Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Charles Olson & "Ismaeli muslimism"



This rather remarkable piece is Charles Olson's "Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul" (1968) as it appears in Rothenberg & Joris, Poems for the Millennium Vol 2, 410-11. Olson's entire "plan" was published as A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul, Buffalo: Institute of Further Studies, 1968. 22 pp. On the left hand page we find "Ismaeli muslimism" and "the Norse & the Arabs". We know that Olson had read Corbin's "Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism" (in English in 1957) by October 1961 when he wrote "Maximus, at the Harbor." By 1968 when this piece was composed he had also read Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (in English in 1960) which he bought in Buffalo in 1965.

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