Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Olson’s line performs the very skepticism it announces: it starts with a swaggering claim of total legibility - “You can read everybody” - then immediately pulls the rug out from under the whole idea of clean disclosure. The first sentence is almost a dare, a poet’s version of X-ray vision. It’s also faintly contemptuous: if people are readable, they’re predictable; if they’re predictable, they’re not worth the romance we attach to “knowing” them.

Then the turn: “It’s not even interesting to tell the truth...” That “even” is doing heavy work. Truth-telling, usually framed as moral courage, becomes dull, a low-yield act. Olson isn’t praising lying; he’s attacking the naive fantasy that the truth arrives as a stable, transportable object. “Because to some extent it’s false” isn’t a paradox for its own sake so much as a diagnosis of how speech works: the moment you package experience into a sentence, you simplify, you select, you distort. Confession becomes another kind of performance, another angle, another edit.

Context matters. Olson, a central figure in postwar American poetics and “projective verse,” was obsessed with breath, field, and immediacy - writing as a scored event rather than a polished report. In that universe, “truth” isn’t a final statement; it’s an ongoing relation between perception and form. The subtext is a warning to readers and writers alike: interpretation is inevitable, transparency is a pose, and the really interesting work happens in the friction between what you mean, what you can say, and what language will let you get away with.