Spiritual Herbs Artemesia, Yarrow, Aloe

Artemisia

 Take artemisia, the generic name, while species have difference, they still share the traits. Only call it mugwort as a convenience. So first the blue grey color, then the scent of thujone, then the delicate fernlike stems and leaves, then the fact that it is everywhere, along every highway, in every fence row, and finally the cure.

The most dramatic cure was when  glass artist Jim Bowman presented one day at the door on Avenue D with his knee swollen all out of form. He said he'd been to an urgent care and it was in its third day. He was just visiting, not seeking a cure, but I went out in the alley, since it is everywhere, cut a bundle and cooked it in water till it was real strong. Then we sat him down and put the leaves on the knee covered by towels over and under and for the next hours poured the water over and over the knee. Maybe he drank some of it too. After that he took the rest home and did it some more. It was the next day maybe, or the day after when he showed up and the swelling was completely gone.

I have done this operation since with less dramatic occasions. Nowadays tennis players have so many swollen knees, but they all ice. This is not as effective. Somebody try artemisia on a tennis player and get back to us. I decided to find out why this worked. The results were published in Native Texans, but there is a physical principle. As a birthday present this year, having breakfast on the Rim, artemisia was growing everywhere. A few little sprouts stuck to wet paper towel we dropped and they came back into town. These were potted up, which coincided with the monsoon rains all week. Now it seems the shoots have already rooted. Great present!

Habitat: Between Raqqa and the Syro–Iraqi border the Euphrates flows through a steppe landscape. This steppe is characterised by white Artemisia herba-alba and Chenopodiaceae.

Yarrow

With milfoil the case is more complicated, it being such an ancient herb of use in function. Not that the I Ching is all that specific, and it's like reading Chuang Tzu, but no divination is useful in itself, despite the huge trade in fortune telling. It's harmful to know the future except in the case where it is a prediction of hope or deliverance from trouble such as Isaiah gave in the siege of Hezekiah by Sennacherib, something about the king will hear some news, which he did. He heard the angel killed a hundred eight five thousand Assyrians that night and Sennacherib was on his way home to Niveveh:. So Byron said:

the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

So it helps to have deliverance predicted. You will be a cured of cancer. So that aside, and maybe to revisit, to apply the color, odor, form, universality, good, the color is an exquisite yellow green, the odor is astringent and vaguely menthol, the form is a thousand leaves, milfoil, more finely divided ferns, the universality is everywhere (that sound redundant?). I put some once along a Creek decades ago and it flourished with the horsetail reeds. I took some from Texas and put it in a Sonoran desert border. It did good, but the seeds took wing and it is in other borders now. It is all over the Mogollon Rim. One is in the garden. Welcome, my friend! As to the good, I used to have weak lungs subject to bronchitis and chest colds. I took to yarrow teas, drinking and inhaling the aromas. It made me its friend. I like a friend with whom I can take a walk. There is again more to this. Is that in Native Texans too? I don't remember.

Aloe
I came to Phoenix for the aloe, saw pictures of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum outside Globe where they were all weather, knew in that instant I had to have aloes year round.

One time on the MoPac outside Austin a cyclist went down, helmet all dented, shirt ripped off, skin like a red rug. I approached him for the time,asked, how's it goin, but he wanted to go home. He bled all over the front seat. When we got to his house his wife burst into tears.

It must be the influence of the plants but I was feeling good that day so suggested he get in the bathtub! A little weird come to think of it.

So his wife and I washed off the gravel and dirt from the road burn and he took a percocet and lay down all red. My wife had gone to cut some aloes and brought a pile which I cut and put on the clean wounds. They should have been antiseptic and aloes are not proper treatment either, but we are in the field here, imagine third world, where the doc's hand is his MRI, or in the 19th century where maybe we put a leech on it, but anyway the guy fell asleep! All the shock wore off. His wife relaxed. The aloe sealed the wounds and he woke up in half an hour and called all his friends who then called the para medics who came in the midst of what was by then one cookin' party when we eased out and went on. Aloe! It's like a French greeting.

