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Published just months after Armand Schwerner's death on February 4, 1999, the Selected Shorter Poems and the first complete edition of The Tablets together constitute a testament to one of the most important linguistic innovators of the late twentieth century. Among the various categories of writers which Ezra Pound identifies in "How to Read," we find "the inventors, discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode and process." Schwerner was just such an inventor. Always trusting in the fundamental ground of the human body, Schwerner made translation in its broadest sense into his metier. With his colleagues in the ethnopoetics movement, he (re)discovered the poetic potential in the anthropologist's study of native cultures and languages, in the synchronicity of the archaic and the modern. | |
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push-car woman do you love meIn this poem, the speech act of Schwerner's young son takes on, as the boy's names appropriately implies, the adamic quality of primal naming. The chant-like quality of the verse, the use of repetition and variation, and the play of parts of speech, are not only qualities of the child's language, but are reminiscent of the poetry of "primitive" cultures as well. Rather than sentimentalize either the child-like or the primitive, however, the poem enacts the oral immediacy which the poet finds so valuable. | |
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This same sense of immediate connectedness -- of sincerity, that quality so valued by Objectivists such as Zukofsky and Oppen, whom Schwerner knew personally -- is also to be felt when the poet uses the first-person pronoun. Note how the equally important Objectivist quality of precision comes into play in these stanzas from "the passage," one of my favorites in the Selected Shorter Poems: I find eight raspberries, the lastThe intimacy of these lines extends from the "grounding" natural world to the absent lover, whose "deep auburn hair"is transformed into the seaweed through the graceful but surprising enjambment. These are the sorts of moves one finds repeatedly in Schwerner's more lyric poems, as in this brief passage from the serial poem "sounds of the river Naranjana": for a week watch the river Naranjana flowingHere, the epistemological and phenomenological concerns of Objectivism coincide with Schwerner's extensive studies of Buddhism, as the speaking voice becomes that of a sage instructing us on the path of enlightenment, an experience of the totality in and of every present moment. | |
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But Schwerner's understanding of cultural change and historical rupture is too deep, too vexing, to allow him to rest content within the moment, even a moment that may lead to enlightenment. Remote, archaic, or primitive cultures are never idealized in Schwerner's work, nor does the apparent synchronicity of belief or experience, the shared instant when the boundary of self and other dissolves, remain unexamined. This is one of the great themes of The Tablets, a work that, genealogically, goes back further than almost any other exercise in ethnopoetics. The modern, accidental form of Sumero-Akkadian tablets provides meThrough the temporal warpings ofThe Tablets, the literal shards of an animistic civilization that existed thousands of years in the past, Schwerner constantly reminds us of the founding cultural dialectic of the sacred and the profane. Body and spirit veer about and collide in the text in ways that continually expose the inadequacy of modern religious thought regarding our somatic being. From Tablet V: is the man bigger than a fly's wing? what pleasure!For Schwerner, this is "not poetry as obeisance to the sacred, but as a creation of it in all its activity; not as an appeal for its survival in spite of a corrosive sense that the sacred is lost, but as a movement which itself might add its own small measure to reality" (Tablets 130). How does the sacred arise out of the profane, how does the profane enhance our sense of the sacred? How does this dialectic contribute to our sense of reality? Consider the opening lines of Tablet VIII: go into all the places you're frightened ofPart prayer and part kvetch, this passage resonates with an existential melancholy worthy of very differerent Jewish writers like Bellow or Malamud, but supposedly precedes even Job or Ecclesiastes by many centuries. At the beginning of Tablet VI, we are informed that "Foosh" is the last in a long list of ridiculous names (including "Sore-Ass-Mole-Face-Snivel-Kra," "Anxious-Liar-Fart-Flyaway ," and "The Porous Poppycock"), though "we have no information about the identity of the addressee; anger and ridicule are directed toward some immanent power which keeps changing its attributes" (25). No wonder then that the speaker in Tablet VIII is so distraught! From the tone of the address, Foosh is, in all likelihood, some sort of deity, and there is a note of intimacy in the passage that is reminiscent of a patriarch's or prophet's speech with God in the Hebrew Scriptures. But if this god's attributes keep changing, then a sense of uncertainty enters into the life of the speaker, leaving him with nothing but headaches, worry, and abuse. | |
