The death of Wayan Limbak at the age of 106 the other day caught my eye for the same reason that Barrett Watten later posted a link to the New York Times obit to the Poetics List. As one of the co-creators of the Ketjak, Limbak was a key innovator in the arts of the 20^th century. And he unwittingly played a huge role in my own aesthetic development.

 

Ketjak, as you may know, is the title of this very long project I’ve been embarked on for several decades now. Originally, this Dutch transcription of Balinese word was the title of a booklength prose poem I composed in 1974, the year Watten & I shared a flat on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. That poem proved also to be the first installment of a four-poem cycle, the remainder of which came out under the collective name of The Age of Huts. Ketjak is also the name of the larger, still on-going process that includes

 

·         (first part) The Age of Huts

·         (second part) Tjanting

·         (third part) The Alphabet.

 

There is a fourth part, too, which I’m about to get started on. Each part is approximately as long as all of the preceding parts – that’s the core premise (working, as I said in my review of Tom Meyer’s Coromandel, from the innermost part of the mollusk outward).

 

Even more importantly, Ketjak is the title of a piece of music & a dance in Bali. I first discovered it on a recording made by David Lewiston entitled Golden Rain, first released by Nonesuch Records in 1969. I’d bought the album for its gamelan music – the Nonesuch Explorer series, only now being reissued on CD, was in many respects the first great project of widely available field recordings of world music. Somewhere in my travels in Berkeley I’d discovered that for me at least gamelan – the Balinese word for orchestra – was more than just another mode of music.

 

But it was the oral chant of Golden Rain’s “B” side, 200 men participating in what Lewiston’s notes characterized as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, that mesmerized me. At 22:08 minutes, it was – still is – the most amazing oral performance I have ever heard. Pavarotti singing “Nessum Dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot, even at his best, has nothing on this. Nor Janis Joplin or whatever model for the vocal you might invoke. In Ketjak, & specifically in Lewiston’s recording of a 1966 performance, the effects of accumulation, reiteration & collaboration are instantly available to any ear. It was those aspects that I had in mind when I chose to name my evolving non-narrative prose poem Ketjak.*

 

To some degree, I must have been counting on the idea that my “audience” – something I could count in the low tens back in 1974 – for the most part wouldn’t recognize the word’s context & thus would take it first of all as an opaque instance of recognizable language, word as object. Ketjak is the Balinese term for monkey. But, although there are allusions to monkeys & the Ramayana myth embedded deep within the poem, I don’t think there’s any way to tell that from the poem. &, while I was interested in exploring the music’s formal features, the presence in the word itself of a tj, a consonant combination that does not occur “naturally” in English, was also important.** That combination served at once to make the word both recognizable & quite unfamiliar.

 

The title, which I knew almost the instant I started the poem, functioned in at least two more ways that I was conscious of at the time. First, it gave me permission in terms of my following a structure that had more to do with music than exposition or narrative. Second, it provided a steadying influence, a register to which I could return, something I could think about, even hear, as I thought inevitably, What next?

 

Not long after I composed the poem Ketjak, I came across some articles on the dance & learned that (as Lewiston insinuates without fully acknowledging in his marketing-driven liner notes) Ketjak was by no means an instance of “native” or “tribal” culture, but had in fact been constructed precisely to perform for tourists in search of the exotic. While its origins began with Sang Hyang exorcism ritual dances, a Javanese choreographer, Sardono Kusumo, made modifications sometime in the early 20^th century. In the 1930s, Limbak and at least two westerners, Walter Spies and Katherine Mershon, transformed the ceremony by inserting a danced narrative from an entirely different tradition, the Ramayana. The two layers, each of which entails both singing & dance, occur simultaneously. The very opposite of “indigenous authenticity,” Ketjak  is a modern – even postmodern – pastiche targeted directly for the tourist dollar, the Balinese anticipation perhaps of something like the Blue Man Group, those “avant-garde” performance artists even Jay Leno could love.

 

Given how much my poetry has always entailed layering, juxtaposition & appropriation, it was the history of this form, as much as the form itself, that caused me to extend it from being the title simply of one poem I wrote in 1974.

 

 

 

 

*Ironically, I began working on that poem after hearing not a performance of that piece, but rather a percussion ensemble piece by a gamelan influenced American composer, Steve Reich, Drumming.

 

**As it is also in the word Tjanting, also a Balinese word in a Dutch transcription, this time the name of a pen or stylus used for “writing” or doing linework in batik.