The Songs of Maximus: Song 1

By Charles Olson 1910–1970 Charles Olson

colored pictures

of all things to eat: dirty

postcards

And words, words, words

all over everything

No eyes or ears left

to do their own doings (all

invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses

including the mind, that worker on what is

And that other sense

made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched,

that consolation (greased

lulled

even the street-cars

song

Charles Olson, “The Songs of Maximus: ‘Song 1’ ” from The Maximus Poems, published by the University of California Press. Copyright © 1983 by Charles Olson. Reprinted with the permission of The Literary Estate of Charles Olson.

Source: The Maximus Poems (University of California Press, 1987)

Biography

Charles Olson was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s. In his influential essay on projective (or open) verse, Olson asserts that "a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct . . .

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