review of
Charles Olson's Mayan Letters
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 13, 2017

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/573193-charles-olson

I've written before that Olson probably came to my notice b/c Ed Sanders used one of his poems as lyrics for a Fugs song. Since then, I've probably very sparsely read a poem here &/or an excerpt there but nothing really substantially Olson related until I read Charles Stein's The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum - The poetic cosmology of Charles Olson & his use of the writings of C. G. Jung. In my review of that I wrote:

"I have the utmost respect for scholarly works - even those on subjects I'm not necessarily that interested in. IF SOMEONE'S GOING TO TAKE THE TROUBLE TO WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAS DEEP CONTENT, ONE CAN ONLY HOPE THAT SOMEONE'S GOING TO WRITE ABOUT IT DEEPLY - & that's certainly the case here. This is no half-assed study, Stein truly cares about the subject & takes us places w/ it that perhaps no-one else wd - & that makes this a valuable bk.

"W/ that sd, reading this didn't necessarily make me any more interested in Olson or Jung than I already was. In fact, it firmly established for me that Olson is a type of poet for whom I have very little entry point." - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1136832.The_Secret_of_the_Black_Chrysanthemum

I DID enjoy reading this. I chose it b/c I've been doing language research for my 'opera', Endangered Languages, Endangered Cultures, Endangered Ideas (you can some idea of the progress of the software for that here: https://youtu.be/fiAVrCNtKvQ ). It wasn't really any use for my research but I'm glad I read it.

The preface was written by the well-known poet Robert Creeley to whom these "Mayan Letters" were directed: "Some time towards the end of 1950, it was in December I think, but the letter isn't dated, I heard that Charles Olson was off to the Yucatan." (p 5)

Olson as a person comes across, perhaps, a bit more in this than he might in a poem. Writing about caring for a bird that'd been injured by vicious rock-throwing boys, I can relate:

"So I reached down and raised the right wing up to the top of the wall. Then the left. And, itself, it pulled its body up, perched for an instant, and swung off, off and up, into the sky, god help us, up and out over the sea, higher and higher, and, not like the others but working its wings in shorter, quicker strokes, it pulled off and off, out over the shrimp ship moored out in the deeper water, inside the bar, from which it swing inland again, and, as I watched it a good five minutes, kept turning more an more to the west, into the sun, until that peculiar movement of the wings began to give way to the more usual flight of a chii-mi." (pp 10-11)

Helping out an injured bird is the kind of thing that's going to make me like someone &, yes, Olson comes across as just my kind of fellow: questioning authority & getting his ass out there in the world to try to have his own perceptions of it instead of the prepackaged ones.

"I am the one who is arguing that the correct way to come to an estimate of that dense & total thing is not, again, to measure the walls of a huge city but to get down, before it is too late, on a flat thing called a map, as complete a survey as possible of all, all present ruins, small as most of them are.

"They'll cry, these fat and supported characters: 'Oh, they are all over the place, these, ruins!' Which is quite, quite the big and astounding fact - so much so are they all over the place that Sanchez & Co., Campeche, Mex., is not the only sand and gravel company in business: already, in this walking area from this house, I have come to learn of four sites – and of some size more than 'small' – which have already been reduced to white cement in bags!" - pp 14-15

Olson's disgust w/ the reduction of ruins to building materials that eradicate the history of the culture the ruins potentially contain cd be seen as a creative reuse in wch the history isn't perceived as of much value as the present. Olson does have an appreciation for creative reuse of contemporary items:

"You will imagine, knowing my bias toward just such close use of things, how much all these people make sense to me (coca-cola tops are the boys' tiddley-winks; the valves of bicycle tubes, are toy guns; bottles are used an re-used, even sold, as cans are; old tires are the base foot-wear of this whole peninsula (the modern Maya sandal is, rope plus Goodyear); light is candle or kerosene, and one light to a house, even when it is a foco, for electricidad" - p 18

Olson's letters are predictably peppered w/ references to other poets, in this case to Ezra Pound:

"Ez's epic solves problem by his own ego: his single emotion breaks all down to his equals or inferiors (so far as I can see only two, possibly, are admitted, by him, to be his betters – Confucius, & Dante. Which assumption, that there are intelligent men whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time, and

"thus creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply with the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air" - pp 26-27

I once performed on video a text of mine written esp for George Quasha's "Poetry Is" project in wch I sd:

"Poetry is, when unquestioned, just another religion
to be exalted as a proxy for the self.

"Poetry is a way of saying something vague while deluding oneself
as being rigorous.

"Poetry is something that sets off my Bullshit Detector.

"Poetry is something that I enjoy most when poets make
the least claims for it."

