1/
In 1968 the present co-editor embarked on a series of
anthologies/assemblages aimed at the remapping of poetry on a global,
historical, and contemporary basis. The
range of works these books have charted include not only poets and poetic
genres widely recognized as part of a normative literary canon, but, perhaps
more tellingly, work that may fairly be described as having flourished outside
the nexus of poetry or of literature as commonly understood. The result has been an exploration and
opening of forms of poetry and expression long overlooked or dismissed by
readers and purveyors of the art.[1]
The opening
work for this was Technicians of the
Sacred, still in print after more than forty years and two distinct
editions, which brought together poems and related works from largely
tribal-oral cultures on a nearly global scale.
This was followed in short order by a pair of more specifically ethnic
(or ethnopoetic) books – Shaking the
Pumpkin (American Indian poetry) and A
Big Jewish Book (“poems & other visions of the Jews from tribal times
to the present”) – and by a string of books (America a Prophecy in the early 1970s and three volumes of Poems for the Millennium in the 1990s
and 2000s) that were a rethinking of American and world poetry over a 200-year
span. Aimed at what one of us spoke of
as “a rewriting of the poetic past from the point of view of the present,” each
of these large books brought forward, alongside recognizably canonical work,
newly developed ideas of ethnopoetics
and what we are here calling outside and subterranean poetry.
As what we
hope will be a culminating volume in this progression of books, the two present
editors have assembled a wide-ranging gathering of poems and related language
works, whose outside/outsider positions, in our judgment, challenge some of the
boundaries where poetry has been or where it may be practiced, as well as the
form and substance of the poetry itself.[2] It also extends the time frame of the
preceding volumes in Poems for the
Millennium, hoping to show that, in all places and times, what the dominant
culture has taken as poetry has only been part of the story.
It is our
underlying contention in fact that poetry in our time – and for many years
before – has come to be viewed, rightly or wrongly,
as the outside/outsider art par excellence, an art whose very practice flies
in the face of what we are expected to hold near and dearest. The poet under those conditions resembles not
only the shamans of our primal and archaic pasts and
presents, but the traditional clowns as
well, whose sacred and disruptive art like that of our secular avant-gardists would call the culture’s deepest truisms into question.[3]
2/
At the same time that Technicians
of the Sacred was published, the other co-editor was just getting into
poetry. The timing, however fortuitous, was perfect. He never lived in a world without some access
to the history of the outside and subterranean and was lucky enough to come of
age as a poet with all the concomitant possibilities that were then emerging in
Technicians of the Sacred and
elsewhere. For him, then, poetry has
always been the whole world poetry, in all its manifestations: written, oral,
performative, genre-busting; a challenge to the status quo of the (internal and
external) power relations affecting all aspects of human life on earth, which
have, as far as he’s concerned, always needed challenging. Since those power relations manifest in ways
that now threaten the very existence of all life (e.g., global warming, the
ongoing “sixth great extinction”, “total subsumption”, etc)[4] for him
it is necessary still to keep forcing the margins, to keep open the road to the
Palace of Wisdom, as William Blake called it, a road, it only becomes more
obvious as time passes, that is a road we sorely need.[5]
While there
is always a danger that the terms we use may prove to be less elastic or
forgiving than we intend them, the two key words in this instance –
“outside/outsider” and “subterranean” – name two approaches, sometimes
overlapping, to the kind of material with which we’ve been dealing. Of these two, “outside” – rhyming with
“outsider” – focuses on the societal position of the poet or the group and
their separation from the normative world and/or the dominant culture,
sometimes forced by religion and state, sometimes by a deliberate act of
self-imposed exile, sometimes by psychological or physical circumstance.[6] As such the term itself goes back to its use
as an equivalent to what the French artist Jean Dubuffet had called art brut for the art and poetry of the insane,[7] but also
to what was singled out otherwise as “folk” and “naïve” poetry and art over a
wide range of genres. Included as well
in our view of the possible outside
are poems and related language works from dialects and “nation languages” (K.
Brathwaite), thieves’ cants and other argots or vernaculars, working class and
lumpen poetries, popular and newspaper poetry, sermons and rants, glossolalia
and glossographia, slogans, graffiti, private writings (journals and diaries)
or semi-private (correspondence, blogs, or social- networkings), women’s work
where long suppressed and /or undervalued,[8] and so
on.
