Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Olson frames poetry as ontology before it is literature: not a polished artifact but a burst of perception crossing the threshold into existence. “The first sound” is doing a lot of work here. It’s primal, bodily, pre-interpretive - closer to breath than to “meaning.” You can hear the Black Mountain ethos in it: composition as an event, not a product; the line as a record of attention moving through the world. Olson isn’t romanticizing innocence so much as relocating authority. If the poem begins at the instant sound is “realized,” then the poet’s job is less to decorate experience than to register it with maximum fidelity.

“Modality of being” gives the sentence its philosophical charge, but also its sly evasiveness. Olson doesn’t say poetry represents reality; he suggests it is a mode of reality, one way being happens. That’s a manifesto disguised as a personal preference. The “for me” looks modest, yet it smuggles in a radical standard: the poem should feel like the first emergence of voice, not an echo of inherited forms. Subtext: the traditional, metrical, museum-ready poem is secondhand sound - already mediated, already social.

Context matters. Writing against midcentury academic verse, Olson insists on an “open field” where the poem’s structure follows the pressures of perception. Sound isn’t ornament; it’s evidence. The line breaks, pauses, and stresses become the mechanics of consciousness taking shape. Poetry, in this view, isn’t what you say after you’ve understood. It’s the moment understanding starts to happen.