Symposium of the Whole : A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics / Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rothenberg, Jerome, Author.

Rothenberg, Diane, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Literature and society.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (523 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [1983]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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:

Symposium of the Whole

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Pre-Face

ONE. Preliminary Moves

Magic Words

The Age of the Gods and the Origins of Language

From a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples

From The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

In Wildness is the preservation of the World

The Rise of Bourgeois Rule and the Origin of World Literature

From "Mauvais Sang" [Bad Blood]

On Ritual and Theater

From The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry

A Note on Negro Poetry/Oceanian Art

Reality at White Heat

Paideuma

The Value of Leo Frobenius

The Duende

On Negritude

The White Goddess

From Tristes Tropiques

The Epilogue to Shamanism

Human Universe

Plato and the Definition of the Primitive

Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique

Pre-Face to Technicians of the Sacred

TWO. Workings

The Meaning of Meaningless Words and the Coefficient of Weirdness

Born Tying Knots

How the Names are Changed on the Peyote Journey

Speech and Image: An African Tradition of the Surreal

Koyukon Riddle-Poems

Izibongo: Zulu Praise-Poems

Drum Language and Literature

Guruwari Designs

The Written Face

The Divination Poetry of Ifa

First Person Voice in Ainu Epic

Songs and the Song

Some Ewe Poets

THREE. Meanings

The Meaning of Everyday Objects

The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Indian Perspective on American Indian Literature

The Mushrooms of Language

An American Indian Model of the Universe

The Fertilizing Word

The Dreaming

On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure

God the Father/God the Mother

Return to Wirikuta: Ritual Reversal and Symbolic Continuity in the Huichol Peyote Hunt

The Return of the Symbol

FOUR. Doings

From "On the Balinese Theater"

The Aesthetics of the Sounding of the Text

From "Shamanistic Theater: Origins and Evolution"

The Sacred Clown

From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers

Nsibidi/Action Writing

Poetry without Sound

Kabbalistic Ritual and the Bride of God

From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad

FIVE. Contemporary Moves

From "Rites of Participation"

A Review of "Ethnopoetics"

Some North Pacific Coast Poems: A Problem in Anthropological Philology

"Tell It Like It's Right in Front of You"

Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry

The Tenth Horse Song of Frank Mitchell

Song/Poetry and Language- Expression and Perception

Fragments from the Prayers Made on Behalf of Nathaniel Tam by the Tzutujil-Maya Priest Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy, Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, 1953, 1959

The Man Made of Words

Neo-HooDoo Manifesto/ The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic

Expressive Language

From "The Incredible Survival of Coyote"

Coyote Poems

The Birth of Loba

The hinges of civilization to be put back on the door

The Preface to Hades in Manganese

Talking to Discover

From "DiaLogos: Between the Written and the Oral in Contemporary Poetry"

Writing in the Imagination of an Oral Poet

The Death of Sedna

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

0-520-96634-1

OCLC:

1100443708