PRE-FACE

1

When the industrial West began to discover— and plunder— “ new” and “ old” worlds beyond its boundaries, an extraordinary countermovement came into being in the West itself. Alongside the official ideologies that shoved European man to the apex of the human pyramid, there were some thinkers and artists who found ways of doing and knowing among other peoples as complex as any in Europe and often virtually erased from European consciousness. Cultures described as “primitive” and “ savage”—a stage below “ barbarian” — were simultaneously the models for political and social experiments, religious and visionary revivals, and forms of art and poetry so different from European norms as to seem revolutionary from a later Western perspective. It was almost, looking back at it, as if every radical innovation in the West were revealing a counterpart— or series of counterparts— somewhere in the traditional worlds the West was savaging. The present gathering will center on the poetics of the matter and will map, from the perspective of the editors, a discourse on poetics (really a range of such discourses) that has been a vital aspect of twentieth-century poetry and art— with precedents going back two centuries and more. The poetics in question, which we will speak of as an 4 ‘ef/mopoetics, ’ ’ reemerged after World War II (with its rampant and murderous racism) and the dislocations of the European colonial system during the postwar period.1 Whenever it has appeared— and some version of it may be as old as human conscious­ ness itself— it has taken the form of what Stanley Diamond, in a recently renewed “ critique of civilization,” calls “ the search for the primitive” or, more precisely, the 4 ‘attempt to define a primary human potential. ’ ’ (See below, p. 71.) The search as such is by no means confined to the 4 ‘modem’ ’ world (though our concern with it will be just there) but is felt as well, say, in the words of ancient Heraclitus often cited by Charles Olson: “ Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar.” And it is present too in the thought of those the West had cast as ultimate “ primitives,” as when the Delaware Indians tell us in their Walum Olum: /

in the beginning of the world all men had knowledge cheerfully all had leisure all thoughts were pleasant at that time all creatures were friends. . . .

’The word “ ethnopoetics” suggested itself, almost too easily, on the basis of such earlier terms as ethno- history, ethnomusicology, ethnolinguistics, ethnopharmacology, and so on. As such it refers to a redefinition of poetry in terms of cultural specifics, with an emphasis on those alternative traditions to which the West gave names like “ pagan,” “ gentile,” “ tribal,” “oral,” and “ethnic.” In its developed form, it moves toward an exploration of creativity over the fullest human range, pursued with a regard for particularized practice as much as unified theory and further “ defined,” as in this book, in the actual discourse.

