English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

27 September 2005

Leon Stennis

Technicians of the Sacred, Symposium Are Interesting

Jerome Rothenberg’s book Technicians of the Scared is interesting because of the variety of ethnopoetic contributions that it presents. I especially enjoyed reading the “Pre-Face,” as he calls it, and the sections on “Visions and Spels” and “Africa.”

In the “Pre-Face” Rothenberg talks about how the field of ethnopoetics, still a relatively new field or genre, has changed since 1968 when he ventured into it. “…It (Technicians of the Sacred) reflects a renewed interest in the collection of traditional poetries & an unprecedented number of translation projects whose main aim has been the re-creation of oral performances in both written and sounded versions,” he said (xix). “With this has also come a change in quality, a new degree of freedom related to the freedom won in our own poetry.”

This new degree of freedom that Rothenberg mentions comes across in both the “Visions and Spels” and “Africa” sections. Take the very first poem titled “The Annunciation” unfolds or conveys some unusual images of man, nature, and the universe.” section. “A man born from a flower in space(,) a man riding a colt foaled from a sterile mare,” reads the first line (49). In the reading, “How Isaac Tens Became a Shaman,” a mixture of prose and verse, it seems that the speaker was in a trance or under a spell throughout, but it seems that he is only aware that he is in such state part of the time:

“At my father’s home…I fell into a sort of trance. It seems

those two shamans were working over me to bring me back

to health…When I woke up & opened my eyes, I thought that

flies covered my face completely. I looked down, & instead

of being on firm ground, I felt that I was drifting in a huge

whirlpool. My heart was thumping fast” (50).

In a number of the poems or readings in this section it is difficult to tell if the speaker or someome else is in a trance or “spel,” as Rothenberg writes it. Some of the poems and readings are hard to interpret, but many of them will keep the read’s attention because of the oddities, unnaturalness, and sometime earthiness. Take this reading titled “The Dog Vision,” for example. I did not discover the word “dog” in the text, contrary to the heading, until the 11^th paragraph. Then it reads like this “…I could see a dust rising there and out of the dust(,) the heads of dogs were peeping” (58). In the poem, “A List of Bad Dreams Chanted as a Cause & Cure for Missing Souls,” the entire dream is not bad, or at least it does not seem to be. “To dream that one’s hair is falling out / To dream that all of one’s teeth are falling out,” for example (67). On the other hand “To dream that one is being saved / To dream that she is answering a man’s proposal of marriage”

doesn’t seem bad to me.

Some of the poems take usual forms, like “The Killer” with its use of the word “listen” as a command for almost every line of the short poet (70). Uniquely enough, in the poem “Spell Against Jaundice,” virtually everything turns “yellow” through line 10, when we learn that the jaundice is the yellow fever. Likewise, every line after line 10 also has the word yellow in it. In another poem, “A Poison Arrow,” the poison arrow is a metaphor for a number of things, especially diseases that kill people. Another poem, “From the Night Chant,” got my attention because it states in he poem that the chanting is to a “male divinity,” a bit removed from the current sensitivity tp gender in poetry and other areas of literature in so called mainstream American literature.

In the “Africa” section, I thought there were some good poems and other readings, but I thought there should have been some indication as to which country in Africa or which ethnic group or tribe in Africa the poetry or reading camp from. In some cases either the country or tribe were listed. I just think that this should have heen done for each piece. Africa is too generic a heading for something like this, especially in this day of cable television, the Internet and other means of instant communications. President George W. Bush event made the mistake of calling Africa a “country” once

Nevertheless, I thought the “Abuse Poem: For Kodzo & Others” was interesting

because of the things it detailed as abuse, “evil firewood,” “the man who eats off the farm he hasn’t planted,” poking “a stick into the flying ant’s grove,” “Amegavi said he has some wealth and he took Kodzo’s part,” “the lion caught a game, alas his children took it away from him,” and “this imbecile, evil animal who_____ others’ wives fatteningly” (164-165). “In Death Rites I” there were interesting references to death, like “spirits of the dead,” “flight of the mosquitoes,” “dead leaves,” and “the storm has growled” (172). Interesting metaphors like “it passes,” “the great cold,” “the eyes are extinguished,” “the

shade has vanished,” “the light is on high,” and “the prisoner is free” are used in “Death Rites II.” (173).

In the essay “Jerome Rothenberg: New Forms from Old,” Michael Castro makes some good points about the success of Rothenberg’s work. He says:

“Rothenberg extended the work, begun by Austin and continued by Olson, of placing tribal poetries and the consciousness behind them within a modern literary and historical context “In addition, Rothenberg’s concept of total translation draws on the inclination toward performance poetry in the twentieth-century European and American avant-garde literary movement, including projective verse. It uses American Indian poetries as the basis for developing new, post modern performance forms intended to extend America’s sense of what a poem is and can be (117).

Castro also takes note of Rothenberg’s emphasis on the “preliterate” tribal context of the poem, dominance of “concrete on non-casual thought” in tribal poetry, his finding of participatory demands in postlogical American and European as well as ceremonial Indian song. Additionally, Castro says Rothenberg likes the fact that there is an analogy between the “intermedia situations” between the various areas of Indian performance. Rothenberg likes the “animal rootedness of primitive poetry” as well as the analogy between modern and tribal poetics, which involves correspondence between the poet and the shaman. The latter is an area of ethnopoetics that still not accepted by some.

In Rothenberg’s Symposium of the Whole, I found particularly interesting an essay by Ishmael Reed, a poet and novelist, who argues that NeoHoo Doo, which he describes as a “Lost American Church,” has not been given its due for influencing America culture. Actually what Reed, who tries to inject a little humor into the matter, is talking about are the cultural expressed by many of toda’s African American literary and creative people. They have not gotten their due, he believes.

“The reason that “HooDoo is not given the credit that it deserve in influencing American culture is because the students of that culture both ‘overground’ and ‘underground’ are uptight closet Jeho-vah revisionists,” he says (417). “They would assert the American and East Indian and Chinese thing before they would the black thing.

For the ethnopoet, I think the question raised by Reed is a valid one. Has African American culture been give it due in ethnopoetics?