In message <[log in to unmask]>,
K.M. Sutherland <[log in to unmask]> writes
> You obviously feel very
>differently -- please do say why, this is something that I think could
>matter a great deal.
I was just checking, really, to see what you were getting at - I simply
wasn't sure. And have to say that I didn't see the programme on the
Mayans & haven't read Mayan Letters for about 25 years. You'd seemed to
be chastising Olson for not knowing all the things now known re the Maya
which ain't exactly fair & in any case would ignore Olson's specific
poetic/aesthetic slant. But obviously you're after bigger game. I'm
always a bit jumpy about the word 'dialectical' although it would have
been a great favourite with Humpty Dumpty; quite likely that Olson
didn't like to be contradicted but whether there is in some sense a
'dialectic' going on in his work as a whole & Maximus in particular
seems a big question. Myself I think there is but not sure that it's
fundamentally different from the archaic/modern dialectic implicit in &
maybe fuelling modernism from the start. Your view is obviously that
Olson's work is much more bound to US imperialism post-WWII. I don't
disagree with the fact of the latter: US use of Marshall Aid, the IMF &
gold stocks to weaken all currencies against the dollar plus rabidly
oppositional politics to create the walls of a new empire - all going on
while Olson was writing his letters to Creeley. But to see Maximus as a
new euhemerism transsubstantiating this into rejigged myth seems to me a
slightly simplistic - & non-dialectical? - view of life translated into
art - ?
--
Alan Halsey
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