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The past is what it is— or was— but it is also something we discover and create through a desire to know what it is to be human, anywhere. Some of the results of that search and its attendant yearnings are obvious by now— so much so that a principal defense against their power to transform us involves an attack on a primitivism debased by the attackers and abstracted thereby from its revolutionary potential. Such a primitivism is not in any case the stance of this collec­ tion. Nor is our interest directed backward toward a past viewed with feelings of decontextualized nostalgia. It is our contention, in fact, that the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modem poetry, both in the Western world and increasingly outside it, has been the most significantly connected with the attempt to define an ethnopoetics. There is a politics in all of this, and an importance, clearly, beyond the work of poets and artists. The old “ primitive” models in particular—of small and integrated, stateless and classless societies— reflect a concern over the last two centuries with new communalistic and anti-authoritarian forms of social life and with alternatives to the environmental disasters accompanying an increasingly abstract relation to what was once a living universe. Our belief in this regard is that a re-viewing of ‘ ‘primitive” ideas of the “ sacred” represents an attempt— by poets and others—to preserve and enhance primary human values against a mindless mechanization that has run past any uses it may once have had. (This, rather than the advocacy of some particular system, seems to us the contribution of the ‘ ‘primitive” to whatever world we may yet hope to bring about.) As a matter of history, we would place the model in question both in the surviving, still rapidly vanishing stateless cultures and in a long subterranean tradition of resistance to the twin authorities of state and organized religion. What we’re involved with here is a complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values: a new reading of the poetic past and present which Robert Duncan speaks of as “ a symposium of the whole. ” In such a new “ totality,” he writes (see below, p. 328), “ all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.” If that or some variant thereof is taken as the larger picture, it can provide the context in which to see most clearly the searches and discoveries in what we call “ the arts. ’ ’ In painting and sculpture, say, the results of those searches are by now so well known that there’s little surprise left in marking the change from Ruskin’s late nineteenth-century comment, “ There is no art in the whole of Africa, Asia, and America,” to Picasso’s exclamation on his first sighting of an African sculpture, “ It is more beautiful than the Venus de Milo.” Yet the obviousness of the change is itself deceptive. The “ human” concerns demanded by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara— for an art that “ lives first of all for the functions of dance, religion, music, and work’ ’—remain largely submerged in the “ aesthetic” ; and it’s a long way too from Picasso’s classicizing admiration of the static art object to the reality of a tribal/oral “ art in motion” (see below, p. 285) that brings all our scattered arts together. This dream of a total art— and of a life made whole—has meant different things and been given different names throughout this century. “ Intermedia” was a word for it in its 1960s manifestation— also “ total theater” and “ happenings” —behind which was the sense of what the nineteenth-century Wagnerian consciousness had called Gesamt- Pre-Face xiii kunstwerk and had placed— prefigured— at the imagined beginnings of the human enterprise. The difference in our own time was to smash that imperial and swollen mold— to shift the primary scene from Greece, say, to the barbaric or paleolithic past, or to the larger, often still existing tribal world, and to see in that world (however “ outcast and vagabond” it had been made to look) a complexity of act and vision practiced by proto-poets/proto-artists who were true “ technicians of the sacred.” (See below, p. 99.) And along with this shift came the invention and revival of specific means: new materials and instruments (plastic and neon, film and tape) alongside old or foreign ones (stones, bones, and skin; drums, didjeridoos, and gamelans); ancient roles and modes of thought that had survived at the Western margins (sacred clowns and dancers, shamanis- tic ecstasies, old and new works of dream and chance); and a tilt toward ritual, not as “ an obsessional concern with repetitive acts” but, as Victor Turner describes it, “ an immense orchestration of genres in all available sensory codes: speech, music, singing; the presentation of elaborately worked objects, such as masks; wall-paintings, body- paintings; sculptured forms; complex, many-tiered shrines; costumes; dance forms with complex grammars and vocabularies of bodily movements, gestures, and facial expres­ sions” (1977: 12). The description, which fits both “ them” and “ us,” holds equally true in the language arts— as this book will attempt to show— though by the nature of language itself (and the need to translate ourselves in— always— partial forms) the complexity and the interplay of new and old haven’t been as clear there. Taken as a whole, then, the human species presents an extraordinary richness of verbal means—both of languages and poetries— closed to us until now by an unwillingness to think beyond the conven­ tions and boundaries of Western literature. This “ literature” as such goes back in its root meaning to an idea of writing— more narrowly and literally, the idea of alphabetic writing (littera, Lat. = letters) as developed in the West. In poetry, the result has been to exclude or set apart those oral traditions that together account for the greatest human diversity, an exclusion often covered over by a glorification of the oral past. Thus Marshall McLuhan— defining the words “ tribal” and “ civilized” on the basis of alphabetic literacy alone— can write: “ Tribal cultures like those of the Indian and Chinese [!] may be greatly superior to the Western cultures in the range and delicacy of their expressions and perception,” and in the same paragraph: “ Tribal cultures cannot entertain the possibility of the individual or of the separate citizen” (1963: 86-87—but see Radin and Diamond, below, pp. 31, 71, for another view of the matter). If the recovery of the oral is crucial to the present work, it goes hand in hand with a simultaneous expansion of the idea of writing and the text, wherever and whenever found. To summarize rapidly what we elsewhere present in extended form, the oral recovery involves a poetics deeply rooted in the powers of song and speech, breath and body, as brought forward across time by the living presence of poet-performers, with or without the existence of a visible/literal text. The range of such poetries is the range of human culture itself, and the forms they take (different for each culture) run from wordless songs and mantras to the intricacies (imagistic and symbolic) of multileveled oral narratives; from the stand-up performances of individual shamans and bards to the choreographies of massed dancers and singers, extended sometimes over protracted periods of time. From the side of visual and written language—which may, like the oral, be as old as the species itself—a fully human poetics would include all forms of what x iv Pre-Face

