“Wholly absorbed into my own conduits toan inner nature or subterranean lakethe depths or bounds of which I more and moreexplore and know moreof, in that sense that other than that all elsecloses out and I tend further to fall intothe Beloved Lake and I am blinder fromspending time as insistently in and onthis personal preserve from whichwhat I do do emerges more well-known thanother ways and other outside places whichdon’t give as much and distract me fromkeeping my attentions as clearCharles Olson, "Additions", March 1968—2”

“Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy.”

“The original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself.”

“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”

“O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.”

“Knowledge is the harvest of attention”

“But if you believe that adults can ‘make’ children learn well—in the absence of or in defiance of a child’s inner sense of confident engagement with the power of discovery and mastery—then, in my view, you are placing that child at great risk of failure as a learner.”