Charles Olson in the Aisles of Home Depot

And so we’ve come to Charles Olson and his Projective Verse. The lamp that I purchased for cheap at Home Depot doesn’t light anymore. But let me come in closer. For any poet, and by that I mean myself, who has researched meter the past decade, the middle section holds some close interest. I will never enter the doors of Home Depot again despite my finding a Weber grille there last June. “It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.” Home Depot deposits situations that America continues to inherit despite democratic latencies that at last are late for the show. But Olson warns, “to step here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” Home Depot is the show and America is the mortgaging of souls to sway a ticket. But the syllable has a twin: the line, that bohemian bastard born of the heart. Head via ear to syllable. Heart by the breath towards line. And so we refuse to cross the threshold of Home Depot for rhetorical devices such as the simile and the like. Home Depot is sluggish and mind-numbing and doesn’t let me dance the dance I danced in Gloucester back in Dogtown when the perfect storm blew in from the Elizabethan seas. But what does Olson mean in the age of hyperlinks bought at Best Buy? I sneeze. Olson blesses, "It is true what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?"