The Empire of Neomemory

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener. 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 traveled 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.