Here's part of an article on Schwerner in Jacket 10. At Jacket's site
there's an image of the cover of _Selected Shorter Poems_.
Norman Finkelstein reviews
Armand Schwerner
Armand Schwerner, Selected Shorter Poems. San Diego,
Junction Press, 1999.
142 pp. $16.00.
Armand Schwerner, The Tablets. Orono, ME, National Poetry
Foundation, 1999.
158 pp. + CD. $19.95.
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.
Yet it was given to Schwerner, perhaps to a greater extent
than any of his fellows, to understand the deep irony and uncanny
pathos that informed the project at its most serious
-- which is also to say, at its most grandly comic.
Schwerner embraced the universalizing spirit of
ethnopoetics -- the dream of total translation, total performance,
total synchronicity -- while at the same time implicitly acknowledging
its impossibility. The Tablets is his brilliant monument to this
realization, but its step by step progress can be seen in his shorter
poems as well, many of them as technically accomplished and beautiful as
the best parts of his long work. Schwerner's poetry, from his early work
in The Lightfall (1963), (if personal) (1968), and Seaweed (1969), and
on through the various editions of The Tablets, presents a great range
of forms and procedures. But what is to be found consistently, both on
the page and in Schwerner's extraordinary readings, is the underlying
assumption that language, particularly spoken language, embodies a
kind of primacy which, when discovered anew (a discovery which is to
be made endlessly), can restore a fundamental sense of wonder to human
existence.
Part of this wonder is
derived from the
nature of the poetic
process. As
Schwerner explains, "The
made thing,
poem, artifact, product,
will appear to
the maker as Other and
yet give the
pleasure of recognition,
to breed other
discoveries. The voices
of the made
thing, poem, object, need
no ascription
by the maker. He does not
know the
necessary identity of a
voice or many
voices. They speak him in
a way he
later discovers. The
locus appears
later" (Tablets 131).
This statement
pulls together a number
of the most
important aspects of
ethnopoetics as
an original artistic
tendency -- original
in Pound's sense of "make
it new" and
original in the sense of
a return to
origins. When Schwerner
describes the
artifact's confronting
the maker as an
Other, he reflects a
typically
postmodern scepticism regarding the unitary self and its
expression in the poem.
The current notion that language speaks us, rather than
vice versa, is likewise found
in the image of unknown voices speaking the poet. But the
sense of otherness that
obtains between subject and utterance is also very
ancient, going back to the
shaman's trance, the possession of the tribal poet by a
god, ancestral spirit, or
totemic power. But whether one regards the phenomenon from
an archaic or
postmodern perspective, it is clear that what the maker
fashions is not
self-expressive or experiential in any conventional sense.
And as Schwerner further
asserts, "there is no nuclear self" (Tablets 130).
Because poetic form is experienced as both recognition and
otherness, it is magical
or uncanny. In Schwerner's work, this linguistic quality
is most apparent in those
texts that rehearse the spoken word, such as the early
"Poem at the Bathroom
Door by Adam":
push-car woman do you love me
watch woman do you love me
iron woman do you love me
bye woman do you love me
happy woman do you love me
store woman do you love me
bird with a heart in his mouth and a kiss in his mouth
present woman do you love me
ask woman do you love me
that's all I can think of (Selected 52)
In 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.
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 last
of their season, along the high grass path
surprise of blueberries I eat
as I go
and vetch I now recognize, that Baker showed me,
half-inch long wild peas, three
tiny peas, tear the pod
carefully, watch the pressure at the seam
I practice the touch, four yellow warblers
fly into the brush
Girl sniffs along behind me, I think
of Corson Ave. she visited
this world by the ocean
is a grounding, deep auburn hair
of the seaweed I touch, I miss you
in this magic yard . . . (111-112)
The 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 flowing
for a week, walk, and for a week watch
the bark of the balsam fir. now
the red-wing lights on it. now
the river eddies, now when you walk you walk.
(Selected 115)
Here, 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.
-- Norman
Finkelstein
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|