Jacques Derrida calls archecriture (= primal writing): pictographs and hieroglyphs, aboriginal forms of visual and concrete poetry, sand paintings and earth mappings, gestural and sign languages, counting systems and numerologies, divinational signs made by man or read (as a poetics of natural forms) in the tracks of animals or of stars through the night sky. That practices like these correspond to experimental moves in our own time isn’t needed to justify them, but it indicates why we’re now able to see them and to begin to understand as well the ways they differ from our own work. Other areas in which such correspondences hold true may be more involved with “ idea” than “ structure,” though the distinction isn’t always easy to maintain. Traditional divination work, for example— the Ifa oracles of Africa, say, or the Chinese I Ching—rests on the recognition of a world revealed moment by moment through processes of chance and synchronicity (i.e., the interrelatedness of simultaneous events), and these processes in turn inform one major segment of our avant-garde. Similarly, the widespread practice of exploring the “ un­ known” through the creation of new languages shows a strong sense of the virtual nature of reality (what Senghor speaks of as the traditional surreal) and the linguistic means to get it said. The idea of the surreal— at its most meaningful— also suggests the dream- works so central to other cultures and so long submerged in ours. And from these, or through them, it’s only a short step into a life lived in a state-of-myth (“ reality at white heat,” Radin called it) and to the recovery of archetypes (as image and/or symbol) that infuse our own work at its most heated: the animal and trickster side of us; the goddess and the feminine; the sense of “ earth as a religious form” and of a living, even human, universe; and the commitment to imaginal geographies and journeys that lead into our own lives and minds. These are as old as the human, maybe older, and they come back to us, transformed, not so much when we shut out the immediate world around us as when we choose to work within it. The twentieth century— and with it the attendant modernisms that have charac­ terized our poetry and art— is by now winding down. It has been a long haul and a sometimes real adventure, but the work is in no way complete and some of the major points have still to be hammered home. My own choice has been to write from the side of a modernism that sees itself as challenging limits and changing ways of speaking/ thinking/doing that have too long robbed us of the freedom to be human to the full extent of our powers and yearnings. The struggle is immediate and the objects and attitudes to be destroyed or transformed appear on every side of us. But it isn’t a question of our having no sense of history or of the human past— no sense of possibilities besides the most apparent. The clincher, in fact, is the transformation, beyond that, of our con­ sciousness of the human in all times and places.

2

By the end of the 1960s, I first introduced the term ‘ ‘ethnopoetics’ ’ as a necessary part of a poetics (an idea of poetry) changed by a century of such experimentation and mapping. A number of often previously involved poets, anthropologists, and critics (Antin, Awoonor, Beier, Diamond, Hymes, McClure, Ortiz, Quasha, Snyder, Spanos, Ted- lock, Tam, et al.) responded immediately to the discourse around the term, while others, Pre-Face xv who remained aloof, were in their own terms implicit contributors to the issues clustered therein. What this marked wasn’t so much a first invention as a recognition that the ethnopoetics, once it had entered our work, altered the nature of that work in all its aspects. And behind it was the century itself and a crisis in language and thought not of our making: an international avant-garde on the one hand, an American opening to history and myth on the other, and a de facto but rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars by whom the attack on the narrow view of literature (i.e., the “ great” tradition) was simultaneously carried on. Few poets and artists— post-World War II— weren’t somehow involved in these new mappings, for what had changed was our paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be. The explicit discourse—that around an ethnopoetics per se—involved the maga­ zine Alcheringa (founded by Rothenberg and Tedlock in 1970) and included the 1975 gathering, at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in Milwaukee, of the “ first international symposium on ethnopoetics,” which drew from many of the principal contributors as well as from others working in related areas.2 (See Tumer, ‘ ‘ A Review of ‘Ethnopoetics,’ ” below, p. 337.) On the one hand, this discourse explored an ongoing “ intersection between poetry and anthropology, ’ ’ in Nathaniel Tam’s words, and on the other hand, between contemporary poets as the “ marginal” defenders of an endangered human diversity and poets of other times and places who represented that diversity itself and many of the values being uncovered and recovered in the new poetic enterprises. The discourse opened as well to include what Richard Schechner called the “ poetics of performance” across the spectrum of the arts, and it also tied in with movements of self-definition and cultural liberation among third world ethnic groups in the United States and elsewhere. The present anthology is an attempt to present some highlights of that discourse— both over the last two decades and in relation to its own history— and to show as well how ethnographic revelations can change our ideas of poetic form and function. There is otherwise no claim to an ethnopoetics movement per se, and many of the present contributors in fact remain largely unaware of each other’s work. Nor is there anything final or tidy about such an ethnopoetics, which works instead to chum up a whole range of issues about ‘ ‘art and life’ ’ (as those terms are used by practitioners like John Cage and Allan Kaprow)— not as a closed field but as an always shifting series of tendencies in the thought and practice of those who in any sense might be considered as participants. And the participants themselves are not only poets but— in an age of intermedia works and genre cross-overs— other artists as well; not only anthropologists and folklorists but the indigenous poets and shamans for whom the others often act as conduits to the world of print and text. We have structured the book to present these issues historically, ethnographically, and from a number of contemporary points of view. Working from our two bases as poet