Color, odor, form, universality, good. Green of a certain sort is the loveliest color. Whether that's the yellow green of milfoil or the slight blue green of aloe is a nice question. With its yellow flowers though we're in the presence of majesty. The spikes don't smell, but the mucilage does, just slightly astringent. The spikes can get so large you can't pick them up, three feet and fat, and they will nick. When my friend Blessing was so sick after her MRI's and brain operations that could not cure the infection we put aloe on her wounds every day and she liked to eat it. It's not everywhere though, except you can take it with you. Dried aloe could be a new industry in the outback. Or go to the health food store and drink it, or smooth it on. Have you smoked it? Please call about that. As to the good hardly enough can be said. We have giant aloes in big clay pots, use one each Christmas as a Tree.

Yesterday I put a coffee mug in the microwave but it had some oil on the inside of the handle. When I took it out the inside of my middle finger felt funny, then began to burn. I iced it, but it really began to burn. Then three big white blisters appeared. Still burning I did what I'd not done in years, went out back and cut some aloe, macerated it in the skin and taped it on the finger. It stopped hurting in half an hour and never did again, but it looked like it did.

I realize aloe should be in the top of this list. I've surrounded my house with it, front, back and sides. This is the yellow flowered one, but I've got reds. Sally Parsons used to give her giant red aloes of Canyon Lake coffee grounds.

Tickletongue

How about the teaching of Tickletonge for low self esteem. Make your own human medicine, be delivered from high pain. Every leaf a possible anesthetic. The leaves have thorns to protect from predators flatulence, diarrhea, rheumatism sore throat. Poultice it on your throat. But just shut this is the piece that wonders what the Indians ate so much of that they needed so many purgatives for, for it is a shibboleth of herb lore that when the writer is done with list of cures, vermifuges, there, I said it!, we will find added that the Indians used it as a purgative. This came however at the end of Carroll’s remission. He immediately printed this in his next number. I soon wrote croton and prickly poppy sent them along because I wanted to see him alive and vital. He printed the croton, “loved your croton story, and was holding prickly poppy at his death. My prose was neither life giving or healing. He was generous in his comments about them so I just kept on writing even after he had died. “Hedeoma” is my epitaph for his life.

To show how harrowing real life can be, the very week I finished the whole ms in first draft I was visited by Sally W who had seen the Abbott articles and asked if I would help her write a book on Tx natives or give her information. One Sunday she just appeared in the driveway with this. I did not tell her of the ms, but did volunteer to gossip with her about the plants, but she already had a contract with Texas Monthly Press, just no book.




The Blue Plants

In the 50’s the red and blue states were just reversed. Red and blue implies a kind of opposition where both are made ignoble. The very lack of specificity is telling. Red. Blue. The most generic, least specific color stands for the most generic least specific politics. This unattractiveness  were it in nature would reduce fertility to nil, for color is fertility, the red bean is read, but why. Well it’s not red, its vermillion. And the brown seed is so in order that it will not be visible to birds, Life guards itself with color. The blue bean however is indigo, so imagine were there a vermillion and an indigo party, each positive, attractive

I went to the store to get a rue but got a lemon tagetes. These can prevent roof rats if planted thick enough. I got so many my neighbor couldn’t. Then I got the roof rat concession at nurseries. In cages they go for 10.

The full tree tobacco along the Rio Grande, overhangs rocky banks of sandy tributaries and washes. in the morning in bloom with its yellow trumpet flowers in morning hang down to shoulder height as you walk the wash, blue and gold with the color of the leaf, mystical sun and moon archetype of beauty. The leaves of the nicotania are blue like a eucalyptus but only to give the color. Their ovate, peaceful ambiance is not tame if it is not safe to go down to the river to view them, that being no fault of the desert or flood, but human forces that impact botany, so we relive the experience in memory. This is opposite its reputation as a trash tree of waste places such as the south slope of the El Conquistador tennis courts in Tucson.

To relive in memory these efficacious herbs, tree tobacco is actually billed among the Navajo as a ceremonial smoke, spurious, with the notion that the leaf in various forms lessens the physical symptom of addicts from opiates to tobacco, spurious again. Herbalists are not at fault for this so much as those who sell “vision inducing” experiences, so they call it a cure for heroin (!)  Whether or not you seek enlightenment this way, if enlightment exists it must come only in its denial. Knowledge is a young man’s business to which he is the foder of every shuckster with a line. Eat this, drink this, smoke this, do this and you will be saved from your average state. You can b e a god. So there is employment available for the few selling to the many.

