By Sarah Montague
Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer and Greek modernist poet Constantine Cavafy were civil servants. T.S. Elliot was a banker. Adrienne Rich taught at the City College of New York. Wallace Stevens worked for a Hartford insurance company and composed on his way to work every morning.
This is by way of introducing Geoffrey Olsen, who is the Associate Director of Part-Time faculty affairs at Parsons, and also a poet.
Olsen’s trajectory included other New York City design schools including Pratt Institute and Cooper Union. At Parsons, his focus is art and design, and history and theory. He is responsible for annual staffing for the First Year program, which he estimates has the highest ratio of part-time faculty across the whole institute.
His role is multi-faceted:
“The main part of my job is happening right now, which is making sure we’re fulfilling base loads for all of our annual faculty.
And that means taking in the scheduling preferences of our annual part-time faculty, taking in their qualifications and just trying to get everyone a schedule for the whole year that fits within their preferences and fits with the needs of the school. Which is, as you can imagine, a pretty complicated puzzle.”
One part of which involves spreadsheets, and the other, professional matchmaking–
“making sure that people are paired up, as much as we can, with faculty they enjoy working with, and trying to find new partnerships.”
To help with this monumental task, a survey is sent out to the faculty whom Olsen help must place and pair up (he is scheduling through Spring 2026).
“asking whether they want to work with new people; if they want to work with the same people. So it’s integrating a lot of that into the scheduling, which can be a little challenging. A lot of faculty have longstanding partnerships, and we try to preserve those, if that’s if that’s what the faculty want.
And then there are cases where we’re bringing in new faculty. So we try to think who would be a good mentor–you know if there’s a Studio professor who’s been teaching for a long time, who might be fantastic at helping a new Integrative Seminar faculty member understand the bridge structure of the class, and help them to get up to speed and create something really great.”
For the uninitiated, Integrative Studio and Seminar First Year classes are taught in parallel, and connect by way of collaborative “Bridge” projects that recombine the material and text-based work in both classes. (Why do I know this? I have been a Seminar teacher for eight years and love this imaginative teaching/learning model.)
Olsen says the pedagogical aspect of the pairings is in the hands of the program coordinators, and he sees his job in part as making it easier for them to focus on that, while he is the pattern maker.
Another key concern of his is the first-year experience.
“It’s so important to have that solid basis because the faculty are working with students who are having their first higher educational experiences. For many of the students it’s their first time in New York City, and for some of them it’s the first time in the United States. So we are just trying to make sure they have a solid grounding.”
All of this seems incredibly important to the smooth running of things at Parsons, and the well-being of its students, but a very different world from that of a practicing poet.
I ask how that side of Olsen’s life emerged and developed. And the first thing I learn is that’s as much about community as it is about a solitary practice.
“I grew up in Northern Massachusetts, and I came to New York City [in 2007] because I wanted to be a poet. It’s really a global center for that. There are so many poets coming through, young poets, and poets who’ve been here a long time.”
Olsen gravitated to The Poetry Project in the Bowery, established in 1969 and still faithful to its original aims.
“The Poetry Project is an institution centering a kind of poetic experimentation. Always having a political rigor and a desire to transform the world that’s imbued the poetics. So that space has been really essential for me. It’s somewhere that brings in a lot of young poets and gives them opportunities to present their work. And also the real, true elders of the poetry community. It’s amazing to be able to hear them there, in the church space.”
The space, St. Mark’s Church, has been in existence since the 17th century and is considered New York’s oldest continuous site of Christian worship. But its location, at the center of the city’s counter culture, has also made it home to creatives.
Olsen mentions Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley and Akilah Oliver as three poets he admires and heard first at St. Marks.
He’s read there twice himself, in 2010, and then again in 2024.
