The American poet Charles Olson repeatedly referred to phenomenology in his poetological essays and notes. This article traces Olson’s idiosyncratic conception of a phenomenological method and practice, focusing especially on the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and then attempts to elucidate Olson’s poetics more distinctly against the background of Edmund Husserl’s reflections on the nature of words in the Logische Untersuchungen. Echoing Merleau-Ponty, Olson highlights that in the moment of a poem’s composition the objects of attention are words. He is especially interested in how words, understood as physical entities, are posited and interact amongst themselves and with a perceiving subject during the writing process. On the one hand, Olson celebrates what Husserl considers a subordinate aspect of words, their “sinnliche Gegenständlichkeit” as “in die Welt hineingesetzte Realitäten.” For Olson, it is precisely the sensory experience of words that accounts for “poeticness.” On the other hand, Olson also thinks beyond the material qualities of words. Husserl’s notion of “Wort-Leib” (as opposed to Wortkörper) is revealing for a negotiation of Olson’s attempt to grasp what makes the “Aktualität der Setzung” possible in the act of positing.