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Open Books: Events
May 13, 2008 07:30 PM
JOHN OLSON
When it comes to describing his work, since it seems to be as much a force
of nature as anything else, one is best served by stepping out of the way
and letting Mr. Olson describe it. To wit: "The exhilaration of poetry is in
its gall, its brassy irrelevance and gunpowder vowels, its pulleys and
popcorn and delirious birds. It is transcendent yet wild, a while of energy
in a shell of words." His Backscatter: New and Selected Poems ($18.95
Black Widow) was published this year and is cause for this celebratory
reading. Mr. Olson was an early winner of The Stranger's Genius Grant and is
well-known in Seattle's, and the nation's, experimental writing communities.
Prose poetry is his primary form, and he has written of the prose poem that
it is "as inclusive as possible... an anomaly so wanton and supple the words
dream themselves into a torrent of unbridled rhythms, irrepressible being."
The words in his pieces come as if from a controlled explosion in a
dictionary warehouse. Giddiness and pathos stream past. Images and ideas fly
by, too. Synapses go snapping when reading or listening to John Olson. There
is such pleasure in that.
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