Of interest along these lines is also:
_Maria Sabina:Selections_, edited by Jerome Rothenberg (in the "Poets
for the Millennium" series Jerry & I publish at California UP).
Our description of the book: "Shaman and visionary--not a poet in any
ordinary sense--María Sabina lived out her life in the Oaxacan
mountain village of Huautla de Jiménez, and yet her words, always
sung or spoken, have carried far and wide, a principal instance and a
powerful reminder of how poetry can arise in a context far removed
from literature as such. Seeking cures through language--with the
help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language
itself--she was, as Henry Munn describes her, "a genius [who] emerges
from the soil of the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a
native Mexican campesino people." She may also have been, in the
words of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, "the greatest visionary
poet in twentieth-century Latin America."
These selections include a generous presentation from Sabina's
recorded chants and a complete English translation of her oral
autobiography, her vida, as written and arranged in her native
language by her fellow Mazatec Alvaro Estrada. Accompanying essays
and poems include an introduction to "The Life of María Sabina" by
Estrada, an early description of a nighttime "mushroom velada" by the
ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, an essay by Henry Munn relating the
language of Sabina's chants to those of other Mazatec shamans, and
more."
Pierre
On May 11, 2005, at 9:46 PM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
> Another book within the same vein--though without the cooperative
> venture
> and the American interlocutor--is Songs of Love and War: Afghan
> Women's
> Poetry, Edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, translated by Marjolin De
> Jager. It
> is a collection of about 130 or 140 landays, which is the name of
> an Afghani
> oral verse form, the specifics of I do not now remember and have
> not time to
> look up. The introduction is fascinating on the differences between
> the ways
> men and women poets use the form. The men, predictably, use it to
> talk about
> "higher" subjects--religion, philosophy and such--while the women
> use it to
> talk about their lives, but it's more than talk; there is a
> sexual-political/quasi-feminist deeply subversive subtext to the
> landays
> produced by the women, which, as I remember, like the poems of the
> Mayan
> women in the Times article, are often sung as part of daily life or
> rituals,
> like marriage and such.
>
> It's a book worth checking out, and I should say that it makes some
> very
> interesting reading when placed against the poetry of Korean
> kisaeng, which
> were translated and collected in a book put out by Boa Editions,
> the title
> of which I have now forgotten. Lots of similarities across time and
> space,
> even in the different ways that men and women use the poetic forms
> that were
> available to them. I was going to teach a course around that last
> semester,
> but it didn't fill. Maybe it will become the premise for an essay
> of some
> sort.
>
> Anyway, both books are worth checking out.
>
> Richard
>
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"Lyric poetry has to be exorbitant or not at all." -- Gottfried Benn
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Pierre Joris
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