“It was an amazing experience to come back as a more mature poet. I had a book come out last year, and so getting to present that was really special. The Poetry Project is space of seriousness in a way that I love: the audience is totally silent, listening with complete concentration. And it’s incredible to have that experience of knowing that not only are people listening, but that they’re listening with profound attention, like they’re really trying to go into the work itself.”
The work itself was Olsen’s first collection, Nerves Between Song.
It reflects the influence of some of the experimental poets who were most important to him as he was maturing, such as the English poet J.H. Prynne and the late Leslie Scalapino.
“Scalapino just has a way with language and understanding the possibility of language–almost as like a political medium–that I deeply admire.”
The poet Brenda Iijima is another favorite. An early friend and mentor, she runs the Portable Press @ Yo-yo Labs, and has recently published a series of poems of Olsen’s as part of her chapbook series.
I ask what distinguishes a chapbook from other kinds of publications, and what Olsen describes sounds pleasantly intimate and old-fashioned.
“A chapbook, right, is generally a labor of love. You know, one person making it, or a small collective. They run from generally 12 pages to 25 pages. So they’re a very contained format for poetry.
As a writer, creating a series or a work that is contained within that space, I think, is really exciting. There’s a there’s a sort of focus, or a way of you can kind of sustain a more concentrated tension over that that briefer duration.”
Olsen’s chapbook is called Neck Field, and took an unexpected shape.
He was preparing some work for Iijima when he had a bike accident.
“And then I started writing while recovering from that. It took me a month and a half to recover. So during that period I was writing all this work, and just kind of coalescing it into a chapbook. So there was something about the speed of putting it out while recovering—”
Olsen doesn’t say exactly what the “something” was, but the implication is that having to work quickly, under duress, created its own artistic challenge.
In any event, he sees it as celebrating his bond with Iijima “kind of culmination of our long mentorship and friendship.”
As you’ve probably gathered by now, Olsen sees poetry and poetic practice as a political statement; another reason why he finds chapbooks satisfying; they present a challenge to mass printing.
“They’re often beautiful visual objects. They’re almost always handcrafted, hand-stapled. They’re essentially zines. So much care goes into the printing and the covers. I always love that there’s an intimacy to them, right? They aren’t coming from a big publishing conglomerate. Ingram is not necessarily shipping you your chapbook.
Somebody put it in the mail. When I purchase a chapbook, someone in Madison, Wisconsin (for example) went to the post office, dropped this in the mail, and sent it to me. I think, these objects are the sustaining life of poetry, even as so many things are transformed. Like our communication systems or the breakdown of our shared infrastructure, or ChatGPT. And mailing gets more difficult because there’s this this disinvestment in our in our public services.”
But to Olsen, poetry is a form of infrastructure, and one of the oldest forms of “public service.”
“There will still be poetry readings where you’ll see poets present their work.”
And chapbooks are the physical extension of this culture.
The 17th century poet Andrew Marvel wrote in a poem called “The Definition of Love”
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Dispensing with the romantic context, we might still think of Olsen’s two worlds, the institutional one, dominated by spreadsheets and schedules, and the creative one, as lines that “though infinite, can never meet.”
But he wouldn’t agree.
“Guillaume Apollinaire was very important to me, so maybe that was what inspired me to start working with Excel.”
If you’re not familiar with his work, Apollinaire created physical constructs out of his poems, so that the way they were organized on the page mattered as much as the poetic language.
“I do think there is something about that connection–
there’s something about information, right? How we structure information and how we can kind of, we contain it in various systems
that does lend itself to thinking about poetry, right? Because I do think a lot about like, what does language do on an informational level? Right? How do we arrange sound? How do we arrange meaning in this sort of concentrated forms.
On some level that inspires me. That’s why my work tends to play much more with meaning that proliferates, and I tend to think of things as like branching structures. Like, a sentence isn’t going in a singular linear form. It’s radiating outward. It’s making new fractal expressions.”
Remember that the next time you get a memo from Geoffrey. And in the meantime, here’s an example of the poet, not the administrator.
