The
Empire of Neomemory, by Heriberto Yépez
translated by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler & Brian Whitener
274 pages
“Olson
is part of the American dream, the dream of expansionism in all its
variants. It is with the purpose of understanding this empire that
I have written this book. Olson in and of himself does not interest
me; I am interested in his character as a microanalogy for decoding
the psychopoetics of Empire. Philosophy tries to comprehend reality
through a discussion of abstract concepts produced by floating masculine
heads (decapitalisms); in contrast, what I want to understand is the
present via concrete bodies, historical microanalysis via the hunt
for biosymbols. Using the text, I want to see through it to glimpse
the substructure and the superstructure.”
In 1951, Charles Olson set out to spend some time in Mexico. He was only there for five months and he didn’t learn much, but this time in Mexico would come to define all the poetry he was yet to write. Yépez begins with Olson in Mexico, with the possibility that he might be writing a study of Olson, a study of Olson’s Mexico-philia.
But what he writes instead is a breathtaking investigation of the relation between USAmerican poetry and Empire that careens idiosyncratically through the great men of empire—not just Olson, but those many other men who also travelled to Mexico, such as William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, D.H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, and Ray Bradbury.
This work is a dismantling of Olson, and of empire, and yet it is also clearly an inside job, a book that could only be written by someone who had spent hours thinking with and through—and beyond—Olson.
Available January, 2013.
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