Olson explores poetry, belief and direct experience in three lectures at Beloit College in 1968, moving through cosmology, myth, language and perception.
Charles Olson — 2 recordings in the archive.
The book: The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson.
The subtitle is the dogmatic nature of experience and I propose to handle it in three shapes or circles unquestionably more circular than shapely. and now I will satisfy that lad that said to me today, you certainly giving yourself plenty of room. The first evening that is tonight does propose to be cosmology and the other two would be belief one and belief two so that I really do mean truth. Can you hear me? This thing is too low for me. Can you hear me? I do mean truth in a very simple sense. I hope I even have my definition of it. But I mean truth in the solemnest meaning of truth. I don't mean any room at all. in fact if I've had any result of the weeks and months that I've been anticipating being here just right now it has been palms and that's about as much as I could bring to you and I can't do that because I have to tell you something as well. I will however read at least one poem that came from this in order to get my chance at you ahead of time. but I would like very much to see if I can rather than try to talk of the of poetry as we could and we have already today in a couple of instances of what's up. I'm more interested in seeing if I can give you my sense of where it counts and is going. And it struck me that it was use it would be useful to try to lay out to you this shift which I see as having happened right recently and that I think is of such a ner that poetry as being written today especially by or in our language. yields a future that is unknown. is so different from the assumptions that poetry has had in our language that the life that one lives is practically the condition of the poetry rather than the poetic life being a thing in itself. And one could almost say that these two words today have practically flown together. Flowed I believe but flowed together. I think I'll start actually with a dry poem which just in fact arrived from the printers Thursday. because actually it was the it was a moment of thinking of being here tonight that that in fact I…