As the
second defining term for our work, the “subterranean” marks another if related
field for poetry that often falls between ideas of “outside” and “inside.” A clear extension of Technicians of the Sacred into the historical or post-“primitive”
subterranean, our work under this rubric draws extensively on the writings of
mystics and heretics (among others) or what Gary Snyder famously called “the
great Subculture” – “schools of thought and practice,” as he saw them, “[that]
were usually suppressed, or diluted and made harmless, in whatever society they
appeared.”[9] The range of work here, deriving from
practices outside of poetry and often outside of society, is enormous and its
exploration now opens poetic forms and modes of thought previously closed to
us: a poetics of the open as against the closed, the free against the fettered,
the transgressive and forbidden against the settled. Its shibboleths are terms
like “free verse” and “open form”; the Dada cry “to liberate the
creative forces from the tutelage of the advocates of power” (R. Huelsenbeck);
the assertion by William Blake that “poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race.” As such it also binds us to the political and moral
renegades and “outriders” (A.Waldman), whose work has come undiminished from
the last century into our own.[10]
. . . . . . .
4/
We view all of these works – those presented here and those
still to be brought forward – as fertile grounds for the creation of new forms
and occasions, like the “creative chaos of liminality” described years ago by
Victor Turner. It is our hope too that
their presence here will move us closer to the realization of the full
potential of poetry in all times and places and will reinforce our sense of how
poetry – broadly defined like Dada as “a state of mind” (T. Tzara), a form of
languaging and thinking – appears in the real lives of people and peoples everywhere.[11]
It is in
that sense that the recovery of the outside and subterranean should be viewed
as part of a still larger project, what we’re tempted to speak of here as an omnipoetics and the ultimate assemblage
toward which we’re heading as an anthology of everything. That we will
never get there is also certain[12]
and we remain aware, as with every previous attempt, of how much and how many
we can’t manage to include. With some
such sense of limitations we were determined that this gathering would not turn
into an anthology of contemporary “outsider” poets where the claim to outsideness
is as widespread as it is, that it would be no more than an attempt to create a
map or collage of possible outsides filled with their own near certainties and
contradictions. Nor can it be limited to
the naïve or untrained poets and artists who loom so large in other approaches
to outsiderness. We have accordingly not
hesitated to include a small but significant number of poets who in the course
of time have attained and kept an unquestionably inside status: Dante, Blake,
Hölderlin, Dickinson, among the more notable.
For this and much else we have tried to make our position clear in the
accompanying commentaries.
We have
also chosen as our title a phrase defining poetry from the Enlightenment
philosopher and writer Denis Diderot as a way to stress its disruptive and
ultimately expansive nature, calling the civic order – the civilized order –
into question even while sharing in it.
If that much was a guideline for us – and it was – there was a still
larger sense in which we viewed the assemblage as a whole as itself an
experiment, to discover by juxtaposition the possible relationship (as both
harmony and discord) of poetries from a diverse range of times and
cultures/subcultures and from a spread of social levels in those cultures where
such terms apply. It became in that
sense our version of what
Robert Duncan had spoken of as a “grand collage” within each
poem and, again, as “a poetry of all poetries.”[13]
Along
some such lines and as a mark of continuity with our own works, we have also
drawn from time to time on commentaries from our previous writings in Technicians of the Sacred and
elsewhere. Working together here,
we are tempted to think of the work of poetry over-all as a work in common,
shared with a larger world in which every languaged being can play a role,
while at the same time it calls a number of the “inside” assumptions into
question. Toward that end we hope that
this book may lead to others, new configurations and special views as valid as
our own. In saying this we see the new
century and millennium as a continuing field for poetry & the work of the
outside as a reminder of the greater work at hand.
jerome rothenberg
john bloomberg-rissman
August 2014
The end notes presented here are part of the collaging game that John Bloomberg-Rissman and I have been playing throughout.
[2] One may ask why the desire for such an extension of
the field? Among a number of possible answers: “We wanted to stay human!” (Hans
Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art). Or
William Carlos Williams in an often cited directive: “It is difficult to get
the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found
there.”
