Alan -- thanks for your post -- I wouldn't care to say whether or not
Olson liked to be contradicted by those he talked with, wrote to etc,
mostly because there's no need to: his writing just doesn't accomodate the
possibility of a useful and informative contradiction. Here and there (as
when in Maximus he rearguards himself against the likely accusation that
he's reaching back in nostalgia for some other Golden Age) he does pause
to justify himself, and so may tentatively have admitted a counterargument
in prospect at least; but these moments are rare and tend rather toward
dismissive bravura than to experiments in disagreement (qualifiers, not
hypothetical disqualifiers). The upshot just -has- to be mythic.
You say, " 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." -- I do consider this an important fact; but even
more so, the fact that he neither included any reference to this in his
work, nor considered at any structuring level how such a political and
economic climate could make his optimism seem extravagantly rhapsodic.
Furthermore, he says very explicitly and at several points that the
Americans of his day -- perhaps meaning only the Americans of his day who
were poets known to him and who expressed sympathy for his ideas -- were
actually the great primogenitors of a new world which would cut right back
through the Greeks to the Sumerians and bleach out the whole of 'socratic'
history. In the light of what you point out in your post about what was
actually happening at this point, and what -- very much more than Olson's
poetry -- has shaped our world -fundamentally-, this is surely a bizarre
kind of transcendental nationalism?
Though still I admire his work of course though as I say perplexed, k
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