As the activating
presence behind The Mayan Letters
(Divers Press, 1953), Robert Creeley comes readily to mind as the person most
intimately involved in the working life of Charles Olson during the nearly six
months that Olson lived on the Yucatán Peninsula in 1951. Olson's
correspondence with Creeley and others, along with his other writing of the
time, reveal, however, a much more complex network of association and
assistance. Or collaboration, as Olson terms it with regard to the graphic
artist Hipolito Sanchez in a proposal he wrote that May in hopes of securing
funds to continue fieldwork toward a study of the Mayan glyphs.1
Olson had met Sanchez
in February, about a month after his arrival. Sanchez, working at the time at
the museum in Campeche, had recently produced, as Olson relates in the
proposal, "a collection of 115 pen-and-ink drawings completely and
brilliantly recording all the stone inscriptions" (98) at the
archaeological site of Copán, in Honduras. Olson meant to conduct his own field
study at a number of sites and publish the results, complete with illustrations
by Sanchez, as a book to be titled "The Art of the Language of Mayan
Glyphs."
While the project
never materialized, the effect of the drawings on Olson is palpable. In the
proposal he praises them for how "they preserve the very quality of the
carving of the stone," restoring the design of the glyphs, otherwise long
since "weathered and broken" (98). He portrays Sanchez's work as a
"perfect fit" for his own, and Sanchez as
a man of great plastic feeling and skill who was
already at a great work, recording the glyphs in so sharp a way that one could
feel and read them as freshly as they must been the day the came from the
sculptors' hands. (98)
To work with the same
disposition as those sculptors was certainly Olson's ambition, to live like the
ancient Mayans who were, as he wrote to Creeley in late March, "worth
remembering because they were hot for the world they lived in & hot to get
it down by way of language" (56-57).2
If Sanchez presented
the original face of the glyphs, it became Cid Corman's responsibility to
accurately portray Olson's own poems. Beginning in October 1950 Corman and
Olson were in correspondence about the publication of the first issue of
Corman's new magazine Origin.3
Corman had initially granted him the first forty, extended later to fifty,
pages of the issue for his own work. As revealed in his letters to Corman,
Olson was extremely anxious to see proofs of the poems. In a letter dated
"March 22?" (he seems not to have been sure himself), he writes:
you haven't sd anything abt proofs—and it begins to
get close to April 15. Is it
hopeless? If so, please, go over all
olson with someone, will you? that is,
watch carefully for (1) the spacing, that, it keeps the same proportions I get
fr this machine (print or varitype space is different, and it is the feeling of
the equivalent proportion that i am after) (39-40)
"The feeling of
the equivalent proportion": this is very close to the language Olson uses
to characterize the design of the glyphs. As on April 1, he writes Creeley:
What continues to hold me, is, the tremendous levy on
all objects as they present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world. And
the proportion, the distribution of weight given same parts of all, seems,
exceptionally, distributed & accurate ... (66)
The typewriter here
takes the place of the sculptors' tools, making Corman's proofs equivalent in
Olson's mind to Sanchez's drawings.
And he wanted them to
be published, the poems and the glyphs, side by side, or least one after the
other. In Olson's previous letter to Corman, dated March 12, after asking after
the proofs he immediately raises "another idea, for future no.,"
explaining how he met Sanchez and the significance of his drawings:
... Now I don't know how you are
going to be set up for repros, ahead. But keep in mind
that, if any such thing becomes possible, no more
beautiful and interesting presentation of the force of
this language-design which is called Maya can be
gotten
than Sanchez's unpublished
drawings. (38)
Later that month, in a
letter dated March 28, as Corman was preparing the first issue of Origin and Olson continued to look over
the drawings with Sanchez, it all seemed to coordinate into one system in
Olson's mind:
The more it unfolds under hand, the more I think you
have the hottest of hot ideas for an auxiliary dramatization of ORIGIN's force
in contemporary culture: and to
dramatize it by way of GLYPHS, fr the oldest and purest origin on this continent, this hemisphere! WOW.... (41)
Olson would take, or
levy, exact—breathe in, almost—or touch, what he could of the glyphs as they
existed in stone, and on paper, and from, as he wrote Creeley the day before,
on March 27, "being here where that life was that i pick up on same"
(56-57).
All of which altered
his verse. As perhaps he had hoped it would. And it is to his own poems in June
that he returned after the "straight suffering" of the proposal.4
He seems to have been after some other equivalent for poetry, and it is in the
content (or really the form, as he doesn't seem to have actually understood the
content) of the glyphs that he found it. As he wrote Creeley on March 15,
"it's hieroglyphs, which are the real pay-off, the inside stuff, for me
... the intimate art" (50). And again, later that month, on the 20th:
Here is the most abstract and formal deal of all the
things this people dealt out—and yet, to my taste, it is precisely as intimate
as verse is. Is, in fact, verse. Is their verse. And comes into existence,
obeys the same laws that, the coming into existence, the persisting of verse,
does. (43)
A different equivalent
for poetry, and along with it a different proportion for the human in relation
to all other "objects" of existence, each with its own place in the
larger ecological field.
image:
from The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, Vol. 4,
ed. George F. Butterick (Black Sparrow Press, 1982).
1 Excerpts from the proposal
were first published in Alcheringa 5,
spring-summer 1973, as "Proposal (1951): 'The Art of the Language of Mayan
Glyphs'."[available here]
2 All page numbers for letters
to Creeley refer to the later, English edition of the Mayan Letters (Jonathan Cape, 1968).
3 The letters are collected in Letters for Origin: 1950-1960, ed.
Albert Glover (Paragon House, 1969).
4 This from a letter to Corman,
dated May 28, once Olson had finished the proposal:
truth is, though it has been straight suffering,
because it is both too early & too late to do it, yet, in the doing, I have
straightened out several problems of glyph procedure, & of application of
my aesthetic generally (55).
As
this passage suggests, Olson was deeply ambivalent about writing the proposal. It
helped him clarify matters of procedure and application, as he states, but he
also felt something vital was also being kept at bay in the straightening
confines of the discursive style. Earlier in the month, in a letter to Corman
dated May 18, he writes:
... god help me there is nothing harder in this life
for me to do than to make such statements—and now, the problem is even greater
than it ever was, simply because my own prose ways (say, G & C) have to be
broken back to the universe of discourse, and that, is unbearable // —so night
& day i try and try to state the thing, and it boggles, is not // what i
want ... (54).
It's
curious that to be there, or really, to return to, later that fall, the place
where he meant to "dispose of argument" and logic, to get "far
beyond them" and return to an experience of "direct perception,"
he had to spend nearly a month writing such a proposal (54). Even at the time
of these two letters, not long before he would leave for the summer session at
Black Mountain College, he writes to Corman that "to this very day I have
not broken beyond to anything like a sustained life in the universe beyond the
universe of discourse" (54). From the energy that still carries through
the Mayan Letters (a selection from
which, not without coincidence, the month of May is entirely absent), it's
rather hard to believe.
