the equivalent proportion | Charles Olson's Mayan Letters

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.

out of context | Susan Howe's Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker

With a slight shift, the replacement of the demonstrative "this" with the indefinite "a" in reference to the 1996 collection it was originally commissioned for,¹ Susan Howe begins the second version of her essay "Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker," recently published by New Directions as the first in its Poetry Pamphlet Series. We read the essay now, of course, in light of Marker's death.²

Also, however, as an elegy for her first husband David von Schlegell, who died in 1992, we read "Sorting Facts" in the context of her most recent book of poetry, That This (New Directions, 2010), a work written in memory of her second husband, Peter H. Hare, who died in 2008. Even the latter's title registers the temporal shift signalled by the republication of the essay, as That, at a distance, in the past, becomes This, near at hand, present again.

Halfway through "Sorting Factings," Howe reflects on Andrei Tarkovsky's struggle to define the nature of his film Mirror (1975):

The constantly changing quality of this work in progress confirmed his feeling that scenario is fragile and constantly changes with the material as well as with qualities individual actors bring to it. (32)

What enabled Tarkovsky to finish the film to his satisfaction was the insertion of newsreel footage (of Soviet soldiers crossing Lake Sivash in 1943) into the middle of what otherwise had seemed mere lyrical autobiography. Howe works by a similar method in That This, in which the 18th century diary entries of Hannah Edwards, sister of the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, serve as the enabling document that allows her space in which to work through the death of her husband. Marker's films, specifically La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), along with those of other filmmakers, serve the same purpose in "Sorting Facts." Each of these works gives the impression of having been created under a great pressure of silence, as though, were it not for the documents that enable them, they might never have been.

In an 1994 interview with Lynn Keller,³ Howe remarks that since the death of her husband she had been unable to write poetry, but was working on an essay of film criticism, what would go on to be published as "Sorting Facts." The essay served, then, as a way "to document," as she writes in the essay itself, "his life and work" at a time that his absence made it impossible to write poems. The truly breathtaking moments in the essay occur when the surface of the discourse falters or opens onto what typically might be considered poetry. The line between the two becomes unclear, as though the one were clearing the ground for the other.

Overcoming the pressure of silence was, however, nothing new to Howe's practice. One very interesting aspect of her initial shift in the late 1960s from a purely visual to a more verbal form of art, as she explains in the Keller interview, was her fear of writing sentences: "I was scared to begin writing sentences. I'm not sure why" (5). She situates this shift at a time when she had begun to read Charles Olson and felt a need to move beyond the word lists that had been occupying her. Howe, in the same interview, further reflects on the element of fear in writing sentences, the basic component of prose, and therefore of the essay:

Writing an essay, I want to say something specific. I can't figure out how to say it. I'm very nervous about my scholarship; I'm very anxious to be scholarly correct.... Then there is sound. The power of sound never changes between poetry and essays.... So the essays are accoustically charged just as poems are, but they originate more from fear, from a feeling of needing to write or say something but having no idea how to say it. They are stutters. (26-27)

And stutters lead back to fragmentation, back, that is, to poetry, because, for Howe, poetry seems based not simply on the line but on the fragment, fundamentally precise and suggestive, which, in its openness, allows for a kind of freedom. As Howe says recently in an interview for the Paris Review about her process of scanning and collaging juxtapositions of fragments from Hannah Edwards's diary entries:

As I moved between computer screen, printer, and copier, scissoring and reattaching words and scraps of letters, I thought, I've never gone as far or felt as free. (8)

Despite her move in the 1980s into textual criticism with My Emily Dickinson, which led her eventually to the film criticism of "Sorting Facts," the stray fragment of text or piece of paper still seems for Howe the essence of her practice, what, with anxious necessity, she moves from, and, with renewed freedom, returns to.

¹ The original essay begins: "I was asked to contribute to this collection of essays because of a book I once wrote about Emily Dickinson's poetry." The pamphlet: "I was originally asked to contribute an essay for a collection called Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, edited by Charles Warren, with an Introduction by Stanley Cavell, because of a book I once wrote about Emily Dickinson's poetry." This change is remarkably minor, but interesting, I think, for how the essay is raised into its own space out of the previous context of the collection.

² Rebecca Ariel Porte, for instance, has written a review in the LA Review of Books that focuses as much on Marker as on Howe. [available here]

³ Contemporary Literature, vol 36, no. 1, spring 1995, 1-34.

⁴ Interview by Maureen McLane, no. 203, winter 2012. [available here]