Steven Fama, the world’s #1 John Olson fan, is at it again with a brilliant new review of Olson’s latest. How bout this cherry-picked quote on poetics:
“You favored a type of poetry that was wild and surreal. A poetry full of phantasmagoria and fugitive meaning. The poetry of delirium. A poetry that did not point in one direction but in many directions. A poetry that capitalized on the inherently hallucinatory properties of language. It had been your experience that most people did not care for this type of poetry. People preferred a more transparent poetry which presented a single lyrical emotion in an anecdotal setting. The bland and acceptable poetry which was generally featured on NPR, read by Garrison Keillor, and got all the NEA grants.
http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010/06/storms-and.html
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
