About John Olson
John Olson is the author of seven collections of poetry and prose poetry, including The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Echo Regime, Eggs & Mirrors, Logo Lagoon and Swarm of Edges. Backscatter, a collection of new and selected work, is forthcoming from Black Widow Press in 2008. Poetry, Olson observes, is what gives our language its essence and rapture, its muscle and reach. It is the full comprehension of the mind's independence and freedom, the spurt and urgency of its plumes and pearls. It is the life-blood of a culture. The pulse of its meat and meaning.
Nominated by Filter Literary Journal
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Filter is a hand crafted journal built and based on the theory that poetry can re-gain a foothold in contemporary culture by being presented in ways that stimulate the reader to interact with the work. Reading is a visual art, a palpable experience, a confluence of literal and physical understanding - Filter seeks to expand on these tenets by encouraging readers to experience language intellectually, emotionally and physically. This journal seeks to represent the work it holds on a visceral level, so that the book is as carefully crafted as the poetry, fiction and art that it contains.
THE ALCHEMY OF POETRY
by John Olson
The alchemy of poetry achieves the absolution of metal in the blade of its laughter. If there can be an imprisonment of mind, there can also be a release of mind, little mouths of dissonant sound leaping out of a bell of wax. Language swirls with parables. Each word is a clam, a shell of sound with a muscle of meaning inside. It's easy to shuck. But difficult to describe. One might call it a banana. Or a bandana. Or a battered old pickup festooned with Christmas lights. There are a hundred different ways to distill a harpsichord. One way is to become a faucet floating a personality through your lips. Another is to imply the presence of an inexplicable meat. I live each day as if it were the raw and powerful expression of an ecstatic doorbell. A fat pink tongue embodying hope and consciousness. My philosophy has a perfume in it. Gravity glittering on a lake. I would like, now, to say something meaningful about glass. About anything. A nut, an insect, a comic book and a jacket. Morning light caught in a cactus. One day I cut my hand while reaching under the car seat to retrieve a video. That is how I arrived here now, naked as a neck with my elbows on the table. Don't ask why. Sooner or later everyone pauses to reflect wondering what life is all about. The skull is an alembic. It all turns silk on the other side of a blue star. A spot of broken white on a tarnished doorknob. I feel green and vertical. I reach out to you. Do you feel me? Trust your convulsions. Your paroxysms. Your perfumes. Your buckles and barrels and impact and ink. When does a lung become an emotion? How do sensations become ideas? Why is silver consecrated to silverware? The sky in our apartment tastes of music. The volume is infrared. The amplitude is amber. A mind is gold when it assumes the calmness of tea. I believe there is a way to get across Cincinnati without laxatives or bunting. I believe the air is lacquered with thought. I love swimming in English. It goes deep. Gravity requires movement to be fully appreciated. I don't know the entire story behind it. I just know that when I get up in the morning, something holds me in place as I begin to make the bed and listen to the words coming out of the radio. Something thick and black and existential. Like a gun. Because that's the way it feels. Like sonnets. Like catalogues. Like balancing a universe on the tip of your tongue.