in cold hell

There’s something about Charles Olson’s In Cold Hell, in Thicket that feels uncomfortably familiar, like stepping into a dense forest where every direction looks the same but somehow promises something different. For me, this poem isn’t just a piece of writing—it’s a mirror held up to the way I experience chaos, place, and selfhood. Olson doesn’t give you a map or a compass; instead, he drops you into the thicket and dares you to find your own way out.

Life often feels like Olson’s “cold hell.” It’s jagged, disorienting, and full of moments where the ground feels not only unstable but downright abstract, as he so aptly puts it. That phrase—“how abstract…the ground is under them”—is haunting. It perfectly captures the struggle to find one’s footing in a world that doesn’t come with clear instructions.

Olson’s thicket isn’t just a metaphor for the messy stuff of existence; it’s an invitation to wrestle with it. It’s about being fully present in the disarray, even when it feels easier to retreat. That’s the part I keep circling back to: the insistence on staying, observing, and confronting.

For Olson, chaos isn’t a pit to escape; it’s a landscape to navigate. His thicket is tangled and hostile, yes, but it’s also alive with possibility. That perspective resonates deeply with me, especially as someone who gravitates toward chaos magick, personal mythology, and the ever-shifting terrain of meaning. Chaos is generative. It forces you to adapt, to create, to find patterns—or maybe to unlearn the need for patterns altogether.

Reading Olson feels like being reminded that this very mess, this “cold hell,” is where transformation happens. It’s where we grow. But it’s also exhausting. The poet doesn’t shy away from that, either. Olson’s words taste bitter, like paper, and his lines break apart under the weight of their own energy. This isn’t a tidy poem; it’s sprawling, raw, and alive, much like the world it describes.

One of Olson’s gifts is his ability to tie identity to geography. For him, place isn’t just where you are; it’s part of who you are. The thicket is as much an internal state as it is an external one. I think about this a lot in my own work, especially when I explore psychogeography or take those long, meandering walks where the outer world seems to sync up with the inner.

In Olson’s world, place pushes back. It doesn’t offer comfort or clarity; it resists, entangles, and even fights. But that resistance is the point. It’s a reminder that understanding—of self, of the world—doesn’t come easy. It’s something you earn through engagement, through wrestling with the thicket and the cold hell beneath your feet.

I’ve always felt that Olson’s vision of the poet as an active participant, not just an observer, aligns with how I approach my own creative practice. Writing, for me, isn’t about standing apart and commenting from a distance. It’s about stepping into the mess, getting tangled up, and then finding a way to articulate what I’ve experienced.

Olson captures this beautifully when he writes about the insufficiency of words—how they can feel like “paper” in the face of everything that demands to be expressed. But he keeps going, keeps writing, and in doing so, he creates something vital. That’s the lesson I take from him: even when words feel inadequate, the act of trying to shape them into meaning is itself a kind of triumph.

One of the things I love most about Olson is how his poetry feels alive. His lines breathe. They expand and contract, mirroring the rhythm of thought and emotion. There’s a physicality to his writing that pulls you in and makes you feel like you’re not just reading the poem but moving through it.

That physicality reminds me to pay attention to my own rhythms—not just in writing but in life. When things feel chaotic, it’s easy to forget to breathe, to lose the thread of connection between body and mind. Olson’s poetry, with its sprawling lines and abrupt breaks, is a kind of embodied practice. It’s messy and imperfect, but it moves, and that movement is its own kind of beauty.

If In Cold Hell, in Thicket offers anything, it’s permission to embrace the struggle. Olson doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulty of being—he lays it bare. But he also shows us that the thicket, the chaos, the cold hell, are all places of profound potential. They’re where we confront the raw material of existence and, if we’re brave enough, transform it into something meaningful.

For me, that’s the gift of Olson’s work. It doesn’t pretend to have answers, but it invites us into the process of questioning, grappling, and creating. It reminds us that the act of wrestling with the world, with ourselves, is where the real work—and the real magic—happens.

So here’s to the thicket. To the cold hell. To the tangled, messy, generative chaos of life. May we keep moving through it, breath by breath, step by step, word by word.