Sacred Forgery and the Grounds of Poetic Archaeology: Armand Schwerner's "The Tablets"

Abstract

The final edition of Armand Schwerner's The Tablets arrives as valuable, important book, extending and challenging our conceptions of poetry, reading, certainty, completeness, and instructing us in the value of humor and the centrality of various modes of not-doing. The National Poetry Foundation has done beautiful job of producing this book, giving it properly large page-size format, pricing the book reasonably, and including an excellent, helpful CD recording of Schwerner's superb reading of great many of The Tablets. The Tablets exists at timely and seemingly timeless intersection of the written/visual and oral/performative. It profoundly moving and flawed project, at once greatly humorous, learned, and outrageous. When I call Schwerner's great work flawed, I do so with the awareness that all writing inevitably flawed. But, as part of my taking this work seriously, I do wish to consider what I see to be some of the limitations of Schwerner's work as well as the great accomplishment of it. The Tablets is, among other things, key book in the work of particular generation-a group of writers/thinkers that includes David Antin, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, and Dennis Tedlock. These writers extend the encyclopedic impulse of modernism-the beginning globalism of Pound and Eliot and Olson-to make (in Robert Duncan's words) a symposium of the whole, and an ethnopoetics pursued with rigor, intelligence, curiosity, and passion that has changed forever the scope of poetry, particularly in the United States. Set beside the anthologies, translations, and books of poems by these writers, much contemporary poetry, particularly the poetry of official verse culture, readily seen to be minor, narrowly conceived, and claustrophobic in its scope and ambition. Schwerner began work on The Tablets in 1968, and, as Arthur Sabatini notes, Schwerner's career is paradigm of the way, during the past three decades, poets and poetry have become enmeshed in the many forms of discourse and performance that characterize contemporary art (DLB, 243). In an interview with Ed Foster, Schwerner describes the incident that triggered the conception of The Tablets: ... the thing that spawned the beginning stages of that work occurred when I was graduate student working in the Columbia Library. At the end of one of the long stacks I stuck out my arm to rest it on one of the shelves for moment, looked at what I was covering and there was large format edition of Samuel Noah Kramer's translation and transliteration from the Sumerian. I interpreted my experience as an omen. I have never forgotten the power of that initial charge. Charge in both senses, both electricity and the responsibility for task I hadn't yet formulated. (T, 43) For me, The Tablets opens up tremendously and extends its scope of consciousness in crucial ways with Tablet XXVII (the final Tablet) and with the concluding section, Tablets Journals /Divagations. Finished in the last year of Schwerner's life, Divagations constitutes one-fifth of the final book. Perhaps it fitting that book such as The Tablets, with its key figure of the Scholar/Translator, would conclude with such superb commentary on commentary, an extended meditation less ruled by the governing conceptions of the rest of the work itself. For me, this Apocrypha becomes the heart of the text itself, where we learn most passionately and exactly what at stake in The Tablets. Schwerner was quite aware of the significant departure and violation involved in adding the Divagations (which first appeared in the Atlas Press 1989 edition of The Tablets, and now appears in much more extended version in the new National Poetry Foundation edition): For so many years, I'd been deeply convinced that everything should go into the poem, that there should be no need for external divagations. And then, years after that profoundly held belief, I added Divagations, long section of citations and commentary as an appendix to Tablets I-XXVII. …