.
Geography Lesson
Cause and effect are sometimes geographic. Junkyards, for instance, are a primary cause of handstands. Elbows may be exhumed from pushups. There are libraries of energy in the rocks and canyons of Saturday. Mountains offer salvation. Deserts urge conference with the stars. This causes corduroy and rejuvenation. Bach runs down the street laughing at a hallucination of wrinkled Japan. I must learn the language of color so that I can better understand the cause and effect of Greenland. Life is fondled by water. Death is exalted by ice. Rain speaks simultaneously of both. Mosquitos bully the balcony into visible rotundity. This causes innocence, glass, and Italy. Needs and insults collide in the clasp of Utopia. Bulgaria happens by blood and pulley. The hops of the Czech Republic thrive wonderfully, causing sunsets that appear forged and red.
People think the earth is round. Earth is not round. Earth is oval, like an egg. In fact, the world is an egg. There is a giant chicken at its interior. One day, it will hatch more eggs which will become more worlds which will be become more giant chickens. In such manner the concertina has become a zone of doubtful control. We all want to be eagles. But sometimes, we must weigh our options blindfolded and blame the geography of imposition.
Our internal geography is a continent surrounded by islands of unknown anguish. Each island creates itself differently. It can be a dog barking inside a taxi cab or a woman swimming in a shark tank. We are, after all, in the realm of metaphor. We all see what we want to see. Elation comes in a pill. Each milieu is a boisterous detour. There are maps, but the ground continues to change. Everything grows. The sky argues with the ocean. The ocean argues with the sky. Thirst is a constant. A wing stirs. An eye opens. Desire cracks its shell. And the next thing you know all the borders have changed and the teaspoons crowd the drawer with their terrible hullabaloo and wizardry.
Yes. There is a geography of the spirit. That should be obvious by now. But what eludes the surveyors and puzzles all the cartographers are the promontories of thought harnessed to each pair of binoculars. As if the sky dangled from a keychain and the sun was a kaleidoscope gently turning and shifting its patterns in a Beatles' song. Which is precisely the reason for rumination. This is the place where cause and effect fail to describe the phenomena that is the sorcery of oysters. The place where irritations and frictions and conflicts become pearls of wisdom. The place of embassies and unspeakable elevations. The place where it is perverse to be narrow and normal to be lost. Where to be lost is to be found. Where to be insoluble is to be flavorful and large. Where there are no directions. Where the parking is always free and the fjords are folded into opinions of fresh and vigorous air.