If life be time that here is spent / And time on earth be cast away / Who so his time hath here misspent / Hath hasten’d his own dying day. / So it doth prove a killing crime / To massacre our living time.
If doing naught be like to death, / Of him that doth chameleon-wise / Take only pains to draw his breath, / The passers by may pasquilize, / Not here he lives: but here he dies.
“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?”
Charles Olson | “Projective Verse”