John Olson (USA)
1947
Born in Minneapolis,
Minnesota on August 23rd, 1947, John Olson’s first seminal discovery in the
realm of poetry occurred in the summer of 1966 in San José, California when a
friend showed him “The Drunken Boat” by Arthur Rimbaud, a poem well outside the
conventions of most of the poetry he’d seen till then and whose hallucinogenic
delirium and phantasmagoric brilliance had an immense and immediate appeal.
He’d begun writing poetry while attending the University of North Dakota in the
spring of 1966, but it was Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat”—shortly after
relocating to the west coast—that truly put him to sea.
Olson graduated from San José State in
1974 where a class with poet Michael Palmer further enlightened his journey
into poetry and introduced him to the work of other poets such as Ted Berrigan
and Gertrude Stein whose concentration on the “thingness” of language
encouraged a more radical approach to writing, a practice based on a sense of
construction, of language as a medium of assembly rather than strictly a mode
of communication, a utility for transmitting messages. This perspective would
be further bolstered by William Burroughs’s cut-up technique. It was also at
San José State that Olson discovered the work of James Joyce, whose monumental
Ulysses would inspire further experimentations in prose and a deepened interest
in the prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Francis Ponge, André
Breton, Bob Dylan (Tarantula), the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse),
Stéphane Mallarmé and Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s novels would also provide a
bridge to the work of Marcel Proust and Louis Ferdinand Céline.
Olson returned to Seattle in 1975, his
point of origin after his parents moved there from Minneapolis in 1959. A part
time job for the mailing service at the University of Washington provided an
income while he developed his writing, although he did not begin submitting
work in earnest until rather late in life, in his early 40s, upon which his
work began appearing in journals such as Sulfur, New American Writing and
Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse.
His first book of poetry, Swarm of
Edges, was published in 1996, followed by several other books, including Logo
Lagoon, Eggs & Mirrors, Echo Regime, Free Stream
Velocity, Backscatter: New and Selected Poems, and Larynx Galaxy.
Olson also write poetic fictions which
include Souls of the Wind (Quale Press, 2008), The Nothing That Is (Ravenna
Press, 2010), The Seeing Machine (Quale Press, 2012), and In Advance
of the Broken Justy (Quale Press, 2016).
Olson has thrice received the Fund for
Poetry Award. In 2004, Olson received The Stranger’s Genius Award for
Literature and in 2102 was one of eight finalists for Washington state’s Artist
Trust’s Arts Innovator Award. In 2008, Souls of Wind, Olson’s novel about the
imaginary exploits of Arthur Rimbaud in the American West of the 1880s, was
shortlisted for a Believer Book .
Olson married poet Roberta Olson in 1995.
They currently reside in Seattle.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Swarm of Edges (Seattle: bcc press, 1996); Logo
Lagoon (San Diego: Paper Brain Press, 1999); Eggs & Mirrors (Seattle:
Wood Works Press, 1999); Echo Regime (New York: Black Square Editions,
2000) (lineated poetry); Free Stream Velocity (New York: Black Square
Editions, 2003); Oxbow Kazoo (Lawrence, Kansas: First Intensity Press,
2005); The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat (New York: Calamari
Press, 2006); Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Boston: Black Widow
Press, 2008); Larynx Galaxy (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2012); Dada
Budapest (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2017)
