Politics & Power Quote by Charles Olson

It lands like a heckle from the back row: not a manifesto, but a jab at the sheer everyday friction of being governed. Coming from Charles Olson, the poet of “projective verse” who wanted language to move at the speed of breath and perception, “nuisance” is doing pointed work. It’s small, domestic, almost comic. He doesn’t accuse government of tyranny; he accuses it of being in the way. That choice shrinks the state from a grand Leviathan into an apparatus of interruptions: forms, rules, delays, speeches, committees, “public” solutions that feel privately obstructive.

The question form is the real weapon. “When will” presumes an endpoint, a future relief that never arrives, turning civic life into a waiting room. It’s also a trap for believers in gradual reform: if you answer with a timeline, you’ve already accepted the premise that nuisance is the baseline condition. Olson’s line doesn’t argue policy; it performs impatience.

Context matters. Olson wrote in a mid-century America swollen with bureaucratic confidence: New Deal infrastructure, wartime mobilization, Cold War institutions, the administrative state becoming the atmosphere. For an artist invested in local energies (his Gloucester) and immediate experience, centralized systems can feel like dead air. The subtext isn’t “no government,” exactly; it’s “why does the machinery always multiply faster than the life it claims to serve?” The sting is that “everybody” includes the people who want government to help them. The nuisance is bipartisan, universal, procedural. That’s why it still reads contemporary: a complaint about governance as clutter.