I don't think George will ever use the footage. His series seems to prefer statements by people who use poetry as "a way of saying something vague while deluding" themselves "as being rigorous." I, as a matter of fact, currently love poetry (sortof) but I have no intention of coming inside it as if it can become pregnant in the process. Whether Pound "destroys historical time" or whether he's "turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air" is open to debate. That strikes me as the kind of thing that one poet writes to another in order to glorify the myth of the potentials of a shared profession. To again quote from my "Is Is" txt:

"Myth is alright as long as no-one believes it."

but maybe I'm just a spoil-sport.. William Carlos Williams's Paterson, NJ, makes it in here too:

"but such blueberry America as Bill presents (Jersey dump-smoke covering same) also WENT (that is, Bill, with all respect, don't know fr nothing abt what a city is)" - p 30

Now maybe Olson never intended these letters for publication, maybe this snarky comment about Williams cd've been considerably broadened into a critique. Regardless, Williams's Paterson was published in 5 volumes & I doubt that it was all hot air so maybe he at least knew something about Paterson, a city, at least.

Olson puts his money where his critical mouth is & goes off to practice some amateur archeology when he can endure the heat:

"christamiexcited, getting that load off my heart, to you, thursday, did a trick. for it pulled out, that afternoon, down the road AND BROKE THRU–

"hit a real spot, which had spotted fr bus, and which same, apparently, untouched: Con & I came back with bags of sherds & little heads & feet – all lovely things

"then, yesterday, alone, hit further south, and smash, dug out my 1st hieroglyphic stone! plus two possible stela (tho, no crowbar, so no proof)" - p 37

Predictably, I like Olson's idiosyncratic expressiveness: "christamiexcited" instead of "Christ! Am I excited!", "fr" instead of "from" & "tho" instead of "though". Fortunately for him, he was writing using a typewriter - there was no spellcheck to fight him every step of the way. He cd actually write the way he wanted to w/o having to constantly undo 'corrections' that actually represent the limited intelligence of the app programmers. In general, I like his observations too:

"It's grass that is the big enemy of maize, the only real one, for they burn off the bush, before they plant. But grass keeps coming in. And in the old days, they were able to stand it off – for as long as seven years (the maximum life of a milpa) – by weeding out the grass by hand. But then came the machete. And with it, the victory of the grass in two years. For ever since that iron, the natives cut the grass, and thus, without having thought about it, spread the weed-seed, so that the whole milpa is choked, quickly choked, and gone, forever, for use for, maize (grass is so tough it doesn't even let bush or forest grow again!)" - p 39

In general, Olson convinces me he's a scholar so I'm interested in his forays into Mayan linguistics:

"Example: the big baby I spotted yesterday means CHUNCAN means TRUNK OF THE SKY – and by god, the pyramid is so sharp and high it is just that, and most beautiful, high over the sea and the land (more like a watch-tower than anything templish) ..." - p 38

"CHUN-CAN, by the way, which I told you was TRUNK OF THE SKY, is – says Martínez not that (which is what the Seybanos told me) but TRUNK OF THE SERPENT. He says, to be the 1st, it would have to be CHUN-CAAN. (Which of course it may have been.)" - p 44

"One curious this is, that the place of origin (in the legends) keeps coming up as TULE (also Tula, Tullan, Tulapan). And it is sd to be the place where he, 'the great father-priest,' was"

[..]

"But this TULE us curious in other ways (not to mention the fact that, in one people's version it is on the other side of the ocean to the east, & in another, to the west): the wildest of all is, what you will remember, that ultima Thule, was the outermost reach of the world to the ancients, was, to the Greeks. Thoule, or Thyle. In the light of Waddell, I should like to know (or Berard, as well as Waddell, for that matter) if that word goes back behind the Greeks to the Phoenicians, Cretans, Sumerians." - p 46

"(Hippolito, for ex., was telling Con and me – with considerable excitement – about a Lacondon Indian who was his & Stromsvik's guide when they were at Bonampak three yrs ago (these Lacandones are an isolated tribe in Chiapas, near the Guatemala border, who have stayed in a state of arrestment apparently equal to the period of the Maya before the cultivation of maize – which goes back, maybe, 3 millennia before Christ, or , into that area of time which coincides with the opening out of the Persian and Mediterranean world by the Sumerians.)" - p 47

I have a special interest in the Lacadone, about whom I know next to nothing, b/c I read a short mention of them in what might be issue 2 of High Frontiers magazine (1985) in wch the Lacadone are described as highly anti-authoritarian. I even had a self-inking rubber stamp made using brown ink that reads: "bin in tsikbal yete wes - lacadone I'm going to talk to the president". Talking to the president means taking a shit & a 'pencil for the president' means a corncob for wiping one's ass.

"But it's hieroglyphs, which are the real pay-off, the inside stuff, for me. And that's not in situ, that is, you can't see them – why Sánchez is so very much the value, for me, here (he came to dinner Monday night, and by god if he doesn't come in with the whole set of little books published in Campeche with his drawings of same, damndest sweetest present, and, too much, as you'd say, too much ..." - p 50

It'd be interesting to see a much larger edition of this bk w/ pictures of things that Olson refers to. I have to wonder about at least one minor detail of this edition: Olson supposedly typed (& hand-wrote) these letters. Unless he was using a Selectric typewriter w/ replaceable font balls I doubt that his typewriter had italics. Therefore, italicized words like "see" in the above may've been hand-written in for emphasis (that strikes me as unlikely but then I don't know Olson's letters so it might be something he did) OR a liberty in printing has been taken or?

