[Wgcp-whc] WG Poetics--12/9

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All,

Just a note that the Working Group will not be meeting tomorrow (Friday the
2nd).  Instead we will meet next Friday (the 9th) at our usual time.  We will
be discussing the work of Armand Schwerner, primarily his magnum opus The
Tablets.  The photocopies of excerpts from this book are being churned out even
now and so they will be ready quite soon.  I will send a note as soon as they
are available.  Apologies in the delay getting them out.

As enticement I'll paste below an excerpt form a piece by Ramez Qureshi (avaible
in its entirty here: http://home.jps.net/~nada/tablets.htm) describing
Schwerner's Tablets:

The latest and final installment of Armand Schwerner?s life-long endeavor, The
Tablets, arrived virtually simultaneously with news of his death early in 1999,
and takes its place besides those large-scale poetic projects ? Pound?s
Cantos, Williams?s Paterson, Olson?s Maximus Poems, and Zukofsky?s "A"
? which have provided some of the most stunning lineaments of American poetry
this century.

How does one describe The Tablets? There is nothing quite like Schwerner?s
masterpiece: it consists of "translations" of twenty-five "Tablets,"
purportedly from ancient Sumerian, plus two more "Tablets" with exegesis, and a
"Tablets Journals/Divagations" appended. Yet Schwerner ? whose career as a
poet and translator also includes lyric and translations ranging from classical
Greek drama to Dante to Native American texts ? has not translated anything in
this book. Rather, the tablets are parodies of translations of ancient texts,
Schwerner?s own invention, averaging about three pages each, with a swiping
ken broad enough to include onanism and high religious ceremony.

The concocted quality of the tablets endows the book with a quality of humor
surpassing that of "Language Poets" such as Andrews and rivaling Ashbery?s
which grows from beginning to end: the reader cannot help but laugh at the
sheer ludic fictivity of the project on the whole. Another comic stimulus is
the "Scholar/Translator," whom Schwerner has created as his arch-persona. The
Scholar/Translator, described as "wrong-headed" by Schwerner in the appended
commentary, will interfere with judgements such as "odd" (Tablet II), will
offer his affective side to the reader, adding "I am not deeply moved" in
Tablet VI, and confessing to altering the tablets and entering periods of
depression in Tablet VIII. Like the best of modern (by modern here I mean
avant-garde, Modern or Post-) poetry, Schwerner forces us to rethink basic
assumptions about the art itself, in this case the binary duality of the
serious and the comic. Besides serving as a comedian persona, the
Scholar/Translator conveniently brings "the reader into consideration of the
essential ambiguities of syntax, grammar and translation, a kind of
undependable groundlessness of appearance," writes Schwerner in his journals.