The Perfume/Of Flowers

 The perfume

 of flowers! A haw

 drops such odour

 it stops me

 in the wall

 of its fall. Love

 arrests 

Lime-trees 

saturate

 the night. We walk

 in it 

On a path jonquils

 fill

 the air. Love

 is a scent

—Charles Olson 

 Charles Olson was an American poet whose theories, writings and teachings influenced generations of artists, beginning with his tenure running the legendary Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Before that, he worked with languages and in government and politics supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was offered the Cabinet post of Postmaster General in FDR’s last administration, but turned it down, and turned back to literature. He’d started out in school with a thesis on Herman Melville, resulting in his first book, Call Me Ismael. 

 Olson’s influence was most direct in the work of Robert Creeley, but he maintained lengthy correspondence with a number of other poets including Michael McClure. His opus is the American epic The Maximus Poems, often compared to Pound’s Cantos.

 In fact there are many poets whose best work is in long poems and sequences, so not appropriate for this space. I’ve occasionally used pieces of such poems here, and maybe I should more often, but there’s a fine line between selecting and wrecking someone else’s work.