2Much of the ethnopoetic work at that time, my own included, was involved with the discovery and translation of the poetry itself and, for many, with the incorporation of related processes into their own works and lives. In that context— in books of my own making, say, such as Technicians o f the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and America a Prophecy— the discourse appeared as a distinctly secondary event or one handled by example largely, though elsewhere it was clearly the event of primary importance. Our effort now, in contrast to those earlier workings, is to bring the talk about poetry— the discourse— forward, while still upholding the primacy of the poetic act. xvi Pre-Face and anthropologist, we have divided it into five sections—the first and the final ones dealing largely with theory and ideology, the middle ones with the particular insights derived from ethnographic and other descriptive approaches. Such a distinction— given the need for both good poetics and good anthropology to merge the particular and the general— is of course impossible to maintain in any absolute sense. Nor have we wished to do so, but to follow, in a number of instances, certain issues through all five sections of the book. The result intended, as should be clear by now, is no less than a new poetics. The first section,4‘Preliminary Moves,” sets out the leading issues and proposes a representative (by no means complete) chronology of ethnopoetic predecessors, from the writings of Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century to my own first ethnopoetics “ manifesto” in 1968. In doing so, we’ve tried not to be merely historical but to select works that still hold up— Herder’s clear vision of the tribal and non-Western, say, rather than Rousseau’s ultimate disdain for them. And we’ve tried also to open the ethnopoetic into what David Antin (see below, p. 452) calls a “ human poetics” instead of forcing it into the more restricted mold of the ‘ ‘primitive. ’ ’ The themes set out in these works, and open to continuing modification, include the reinterpretation of the poetic past, the recurrent question of a primitive-civilized dichotomy (particularly in its post-Platonic, Western manifestations), the idea of a visionary poetics and of the shaman as a paradigmatic proto-poet, the idea of a great subculture and of the persistence of an oral poetics in all of the “ higher” civilizations, the concept of wilderness and of the role of the poet as a defender of biological and psychic diversity, the issue of the monoculture and the issue of cultural imperialism, the question of communal and individual expres­ sion in traditional societies, the relation of culture and language to mental processes, the divergence of oral and written cultures (and their projected reconciliation), and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images (the goddess, the trickster, the human universe, etc.). In the middle sections, drawn largely from the work of anthropologists and other scholars, many of these issues recur (along with others not previously discussed)—this time in relation to specific forms and events in both other-than-Westem and alternative Western traditions. The second section, ‘ ‘Workings, ’ ’ deals principally with operational descriptions of poetic and related linguistic forms. How do poems really “ work’ ’ in such situations? What elements do they include, how are those elements put together, and what are the intended results? Is the poetry of oral cultures essentially different from that of written ones, and are written elements at work as well? With an eye to the expansion and transformation of our present ideas of poetic practice—and with our expanded practice as a key to the kinds of verbal acts that may now be viewed as ‘ ‘poetry” —we’ve focused on a number of culturally specific “ workings” : the language of magic employ­ ing often untranslatable sounds, the processes of naming and imaging by means of language, the use of surrogate language forms (drum-language poems, in the present instance), the relation of visual forms to vocal ones, the employment of chance-related procedures in divination poetry— as well as the persistent question of the individual poet’s voice in traditional and communal societies. The question of transferability— whether or to what degree it’s possible for us to adapt such culturally specific forms— is of course implicit throughout this presentation. The forms, the processes themselves, are always part of a larger nexus of meanings, and to get a grip on such a nexus is, it seems to us, essential to any new poetics, particularly Pre-Face xvii one that stresses an intimate relation between “ form” and “ content.” In our third section, “ Meanings,” we shift attention to conceptual questions of world view and symbolic process, with particular concern for the ways language shapes reality, for the kind of symbolmaking that approaches what William Blake called the “ four-fold vision,” for the use of paralinguistic modes (dreamings, psychedelics) to enhance language and meaning, and for culturally (and historically) particular views of certain of the imaginal beings most pertinent to a twentieth-century process of “ mythopoetic” recovery. In