Thursday, March 7, 2013

from Charles Olson, Lerme, Mexico, March 7, 1951-- "spanish is mighty huge, for me"


The poet Charles Olson had been full of questions about Murray and Rosa's life in Mexico in the '40s, and had talked for years about a trip. In 1951 he and Connie went to the village of Lerma, just south of Campeche on theYucatรกn Peninsula. Charles poured himself into Mayan archeology, both physical and metaphysical, writing to his friend Robert Creeley that
i take it, a Sumer poem or Maya glyph is more pertinent to our purposes than anything else, because each of these people & their workers had forms which unfolded directly from content... "Mayan Letters, A Charles Olson Reader," p. 101
In writing to Rosa and Murray, who did not feel competent to have opinions on modernist poetry, he wrote more about places and people. 

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