but not alone for punditry or salesmanship. For them  that wants to turn prophet, or turn a profit, one oz $8,  114 grams of foliage $40. Seekers of auyhausca have found nicotania in the outer world only exists inside the high, high, high state of the herbal fire. If high is your desire than nothing compares with self sacrifice and self surrender with integrity and recognition of compassionate purpose. That will get you a position on the bottom rung.
When you have been once enlightened how do you get unenlightened except by putting aside all the techniques of divination and thought control? You don’t try to control your mind. You don’t seek to know the future. You open your eyes and ears, all your senses and proceed.
Used for fighting opiates the way the same blue plant, rue fights against premature orgasm You don’t see lines of this among the old however. It is billed as harvested by the hands of native people, another way of saying the world is not with us (wordsworth), when we consume with the native. Sometimes it is called Indian tobacco and claimed hallucinogenic. Why you would pay for this is your own business when every night of your life you get them for free.

It is also a vote against animal cunning, which turns out to b e less devious than we supposed, for the active ingredient Anabasine,  a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist , which can “curb the desire for the cigarette by fooling the body . Where else can you go to fool the body into thinking. Does the animal think? into thinking you skip the withdrawals you would normally feel with nicotine. In addition you can feel a sense of euphoria. I feel euphoria merely at reading this.

Common names and Synonyms: Siphaulax glabra, Nicotiana arborea.
Tree Tobacco, Mustard Tree, Wild Tobacco, Wildetabak, Mexican Tobacco, Coneton, San Juan Tree, Tobacco Plant, Akkue Musa, Cestrum, Corneton, Jantwak, Le Tabaque Glauque, Mahasatpurush, Masseyss, Palau Pazau, Satpurush, Tabaco Cimarron, Taba, Don Juan, Isil Pivat, Yellow Tree Tobacco.

orgDirectly imported from South America
Genus: Nicotiana
Varied Species: glauca
http://www.visionaryherbs.com/images/nicotiana_glauca_cured_tobacco.jpg

Abstract

Nicotiana glauca (Argentinean tree tobacco) is atypical within the genus Nicotiana, accumulating predominantly anabasine rather than nicotine and/or nornicotine as the main component of its leaf pyridine alkaloid fraction. The current study examines the role of the A622 gene from N. glauca (NgA622) in alkaloid production and utilises an RNAi approach to down-regulate gene expression and diminish levels of A622 protein in transgenic tissues. Results indicate that RNAi-mediated reduction in A622 transcript levels markedly reduces the capacity of N. glauca to produce anabasine resulting in plants with scarcely any pyridine alkaloids in leaf tissues, even after damage to apical tissues. In addition, analysis of hairy roots containing the NgA622-RNAi construct shows a substantial reduction in both anabasine and nicotine levels within these tissues, even if stimulated with methyl jasmonate, indicating a role for the A622 enzyme in the synthesis of both alkaloids in roots of N. glauca. Feeding of Nicotinic Acid (NA) to hairy roots of N. glauca containing the NgA622-RNAi construct did not restore capacity for synthesis of anabasine or nicotine. Moreover, treatment of these hairy root lines with NA did not lead to an increase in anatabine levels, unlike controls. Together, these results strongly suggest that A622 is an integral component of the final enzyme complex responsible for biosynthesis of all three pyridine alkaloids in Nicotiana. DeBoer, K. D.; Lye, J. C.; Aitken, C. D.; Su, A. K. K.; Hamill, J. D.

Journal

Plant Molecular Biology 2009 Vol. 69 No. 3 pp. 299-312

• Native & Naturalized Woody Plants of Austin and the Hill Country by Brother Daniel Lynch

·  Ethnobotany and History

• Useful Wild Plants of Texas by Scooter Cheatham and Marshall Johnston, with Lynn Marshall
• Wildflowers of Texas by Geyata Ajilvsgi
• Explorers' Texas: The Lands and Waters by Del Weniger

·  Restoration and Propagation

• The Tallgrass Restoration Handbook: For Prairies, Savannas, and Woodlands
• How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest Revised and Updated Edition by Jill Nokes

·  Botany and Ecology

• Shinners & Mahler's Illustrated Flora of North Central Texas by Diggs, Lipscomb, and O'Kennon [online]
• Illustrated Flora of East Texas [online]
• Atlas of the Vascular Plants of Texas by Billie Lee Turner, Holly Nichols, Geoffrey C. Denny, and Oded Doron
• Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas by Corell and Johnston
• Edwards Plateau Vegetation: Plant Ecological Studies in Central Texas

http://www.npsot.org/Austin/GrowNativePlants/learn.html
http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/20093101423.html;jsessionid=B1DA8F3429D35CD2AEA71BB07CA11D35