the fourth section,4 ‘Doings, ’ ’ we move directly to the matter of performance or enactment— ritual and theater— that has, in fact, been a dominant theme throughout the gathering. This approach through performance has so frequently been identified with ethnopoetics and the recovery of an oral impulse as to be almost indistinguishable. In tackling it head on (that is, in situ), the subjects range from Antonin Artaud’s early intuition (1931) of a Balinese theater that goes “ beyond language” and J. Stephen Lansing’s recent exposition of a Balinese4 ‘poetics of the sounding of the text’ ’ to a broad survey of the performative sides of shamanism, particularized descriptions of sacred clowns and traditional cathartic rituals and songs, writings-in-space as an aspect of African dance, contemporary signing poetry in the ‘ ‘culture of the deaf, ’ ’ celebrations of the female aspect of God in the subculture of Jewish kabbalistic mysticism, and a final overview by Richard Schechner of the ongoing but ever-shifting relation between ritual and theater. Schechner’s essay acts in turn as a bridge to the last section of the book, “ Contemporary Moves,” which articulates some of the major issues of the earlier discourse while adding still others developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Though it’s in the nature of such discourse to run over many issues and to produce as much opposition as agreement, the section is unified by the participants’ common desire and need to chart and adjust the relation between traditional and contemporary modes of poetry. It begins with the overviews of a poet and an anthropologist and continues with several ap­ proaches to experimental translation from oral sources and with two pieces that deal with the process of oral transmission from the perspectives of a Native American poet and of a European-born poet-anthropologist. These are followed by a number of writings that explore the idea of poetic continuities— in Native American and Afro-American culture, in the survival of Coyote and related trickster figures in the work of several different American poets, and in the reinterpretation of the human past going back to our earliest paleolithic sources. The last several pieces—before Edmund Carpenter’s coda-like “ The Death of Sedna” — deal in various ways with the still-to-be-resolved question of the relation between written and oral forms of poetry and language—both “ there” and “ here.” Those familiar with the intentions and workings of contemporary poetry and art will likely see the relevance to our present practice of most of the inclusions. But because we hope to inform as wide an audience as possible, we offer a running commentary to place the pieces in context—concentrating in the first and last sections on authors, issues, and movements, and in the middle sections on the original cultural contexts or on the relation of traditional modes to contemporary concerns or to what we often take as losses or discontinuities in our own culture. For those who want to pursue the work still further, we’ve provided a cumulative bibliography of works mentioned throughout the xviii Pre-Face anthology, adding a few others that have been of special importance to the ethnopoetic discourse. The bibliography in no sense pretends to completeness but attempts only to suggest the web of readings that underlies even as partial a selection as this one. We are calling our book Symposium of the Whole after Robert Duncan’s phrase already noted in this Pre-face. To this we have added the subtitle, A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. That means, quite literally, that we are, in spite of the privileges of editorship, trying to remain open to the variety of voices and stances around this subject and, above all, to see the work as a movement toward something that can in no sense be taken as presently achieved.

San Diego Jerome Rothenberg 1982

POST-SCRIPT and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. In coming— as the custom is—to the matter of particular indebtedness, we’re mindful that the book has been made possible by the efforts of many gifted people who have contributed to the possibility of an ethno­ poetics from often divergent directions. Those represented in these pages are acknowl­ edged by their presence, while those not represented are so numerous that we hesitate to name some, thereby seeming to slight others. The book is dedicated to the memory of our friend, Michel Benamou, a literary scholar of distinction, who spent the last years of his life as director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in Milwaukee and as a devoted ally in the work of defining a new poetics. Through his presence we were able to believe that a genuine collaboration between artists and scholars was both possible and necessary for that “ liberation of the creative forces from the tutelage of the advocates of power” described by the Dada poet Richard Huelsenbeck in the legendary days of the Cabaret Voltaire. We are grateful also for the encouragement and good talk of our editor, Robert Zachary, who commissioned the book and gave us the privilege of gathering these works as a gift to those who wish to use them.

J. R. D. R.