We here at con/crescent are very excited to post some poems by our friend Geoffrey Olsen.  Recently, we were both quite pleased and lucky to find ourselves critiquing and really investing some time in his work.  So much so, that we’d like to offer you .pdf’s of Mr. Olsen’s work, and our two responses to it.

Here is a brief excerpt from Olsen’s Not of Distends*Address Panicked, followed by a .pdf for download:

.         blue wrapping our
.           blue wrapping around

.      avoiding seeing
.          them folding it seeks
.                   return
.             to right altering

.                    multiple chains

.                                they’ve
.                 splintered though I was wanting
.                 desiring to be there as a part

.                             access to sun
.                 response dictates
.                 they were riding next to each other
.        something regional and a way from here. patterning

Not of Distends*Address Panicked download

Here is Jamie’s response, followed by a download for the full:

“Your text is struck through with the present participle tense — the ongoing-ness of experiential space. As I open to the first page, beginning with a blue that wraps both “our”, the shared closeness of an inner dialogue that positions separate bodies, and “around” that field between, the potential space of experience, I am thinking primarily of the infusion of blue in our world — that it is the color of both sky and water because of the way light is absorbed and refracted. We begin with sight, with light as a subject that contains its own conditions, shapes experience, literally “colors” the field on which forms play. That the act of splintering, that sight is an acknowledgement of the break that we live in, allows this text to address the phenomenological complexities inherent in the act of writing. It challenges us to perceive sight, which shifts to the camera image of the eye several lines down, as an act of navigating complex relationships between the “see-er” and the “seen” as an “effort to form one’s mind”. A startling and absolutely necessary concern with which to open this aggregate of shifting space…”

Jamie Townsend’s Response to Geoffrey Olsen download

And finally, here is DeBoer’s response to the text, followed by the full in .pdf

“Initially, I get a sense, more than a color with ‘blue’ and its an easy suggestion to be that of ‘depression,’ but if we allow ‘blue’ to stand, as a color we move into this space of a ‘blindfold’ of the avoidance of sight. Yet, the avoidance also acts as a ‘right’ (as in the right to be something) altering the ‘blindfold’ as a chain worn over the eyes, or the body. I like ‘they’ve/splintered though I was wanting/desiring to be there as a part,’ quite a bit, as in the way it breaks apart, streaming like colored ribbon in a parade, or that tightness that shrieks to the point of lack, to the desire that registers as a need. There is this wonderful, pivot that happens in the space between ‘stanzas’ or whatever it is we are to call it these days. This goes toward the ‘access’ the sun has to response, to dictate the way in which ‘they’ ‘people’ ride next to one another.”

Nicholas DeBoer’s Response to Geoffrey Olsen download