Along with mullein and mugwort, rue

Nicotiana glauca tree tobacco

Product: Nicotiana glauca
Latin Name: Nicotiana glauca
Common Name: Tree Tabacco

Nicotiana glauca leaves are organically grown and harvested by hand by the native people.
The leaves have been cured.
Smoking the leaves of the nicotiana glauca plant have been said to curb addictions as strong as heroine on top of being somewhat hallucinogenic.
Studies are ongoing at this time.
The effects of the plant seem to satisfy the mental and physical craving while also deminishing the physical addictions of some addicts.
Studies of Nicotiana to be used as a treatment for nicotine addiction since it does not contain nicotine are ongoing. Nicotiana glauca's active ingredient is anabasine--an alkaloid similar to nicotine.

NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS - MUST BE 18+ TO PURCHASE. NO EXCEPTIONS!

 http://www.seekershop.com/nicotiana_glauca.html

Rare and beautiful, nicotiana glauca does not actually contain nicotine, but analog alcalides. The unusual bush or tree has leathery blue vaned leaves, which are smoked for ritual perposes by Navajo Indians.

Nicotiana glauca AKA Tree Tobacco was considered the most powerful of the Nicotiana species. The hallucinogenic properties were believed to be more powerful and, like all of the Nicotiana, it was used for many medical treatments.

Some are studying Nicotiana glauca to be used as a treatment for nicotine addiction since it does not contain nicotine. Instead, Nicotiana glauca's active ingredient is anabasine--an alkaloid similar to nicotine. 

Artemesia as dangerous:  http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/

What makes a life herb desirable has to be the same for a great ceramic or painting, color, odor, form, universality,  good and the cure it brings. To abstract these in the botanese of materia medica is impossible.

 

 

Song of the Earth

 

A hundred years after its demise

the Ghost Dance for the restoration of species

is sung and danced by the world.

 

Sometimes, all the time, at night we dream of stories heard and what we have seen of the earth, as a black moth flutters the yellow flower and the smell of dirt after rain. Hardly things one thinks today, the mud, the rush of water in the creek, the roar, bluster of wind.

 

We have dreamed things that don’t exist, gone from the circle of life, separated by a fence from the honeysuckle that always was. That fence is strong enough to hold us up, not keep us out, to find a way from what was not to a dream flower prescient with the knowledge of itself.

 

The old house was never a house, a sculpture islanded by moat, where what looked like giraffes walked paths to what is now a city of lights. The dreams honeycomb, traverse fallopian and moments of birth. Waking sudden and early, the lassitude of moment stretches on until we drop.

 

Interrupted by the life we live for ones who love and give up everything, the Unnumbered stretch the great wake waking, tens of generations walk the moats and paths of nations. It’s about earth, the way we reach form, dust and ash that memories aurify, the ground that miners explore, which of course we all are mining to find.

 

Don’t come to graves, but in the wild of the Rio Grande the blue leaf desert with its yellow flower hangs. From tributaries where we once stood, still stand if we ever were, to Glenn Springs in mid desert, there is a spring where cenizo flowers pink and blue. Folk always, folk art as awe, makes it relive the past and find the gold.

 

There were others on the ground, Cosgroves, Parsons, Clarks in the hills before refrigerators, packed up among dinosaur tracks and creeks. Even if ravines where they or neighbors ran close cropped goats are gone, grass, drought, rains, flood remains, where once in a field a gulley stood, unbegun, the grass was clipped,  protective mat of foliage dried.

 

Compromised, the cedar came, if you like Christmas happy for the green, and if you like fence posts. In the gulley deep it was not the fault of goats, the Navajo did the same with sheep before the Army came and tore down their statue to the sheep Hussein, divvied the herds to a half or a third. None intended, people got along.

 

If Stevens ran wild creatures without herdsmen like the emu of today, wild propagating goats, this is what you would say, earth remained for dikes and dams to catch silt, stop runoff from a trench. Deer and turkey took off.  Hawks flew up.  Badgers applaud the sides of cliffs, burrows excellent for roots with caliche seeps.

 

I had no shirt but now am dressed, explore light and dark, but none familiar till an uncle shows this cornice measured at its base, numbers and ratios written on wood, yet founded on the premise of a sculpture house built by a grandfather on a lake.  I go there to find some keepsake, some carving, balustrade, ironwork as good as the sense impressions to compare, which I have from another house, lived in hundreds of years, artifacts, but do not dream them. Not constantly.