In general, I found this bk fascinating enuf - whether it's Olson's attempt to follow the Mayan calendar:

"monday, mars (Or, as I figure it comes out, on the Maya calendar: CEH, day AKBAL (Ceh meaning the New Fire Ceremony, Instituted by Kukulkan, 1159 AD or c." - p 52

or his description of cleaning w/ shell fragments:

"...yesterday was a bitch, & beautiful : we took 7 A.M. bus down coast, to a glyph, then set off up the road back, walking some 8 kilometres to a place on coast called Sihoplaya, which same beach is only equalled by Oregon coast : we stripped, and washed each other with the sand (not sand, but minute fragments of shells)" - p 52

or his recounting of a myth:

"moon is girl, living with grandfather, weaving, sun is not yet sun, is a young man full of himself, who wants this girl, & poses as great hunter, to win her first looking. to come closer he borrows the nature of hummingbird, but, while drinking honey out of teh tobacco flowers near her house, grandpa pings him with a clay shot fr blowgun. moon picks sun-bird to bosom, then to room, then sun to consciousness, then sun to human shape, and business! he persuades her to elope. but g-pop gets rain to toss bolts at pair fleeing in canoe : sun converts to turtle and escapes, but moon, trying on crab shell, is not protected enough & is killed." - p 55

or his comments on the language:

"what i want to get to, with you, is, at the nature of this language, of which the glyphs are the most beautiful expression (much more beautiful, by the way, than the codices, which are late & Mexican (pictographic, not, as were the Maya, both ideographic & phonetic) and much more beautiful due to the limits of stone plus the limits of language)" - p 58

"Well, said, it doesn't seem to say much. But i smell it as important, tho, just yet, i can't demonstrate (it opens up, the fluency of, the glyphs, for me : which is what i have felt in them since that first day i saw them through Sánchez's drawings. and leads straight on in to the heart of their meaning & design as language, not, as astrological pictographs

"the distinction is, that it is necessary to separate the glyphs from the use they were put to, that is, no argument, that the major use was, to record in stone the investigations by the learned of time & planets, but – because the stone has stayed, while another use – for books, painted or written with a brush – has mostly disappeared, there is not reason not to come in quite fresh from the other end, and see the whole business of glyphs as, 1st, language, and, afterward, uses of same

"and it is the fact that the glyphs were the alphabet of the books that puts the whole thing back to the spoken language. Or so it seems to me, this morning." - p 62

Olson suffers from gastro-intestinal & other illnesses that people from North America seem to be generally not immune to when they visit more tropical climates.

"Uxmal & Kabah

"(((found out, it's tick poisoning, which, I've had : you shld not be me, this morning, with my trunk wholly raised in sores, plus, fr the jail water, tourista, viz, GIs : up at 6 this morning))) ..." - p 70

UGH. In other words, there're more limits than just cultural ones. He has to be restricted by the environment & by his budget.

"Any one place requires, instantly, two to three days : that is, all one can do the first day, is to get there. For by that time the sun is too far up to do anything but sleep in some place out of the sun. So that evening, and the next morning, early, are the only work times. Which means, almost, the 3rd day, for return. All of which is too expensive for the likes of one sole adventurer as me!" - p 71

"LATE CLASSIC VAULT II TEPEXU"

[..]

"abandonment of site, even tho site still top shape!" - p 77

"As against the agronomy explanations of, the abandonment of, the southern cities. AVKidder argues, excellently, that it won't hold (either (1) that they maized-out, or (2) that they cut off so many zapote tress, they got erosion, & silted up their lakes into malaria swamps), simply because such sites as Quirigua (on the river Montagua, which, floods like the Nile, offsetting either of above explanation, obviously) and the Usumacinta sites (river, again : Piedras Negras, Palenque) were also deserted when, the other, inlands, were! Copan, likewise! which sits, even today, ready, for occupancy" - p 78

WHY?! I know so little about this part of the world. Olson's gotten me more interested. Contrarily, the poverty, I expect, but it's saddening, as usual.

"And by god none of them get enough to eat, even so. And I do not mean by gorging American comparisons. By minimums. 4 eggs, for example, for an omelet for a family of 7!" - p 81

Olson's full of 'unfettered' observations. Here's another example of one that I find pleasing:

"Con figures, the animals, can't any more resist Saturday night in town – paseo, Senor y Senora, pasanado? – than any of us can. Every Saturday night – and no other night, by god, if three goats don't come in and chew their way through it all! And precisely ma, pa, and little goat! Exactly like a Maya family in, from the farms, back of Quila!" - p 83

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/573193-charles-olson ( )