EthnoPoetics as the New Black?

In September 2008 American Poet Jerome Rothenberg organized a small birthday bash to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his EthnoPoetic anthology 'Technicians of the Sacred, A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania'. I like the idea of Jerome Rothenberg, perhaps because, born in 1931, he is too old to be one of those depressing baby-boomers the year 1968 evokes: he reminds me more of the refined culture that went down with the Republic of Weimar then of the mass hysteria of Woodstock. Rothenberg does not come across as a faded old hippie, but he is, metaphorically speaking, their older, more responsible but nerdy, brother. Rothenberg has always sought independence, independence of mind and independence from the established powers and habits of the literary world. He published his own magazines and he created his own traditions, his own predecessors. He is a poet but also a collector, an anthologist, and with EthnoPoetics he has created his own literary movement. In theory EthnoPoetics is be as ownerless as any academic discipline or artistic principle and many writers and researchers have published their work under this label, but in practise EthnoPoetics is inseparably tied up with the career, taste and personality of Rothenberg.

Poets tend to start at least a dozen poetic movements before they reach thirty but Rothenberg stands out because his vision has greater scope. Instead of promoting some minor idea or principle as a major breakthrough Rothenberg discovered something that was not minor: non-western literature, a huge uncharted globe full of it. His many finds most notably include the poetries of the so-called primitive people, especially the Indians (as they were then still called) in his own backyard. By looking at these literatures he also found a way to look at the literature of the West in a way nobody within literature had done before. To create his manifesto, to bring to the West a great number of new unrepresented minds, he did not need to get a PhD, he did not have to go through the ordeals of tribal life, nor did he need to go abroad, all he needed was a library. From kilometres worth of books nobody wanted to read: from the annals of ethnography, anthropology, linguistics and what academic specialization have you, he distilled his 'Technicians of the Sacred'. From the deepest graves of the academic paper trail his tome of strange voices was projected into the self-indulging guts of high-culture. But Rothenberg is not an impartial reflecting daemon, on the contrary: his art is one of distortion and ventriloquism. 'Technicians of the Sacred' is a mind trick.

Tribal cultures and their plight are witnessing something of a revival and this might well ignite new interest in the field of EthnoPoetics. In fact, this new attention for the nobility of loin-clothed savage (because of course that is where it always comes down to, nothing as disappointing as the uncontacted tribe's jaguar shaman wearing an Adidas T-Shirt) is only the latest manifestation of the same spirit that informed Rothenberg. For instance, the much-repeated appeal of Wade Davis (a Harvard anthropologist and ethnobotanist and a 'National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence') to protect the ethnosphere sounds like what EthnoPoetics would sound like if Al Gore had invented it. The 'ethnosphere', the cultural equivalent to the biosphere, is defined as the aggregate of all human cultures that have existed since the beginning of consciousness. Fifty percent of the Ethnosphere will go extinct in our lifetime and Davis has chosen storytelling as the way to help keep these endangered cultures alive. Much of the poetics of EthnoPoetics is concerned with just this power of non-Western poetry as performance as the antidote against the anaemia of our own strictly literate literary book culture. 

Made curious by the television programmes of Bruce Parry or by a rave review of the tribal way of life in the National Geographic, the plumber or IT-consultant picking up a copy of the Technicians might be in for a surprise. Reading texts from a different culture is not an easy or even a fun thing to do. Without the proper context, the poem or song removed of all untranslatable rhyme and rhythm, ignorant of the life and symbols of the people whose poetry you are reading there is little left to lift the experience and appreciation of it into something exceeding the platitudes of the exotic. Academia has the foreword, the post scriptum and the footnote to kill the thing in ponderous explanation. Rothenberg on the other hand is not interested in an accurate portrayal of what these poetries 'mean' at all. While densely annotated it is only rarely that he will give factual backgrounds to a text, like date, author or original use. The Sumerian, the classical European, Chinese and Mayan, the shamanic and the contemporary tribal at its most raunchy are arranged along side each other like random knick-knacks at a flea market. The reader is to pass through them with Surrealist reverie, hoping for serendipitous enlightenment.

'Technicians of the Sacred' anthology spells re-appropriation: Rothenberg's real intent is not to represent but to recreate, to use all these poetries to tell the story of his real love, the 20th century avant-garde, from a different perspective. For his playful insensitivity to the original and his anarchic juxtaposing of material Rothenberg has been called a modern colonialist but this is unfair. Cultures live in perpetual state of cross-contamination and the main body of the poetry collected here is played out against the second anthology, this time of modern poetry, hidden in the commentaries. In the process of this redefining of bits and pieces from the entire world in terms of abstract poetry, sound poetry, performance pieces, concept art, etc, he creates novel but very odd categorizations: eskimo rituals become fluxus events and Monte La Young must have been a fertility rite geek. His treatment of wilfully obscure outsider movements like Dada by quoting what may well be the aboriginal equivalent to Kenny Rogers, Cliff Richard or Madonna makes for odd vistas you will find no where else. This makes 'Technicians of the Sacred' quirky but inspirational, unreliable but fascinating, obsessive but educational, profane but exalted, annoying but admirable.

October 2008

Jerome Rothenberg's Blog: http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com