 

Dream the lost overtaken by time, back to the gardens and lushness grown. I don’t see how landscapes of the county nineteenth and twentieth century houses and gardens differ. The last remained with its family until the next, too new to dream, too realized with books and art. Start with sense impressions of previous lives, experienced now in memory, even more in dreams I have constantly of their transfiguring.

 

Though dreaming in the afterlife of this, this life is now an afterlife of that. Nothing remains of the slag, piled football fields high, made from stripmined down hills, which you could slide upright on your feet like skis, or the rock house in the hills inhabited by condos. All that remains are the books to read. The cars are gone. The people have aged.

 

I look at my son and see Amasa Clark in Bandera who started his orchard among Comanche and bears, in peace till an onion felled him after a century. I knew him through his daughter, her daughter, her daughter and her daughter whom I married to begin life with the same prime looks at trails, for the earth remains. They think it won’t but it will.

 

They think species extinct, that carrier pigeons, exotics and imports come upstream to swallow the indigenous, that this is the fate of ice caps and coastlines while radio enthusiasts find waves that cure cancers implanted with metal nano particles.

 

So why not have creation over, flights of robins in the thousand and ten thousands, like David, like herds of the plain, like trees, somebody will say who has an ash, or heard of one in another part of town, the great fecundity of creation recreated?

 

If I could promise you this would it matter? All loss all gain, yet will the world, but it is a new world remade, remains. I never dreamed it, but feel it in the vein, the impossible heart arteries that pump like new. At least we are not without likeness. New hearts, new liver, new kidneys, new fingers and toes, new earth in a ground that floods with life the way the whole world does.  

 

[The title evokes the Ghost Dance with Gustav Mahler’s most personal composition, The Song of the Earth (1911), Das Lied von der Erde / Le Chant de la terre. He in turn evokes Li Bai (Li Po), the Chinese poet (701–762) said to compose poetry at such rapid pace that it needed no correction. Mahler’s new form called a Song Symphony uses Hans Bethge’s translation of ancient Chinese poetry (Die Chinesische Flöte / The Chinese Flute) to celebrate this beauty and mortality, which Ezra Pound versed also in Cathay. I found this composition while reading Momaday on the Kiowa, Ed Dorn on the Shoshone and looking for what Albert Glover said of the last sighting of Charles Olson. Written sometime out of memory, it is conveyed without correction. You would not think merely a hundred years after its demise that the Ghost Dance of the Paiute for the restoration of species would be sung and danced by the world.]

 

  Notes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Tai-Po

Li Bai composed his poetry; he was said to be able to compose at an astounding speed, without correction

Li Bai is influential in the West partly due to Ezra Pound's versions of some of his poems in the collection Cathay,^[2] such as The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter. The ideas underlying them had a profound impact in shaping American Imagist and Modernist poetry through the 20th Century. Also, Gustav Mahler integrated four of Li Bai's works in his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde.

complete integration of song cycle and symphony. The form was afterwards imitated by other composers, notably by Shostakovich and Zemlinsky. This new form has been termed a "song-symphony",^[7] a hybrid of the two forms that had occupied most of Mahler's creative life.

Albert Glover  http://charlesolson.ca/files/Glover2.htm

Mushrooms:  went to Olson’s Fort Square rooms once during the summer of 1966 it must have been. I was with my wife, and we didn’t get past the kitchen. Still, he stayed up all night with us, talking as he always had. He displayed a jar of mushrooms “laced with strychnine” that someone had sent to him from California. Perhaps I’d like to try one? I declined. At one point he read to me about Buddhism from his favorite dictionary, Webster’s Second Edition. The Four Noble Truths. He would shake me when I started falling asleep. And he seemed to have a good time with Pat, my wife, who would challenge him with her spiritual ferocity: “Say it in three words or less!” He’d slap the table, laugh, and set off on another 20 minute solo. Then he’d look at her for approval — she’d do it again. There was a Jackson Pollock drawing on the fridge, put up there like a child’s homework by an admiring parent.

