First edition, from a poet's collection
OLSON, Charles. Mayan Letters. [N.p.]: The Diver's Press. 1953 [i.e. 1954].
8vo. Original folded card wraps with blue title and lettering on spine; cover illustrations to front and rear covers designed in Palma de Mallorca; pp. [2] 5-89, [i]; slightly chipped at spine ends with tears at top edge of spine; 1 rear flap is missing and 1 is loose, slight seperation from the hinge, otherwise very good.
First edition, edited and published by Robert Creeley who owned Divers Press in 1953-55; this copy with the ownership signature of Ron Loewinshon, a poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance who was heavily influenced by Olson.
Charles Olsen did not consider himself a poet or a writer but rather an "archeologist of morning" and was a figure that united his predecessors such as Ezra Pound with a new generation of avant-garde poetry such as The Black Mountian School and the Beat Generation. In 1950 he would publish his influential essay, 'Projective Verse' where he pursued the idea that the writing of poetry should always serve to be a relfection of the poets breath. Subsequently, Olson was stubborn in his preference to write on a typewriter believing it perfectly reflected the musical lilt of the poets verse, "For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.".
Mayan Letters compiles a series of letters written by Olson from Mexico to the poet Robert Creeley, who writes in this editions Preface, "I heard from him regularly, and so was witness to one of the most incisive experiences ever recorded"…
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