Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

A body in a corner, refusing the tidy etiquette of choosing a single direction: that is the nervous energy inside Olson's line. "I'm trying to climb up both walls at once" turns ambition into geometry, and the geometry into a trap. It's comic on the surface - the image borders on slapstick - but the joke has teeth. To climb one wall is hard; to climb two simultaneously is almost impossible, a self-imposed contradiction that nonetheless feels like the most honest description of modern attention and modern pressure.

Olson, the key voice behind Projective Verse and the Black Mountain orbit, wrote against the polite, pre-measured poem. He wanted a poem that moved at the speed of breath, perception, and thought as it actually happens: lurching, doubling back, making concurrent demands. The line reads like a manifesto smuggled into a complaint. One wall is the inherited literary tradition, the other the raw data of lived experience; one wall is intellect, the other the body; one wall is public history, the other private urgency. Olson's speaker doesn't pretend these can be reconciled into a neat synthesis. He stages the struggle.

The subtext is a refusal of single-lane identity. Mid-century American culture loved clean categories - formal vs. free verse, high vs. low, academic vs. outsider. Olson dramatizes the cost of resisting that binary: strain, maybe failure, but also a stubborn insistence that the real work happens in the corner, where competing forces meet and the poem has to invent new traction.