^* And by way of lore among poets : Irby here follows information from archaeologist-historian Cyrus Gordon, included by Olson in 1961 in “Bridge-work” in a list of “men worth anyone’s study,” along with Edward Hyams, Carl Sauer, linguists Sapir and Whorf, G. R. S. Mead, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Fenollosa, and others (Additional Prose, 24).

^† Robert Duncan recalls that “As he was dying of terminal cancer that had come into his liver and was eating away each day, Olson was writing out, as if to unlock in a logographic magic the secret message or to break the code of that event, ’LIVE-HER.’ He is trying words, to find in the body of the language he loved and worked in and incarnated himself in, this event that was eating at him. He had to know it in words, what he knew in flesh” (“As an Introduction,” 83).