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It is at such points that one feels the modernity of The Tablets, and not merely in the anxieties of its ancient speakers. "[T]he right words wait in the stone / they'll discover themselves as you chip away" declares the voice in Tablet VIII: writing becomes the means through which the speaker deals with his worries, and finding himself "getting stiff" in a "cold place," he composes a poetic curse ("this curse / better work" he cries) to free himself: If you step on meAnd so it goes for another three stanzas: surely one of the funniest send-ups of "the primitive" in the entire body of ethnopoetics. Yet Schwerner's Sumerian/Akkadian curse (along with the hymns, love songs, plaints, meditations, and other speech-acts found throughout The Tablets) is charged with the urgency of the fully lived moment, however remote in time. It is a moment when rhetoric counts, when poetry comes as close as possible to magic in the power it is believed to hold over reality. Schwerner does not relegate this sense of the magical to the primitive or the archaic alone, however, and this is one of The Tablets' greatest strengths. In his note following Tablet VIII, the Scholar/Translator reflects on the course of his work: Looking back myself to that first terrific meeting with these ancient poems,The Scholar/Translator's fantasy is true, of course: not only is the sequence an invention, but he himself, forced into unpleasurable linguistic exercises, is an invention as well. Schwerner's metafictional fun with his character is one indication that the magical power of writing holds even in the realm of "objective" modern scholarship. Like the scribes and librarians of Kafka and Borges who are his closest kin, the Scholar/Translator is fanatically devoted to a text which is his world; the book is the scholar's author, rather than the scholar authoring the book. The ambiguity which the Scholar/Translator experiences is derived from this intricately folded condition of fiction and reality, creator and creation, past and present, magic and science, original and translation. It is this last dichotomy, fundamental to the Scholar/Translator's identity, that puts such a strain on this figure. The Scholar/Translator regards it as his responsibility to translate, and thereby "make available" to a general readership, or at least to other experts in the field, a set of texts that he regards as "secret and inviolable." By the time we reach Tablet XXVI (subtitled "From the Laboratory Teachings Memoirs of the Scholar/Translator"), it has dawned on the Scholar/Translator that "I am involved in the process of formation of the canon of this sacred material" (95). To what extent is he the rational scientist engaged in the objective study of these artefacts, and to what extent is he an initiate into the sacred truths which they may contain? At what point does the modern student of the sacred participate in the practice of the sacred? And given what we have seen of the Tablets and the world from which they come, where does ritual end and poetry begin? "I would also call attention," notes the Scholar/Translator, "to the power of the unsullied literary imagination evident in the texts which are the objects of my studies, a power generously evident in the work of the so-called scribes, who were of course redactors, a vector we usually ignore. Thus often the line between redactor and author is hard to draw" (71). From author to redactor to Scholar/Translator to Schwerner, the poet himself pulling all the strings: the lines become increasingly hard to draw, but "the power of the unsullied literary imagination"deconstructs the binarisms that structure Schwerner's masterpiece. Or as Schwerner observes, "Prose is eloquence, wants to instruct, to convince; wants to produce in the soul of the reader a state of knowledge. Poetry is the producer of joy, its reader participates in the creative act. Thus Commentary and Text in The Tablets? (Is that distinction stupid?)" (132). Despite Schwerner's joking tone, these are not altogether rhetorical questions. The uncanny symbiosis of prose to poetry, commentary and text, present to past, that intensifies as the sequence proceeds indicates that in The Tablets, these distinctions exist so as to be subsumed by the maker's art. Yet that art of poesis, both original inscription and inventive commentary, seems always to be in crisis. In Tablet XXVI, a figure called "the blind artificer" emerges out of a welter of (computer-generated) pictographs, and we hear one of the most poignant laments to emerge from Schwerner's ancient world: When I was young they would praise"[T]he oracle / turns dunce" (90) says this poet-prophet of himself, but even as he mourns the loss of his visionary power, his lyricism reaches across the millenia, edging The Tablets away from satire to an increasingly elegiac register. The powers he represents, the powers his civilization have posited as truths, are perceived to be failing; faced with his apparent death, the process of cultural meaning falls away and a mournful voice declares that "The abyss is a hope / Yawning between mouth and star" (91). Schwerner understands that the same is true for his contemporaries as well. As he says of his poor Scholar/Translator in a conversation with Willard Gingerich, "The S/T has an inclination towards meaning, but he's got a problem which he avows covertly and indirectly and with pain. He has a suspicion that his inclination towards meaning must find other paths from those he has been given by his own modes of scholarship and research, his own culture, his own theological antecedents. And that's the main problem; that's also the problem of Western civilization . . ." ("Armand Schwerner: An Interview," American Poetry Review 24.5 [September/October 1995]). What is remarkable about Schwerner is that he may have found one means of addressing this problem, that he may have an alternative path.
-- Norman Finkelstein
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