Years ago,
an interviewer asked Allen Ginsberg what he thought of the language poets. The
way he asked the question, you knew he was hoping Ginsberg would say something
juicy to rev up the poetry wars again. But Allen was
having none of that. Instead, he made a comment about how one generation of
poets points at the moon, then the next generation of
poets notice that they’re pointing. I’ve always
thought that was a great remark, generous & on target.
It’s what
popped into my continuous mind movie when I wrote the name Armand Schwerner in
the list – indeed, really first in line – of the poets whose work Patrick
Herron’s Lester brings to mind. Lester’s Be
Somebody is rather like The Tablets turned inside out. Then yesterday I was thinking about
George Oppen & how it was possible for somebody like Edward Hirsch to completely misread him. And that
brought up the comic travails of the infamous “scholar-translator” – I love
that hyphen & all that those two terms do to one another – of The Tablets & there was Armand
again. And, frankly, of the poets I once used to think of as the Caterpillar
Group –
When I
first set out to start a little magazine in the 1960s, knowing absolutely
nothing about what I was getting myself into, Armand Schwerner was one of the
first half dozen poets to whom I wrote, asking for work. As everybody who has
ever started a little mag knows, half the reason for having one is just so you
feel permitted to write to these famous older poets and ask for work, for correspondence
in the most literal sense . . . for any acknowledgement of your existence,
really. And Armand sent in a Tablet. I was totally thrilled, but I was also paralyzed by the daunting
tasks of putting together a magazine. By the time, four years hence, that I
finally managed to get the first issue of the much transformed project printed
in its vast run of maybe 100 xeroxed copies, Schwerner’s first large collection
of Tablets I-XV was out & I never
did get around to printing any of his poetry. Looking at the back cover of that
first volume now, I find a quote from George Oppen.
There were,
finally, 27 Tablets, published
posthumously in a sumptuous edition by the National Poetry Foundation,
complete with an accompanying CD of Armand reading 15 of the texts. The CD
makes enormous sense, because it brings out the full three-layer structure of
the text in a way that what’s on the page itself might
not. The first layer – I’ll let you decide which is inner, which is outer – consists of Schwerner himself, the second the
scholar-translator, the third the unnamed author or authors of the Tablets. I have a
sense that when he started the project, it was the idea of the Tablet and what he refers to in a
postscript of sorts – 30 pages of notes to himself entitled “Tablets Journals /
Divagations” – as the Tablet people, that motivated him, but that as the
project matured, the scholar-translator loomed ever larger, more problematic,
ultimately the focus of satiric text.
The idea of the long poem as fake, as satire, is markedly different from
the precious-object status that Pound, say, wants to lend his sphere of light.*
While The Tablets is the work for
which Schwerner is most well known – his Doomsday
Dictionary, co-edited with
Here’s
one of the pantoums, just to give a sense of
Schwerner as a non-satiric, non-conceptualist poet. To each pantoum
Schwerner noted where he had gotten some material, in this instance from the
poetry of
The Way Up is the Way Down
so often
as if earth had a trachea
full of dust
I envision my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street
“as if
earth had a trachea”
that was your phrase but
I envision
my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street
that wasn’t what you had in mind?
that was your phrase but
I was drawn
to an image of falling
that wasn’t what you had in mind
father?
I was drawn
to an image of falling –
the way up is the way down
father
did you used to have such pictures?
the way up is the way down
so often
did you used to have such pictures
full of dust
This poem,
curiously enough, is the closest I can recall any American poet – any poet, period – capturing a spirit that I would
associate with the sensibility of the painter Marc Chagall. It is, all at once,
both simple & complex, and in that sense balanced as few poems are.
When he
died in 1999, Schwerner was translating Dante’s Inferno. My understanding is that that project was not finished,
although some pieces did appear in magazines. I would love to see what passages
there are.
* A phrase I
can never hear without thinking of The
Cantos as a giant, mirrored disco ball.