[3] Or transposing Wittgenstgein’s words about philosophy
to a similar reconsideration of poetry: “[Poetry], as we use the word, is a fight against
the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue Book, 27)
[4] “When they
think their land is getting spoiled, the white people speak of ‘pollution.’ In
our language, when sickness spreads relentlessly through the forest, we say
that xawara [epidemic fumes] have seized it and
that it becomes ghost. … If the epidemic continues] the forest will become dark
and cold and will remain so forever. … Then the waters will gradually cover the
entire earth … just as it happened at the beginning of time.” (David Kopenawa, The
Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman)
[5] “The road of
excess leads to the palace of
wisdom.” (W. Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)
[6] it is through the ECLIPSEs – “darkness”of my
life & work – you see, one is presenting oneself hidden in plain site/sight/cite
through these works
“in Other words” – the streets the stones the grass one walks on – is – one finds there – the writing of one's way –
the feeling of being so outside that is hopeless, “total eclipse” –
“suicidal” “psychotic depression” "”chronic substance abuse” etc – through all that –
is – as a poem of mine says
“To go through darkness until all that remains is LIGHT” –
to find this writing this Way this being – in the stones and – as Petra Backonja wrote (paraphrase poorly) to do what Gerard de Nerval in AURELIA says is impossible: to find the way of writing so that the stones themselves speak (David-Baptiste Chirot, in a private communication)
“in Other words” – the streets the stones the grass one walks on – is – one finds there – the writing of one's way –
the feeling of being so outside that is hopeless, “total eclipse” –
“suicidal” “psychotic depression” "”chronic substance abuse” etc – through all that –
is – as a poem of mine says
“To go through darkness until all that remains is LIGHT” –
to find this writing this Way this being – in the stones and – as Petra Backonja wrote (paraphrase poorly) to do what Gerard de Nerval in AURELIA says is impossible: to find the way of writing so that the stones themselves speak (David-Baptiste Chirot, in a private communication)
[7] “A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when
it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a
person’s being. … It is my belief that only in this ‘Art Brut’ can we find the
natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary
state.” (Jean Dubuffet, from
”Prospectus et tous écrits suivants,” 1967)
[8]
“Why ... was I born a woman, to be
scorned by men in words and deeds? I ask myself this question in solitude. ...
Your unfairness in not writing to me has caused
me much suffering, that there could be no greater suffering. ... You yourself
said there was no goal I could not achieve. But now that nothing has turned out
as it should have, my joy has given way to sorrow. ... For they jeer at me
throughout the city, the women mock me.” (Isotta
Nogarola [1418-1466], Italian humanist and intellectual, from a 1437 letter to
the philosopher Guarino da Verona)
[9] “Peasant witchcraft in Europe, Tantrism in Bengal,
Quakers in England ,
Tachikawa-ryu in Japan , Ch’an
(Zen) in China Golden
Gate Park
[10] “Poetry is a rival government always in opposition to
its cruder replicas.” (William Carlos Williams)
Or Anne Waldman on the figure of “the outrider” as a still more engaged
subterranean force or presence: “The Outrider holds a premise of imaginative
consciousness. The Outrider rides the edge – parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the
mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it
recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or
rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of ‘negative capability’, but
also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands
that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The
Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the outrider is a
kind of shaman, the true spiritual ‘insider’. The shaman travels to zones of
light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes
back to tell the stories.” (From the essay “Premises of Consciousness: Notes on
Howl”) And John Bloomberg-Rissman: “I don’t want to
be anybody’s legislator / unacknowledged or otherwise / I just want to look ‘em
in the eye and say ‘yo!’”
[11] “Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms
itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and
yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the
opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very
simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.” (T. Tzara, “Lecture on
Dada” [1922], tr. Robert Motherwell)
[12] “… when its graph will expand with unparalleled
volume and regularity, we may hope that the mysteries which really are not will
give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two
states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of
absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this
Surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my
death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.” (A.
Breton, in Manifesto of Surrealism)
[13]
In the grand collage signs flash green
against blue, black against white, red against yellow. Enlarged pupils of the
emerging doctrine attend the hidden teacher of the increasing sound.
And all the signs rime.
Robert Duncan, Bending
the Bow
Or
again: “In the poem this very lighted room is
dark, and the dark alight with love’s intentions. It is striving to come into
existence…a poetry of all poetries, grand collage, I name It, having only the
immediate event of words to speak for it. In the room we, aware or
unaware, are the event of ourselves in It.”
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