Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an EthnopoeticsJerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.” |
Contents
Magic Words | 3 |
In Wildness is the preservation of the World | 10 |
On Ritual and Theater | 16 |
A Note on Negro PoetryOceanian | 29 |
Paideuma | 36 |
The Duende | 43 |
On Negritude | 52 |
The Epilogue to Shamanism | 59 |
The Sacred Clown | 270 |
NsibidiAction Writing | 285 |
Poetry without Sound | 291 |
FIVE | 319 |
Contemporary Moves | 325 |
A Review of Ethnopoetics | 337 |
Some North Pacific Coast Poems A Problem | 343 |
Tell It Like Its Right in Front of You | 366 |
Plato and the Definition of the Primitive | 71 |
Poetry and the Primitive Notes on Poetry as | 90 |
PreFace to Technicians of the Sacred | 99 |
The Meaning of Meaningless Words and | 107 |
The Meaning of Everyday Objects | 171 |
The Mushrooms of Language | 187 |
The Fertilizing Word | 197 |
On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure | 206 |
God the FatherGod the Mother | 217 |
Return to Wirikuta Ritual Reversal | 225 |
The Return of the Symbol | 231 |
The Aesthetics of the Sounding of the Text | 241 |
From Shamanistic Theater | 257 |
Total Translation An Experiment in | 381 |
The Tenth Horse Song of Frank Mitchell | 393 |
SongPoetry and LanguageExpression | 399 |
Fragments from the Prayers Made on Behalf | 408 |
The Man Made of Words | 414 |
Expressive Language | 422 |
The Birth of Loba | 441 |
Talking to Discover | 450 |
From DiaLogos Between the Written and | 461 |
Writing in the Imagination of an Oral Poet | 474 |
| 485 | |
Acknowledgments | 501 |
Other editions - View all
Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics Jerome Rothenberg,Diane Rothenberg No preview available - 1983 |
Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics Jerome Rothenberg,Diane Rothenberg No preview available - 1983 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Indian ancestors animals anthropologists audience Balinese become beginning called ceremony chants Charles Olson clowns concept consciousness contemporary Coyote culture dance dancers discourse divine drama dream drum Duende earth ehye-la English ethnopoetics everything example excerpt experience expression father figure Gary Snyder gnostic guruwari hand Hopi Hopi language Huichol human idea Jerome Rothenberg Kabbalists kaiko kind language linguistic literary literature living look magic Marķa Sabina meaning mind mother mystical myth nana yeye native Native American nature Navajo Negritude Neo-HooDoo Ngbe object oral original performance person peyote Plato poem poet poetic poetry present primitive reality relation ritual Rothenberg sacred sense shaman Shekhinah signs singing social song sounds SOURCE speak speech spirit story structure symbolic tell theatre things thought tradition translation tree trickster verbal vocables voice wayang Western woman words writing