Letters to Myself

What must be kept is the experience of encountering these things. The how we got to reading this stuff -- even if it were merely following the cue or off-hand remark or a footnote smuggled into a commentary on something else.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

I remember HIM -- not Olson of course -- but little impy HIM -- batik shirts and open toe sandels, hair curling and glasses immense. Twiddling tabacco. smoking out the window. Always talking about Projective Verse and de-territorializing machines. Turned onto a huge BIG BOOK by the throwaway remarks of a mad Irish man.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Dominating the cover -- a giant of a man. Hand reaching to his lips. Cigarette poised for a BREATH of the noxious weed. Old man now. But still a big man -- powerfully built.

Other Books -- Call Me Ishmael -- a condensed study a real densely packed study of Melville, his material world and what made the WHALE.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Sprawls. Is too large to carry or read unobstrusively. Perhaps that's what THIS reading is supposed to be. Utterly large, utterly performed.

Letter One -- I Maximus to You

I can only make out the LOCAL -- the Birds build with straw -- as a poem is built with syllables. One tiny bit at a time. But the Local is smeared in the excesses of a consumerist age. Advertisements are the noise. The Local is the National is the Cultural:

(o Gloucester-man,
weave
your birds and fingers
new, your roof-tops,
clean shit upon racks
sunned on American
braid
with others like you, such
extricable surface
as faun and oral,
satyr lesbos vase

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
( MP 8)

To braid -- is not to weave. A braid retains the complexity of each strand, doesn't dissociate the MATTER into particular atoms. A ROUGH putting together, holding together -- a putting together where the mismatch or the texture is the pattern. So with the world / the universe(!), he writes -- the local.