When I moved to northern New York in 1968, I brought The Institute of Further Studies with me. The final issue of The Magazine of Further Studies, which contained “A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul,” was edited at the Holberg house across the street from the pine plantation where I’d found my first amanita muscaria. In the months preceding the publication of Wasson’s expensive Soma, Charles and I had been working on this mushroom which appears in The Maximus Poems briefly as an Algonquian intoxicant. I wanted to try it. We’d both also been reading The Teachings of Don Juan and were excited about that. As my research deepened and I grew closer to actually taking these mushrooms, Charles wrote to me on one of his fabulous postcards that he didn’t know from experience if “whortleberry juice” in fact “cut” fly agaric. Just to let me know that the risk I was taking was mine to take. That gesture remains for me a presiding honesty in our relation. I’ve written about some of this foolishness in The Mushroom, my contribution to A Curriculum of the Soul. And it is true that the vision of that project which has kept me for the past twenty-eight years came from the mushroom shortly after Olson’s death and the arrival of Wasson’s beautiful tome, purchased for me by students at St. Lawrence. I was to publish an epic tribute, a work with many voices, all of them “one voice.” Jack Clarke took the “Plan” and wrote the assignments. The books would go out in various colors and together would make a rainbow bridge. The Ford Foundation bought me Gestetner mimeograph equipment. When the first “proof copies” (400 of each) had been made, I would edit the whole into one volume as lavish in production as Soma.

The last words I received from Olson came by messenger, a phone call from Linda Parker. Letters for Origin had just come out from Jonathan Cape, and Charles wanted me to know that he liked the book. “But the words at the back” (an awkward “editor’s note” I had made in lieu of a scholarly preface) “top it.” He was ever generous with me. And the last time I saw Charles was at the “Olson Conference” in Iowa City, 1976. George, who was on his way to becoming “the Dean of Olson Studies” (as a distinguished “panelist” would announce a few years later at MLA), had cooked up the event with Sherman Paul who was promoting his new book: Olson’s Push. Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry. Though I hadn’t been officially invited (George had become embarrassed by what he called the “loose Visigothic horde” of Olsonites and was bent upon making Charles a respectable literary figure — the University of California would get the work) my efforts on Olson’s behalf made it hard for George to keep me out when I pressed him. Finally it was arranged I would introduce George and thus have something to do, i.e., I could have a room at The Rebel Motel in Iowa City and apply for travel money from my home institution. Still, as a reader of “Letter for Melville, 1951,” I was in a repressed rage about the Conference and the agenda attached to it. Olson had made it quite clear to me that he detested such “literary” stuff along with the people who made careers out of it. I was also angry because both Jack Clarke and Harvey Brown, men who had worked closely with Charles for several years, were given no opportunity to speak. Regardless, George and I went out to lunch together after one of the morning sessions and whom should we see in the cafeteria but Charles. We both recognized him immediately, though the occurrence did stretch our minds. I thought George was going to drop his tray, but he only turned white and held on. We made our way to a table, and I said: “It’s him. He’s here!” George nodded. Charles came over toward us, but we made no sign of recognition; on the contrary, we both pretended we didn’t see him. So he sat down at the table directly behind me, his back toward mine. And then, more wildly, he pushed himself back so his shoulders were actually touching mine. I continued to pretend nothing was happening as my body filled with an incredible golden light which seemed to flow out of him where we touched. Then he got up and left. George and I never talked about it. And Charles has never bothered me, even in dreams, since that day.

Recently I had a brief exchange of e-mail with a young academic who is interested in how Charles and Robert Creeley shaped their careers. She writes:

I appreciate your reaction to my notion of “career.” I gave a paper on Olson and professional anthropology at Orono and Ed Dorn objected vociferously to any intimation that Olson was an “oppositional professional,” saying, “In those days, we thought professionals were dentists.” I clearly have to think carefully about my terms. How, though, would you describe the tremendous ambition and strategic planning readable in the Olson/Creeley correspondence? The two were collaborating as much on making it in the literary field (they networked in the “mainstream” as well as the “margin”), I think, as on projective verse. I’ve also done some research on Creeley’s dealings with his editor at Scribner’s. He kind of got in the back door, through one of the Short Story anthologies, but when it came to “plan” the publication of For Love, he was remarkably adept at packaging his work.

Her interest strikes me as genuine. But I have been unable to communicate to her the dimension of spirit in which Charles lived and worked. There seems to be no explaining it to the next generation

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CQNgTUODPS4J:www.charlesolson.ca/Files/Glover2.htm+%22the+last+time+I+saw+Charles+was+at+the+%E2%80%9COlson+Conference%E2%80%9D+in+Iowa+City,+1976%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

Next, see Native Texans