The Tablets
A Restless Messengers Symposium
Edited by Michael Heller
A Restless Messengers Symposium
Armand Schwerner, The Tablets
Edited by Michael Heller
Verge Books, 2026
Michael Heller
Joseph Donahue
Tirzah Goldenberg
Alan Golding
Elizabeth Gray, Jr.
Stephen Williams
It is my great pleasure to present this Restless Messengers symposium on the new edition of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, which coincides with a celebration of the book at Poets House in New York City. Schwerner’s poetry has long been out of print, which is only one of many reasons to celebrate the new edition, edited by Schwerner’s longtime friend Michael Heller and published by Verge Books. The magnificent new edition, as Peter O’Leary explains below (Peter, along with John Tipton, are the founders and editors of Verge), has been years in the making, and since it also includes a generous selection of the shorter poems and translations, it will be the definitive collection of Schwerner’s work for a long time to come. It is our hope that it will also introduce a new generation to Schwerner, and return us to a deep study of the poetry—a study, I believe, that is crucial to poetry today.
Along with such figures as Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, David Antin, and Nathaniel Tarn, Armand Schwerner (1927-1999) was major figure in (and critic of) the ethnopoetics movement, which had a profound international influence on both poetry and cultural anthropology from the 1960s through the 1990s, and up to our present moment. Schwerner was also more broadly an heir to the sweeping modernist vision of poetry as a vehicle for historical investigation and cultural exchange, and as a means of bringing us closer to what Schwerner, following Wallace Stevens, calls “the real.” Thus it is no accident that Schwerner was a friend of the Objectivist George Oppen (“Some of the young men / Have become aware of the Indian...”) and an intimate of Heller, perhaps the most important of what can be called the second generation of Objectivists. The Tablets bears the mark of these associations, but also remains absolutely unique among the major long poems of our time. Staging the enigmatic confrontation of the archaic and the now, and encompassing all that this confrontation implies, it returns to us in this new edition as required reading.
—Norman Finkelstein
Introduction
Peter O’Leary
I first started reading Armand Schwerner in 1996 after I saw him read at the Poetry of the 1960s Conference in Orono at the University of Maine in the summer of 1996. He was introduced at that reading by the host of this symposium, Norman Finkelstein. I remember Norman’s cheerful, enthused, and persuasive suggestion that the opening line of The Tablets, “All that’s left is pattern* (shoes?),” initiates you in six words and one scholarly diacritical mark into the mischievous genius of Schwerner’s masterpiece as well as the satirical power of his work as a whole.
Schwerner followed Norman to the podium, delivering a memorable recitation of parts of The Tablets and some of his other work as well. He had an arresting, performative presence, a clear sense of what made his work funny and compelling, something informed, as I would learn, from his commitment to Dada, among other twentieth-century avant garde movements. As a result of that reading, I became a committed reader.
This meant following The Tablets through a handful of editions (Atlas, NPF), as well as tracking down the earlier, non-Tablets work in fugitive editions, which I would seek out in used bookstores and the stacks of the library. When Schwerner died in 1999, I was just beginning to become aware of his work as a translator. His Cantos from Dante’s Inferno, published in 2000, attracted my attention especially.
When John Tipton and I started Verge Books in 2013, Schwerner was on our radar. From Michael Heller, I learned that an edition of Schwerner’s selected poems, that Mike had been involved with editing, had been scrapped from the short-lived but excellent Poets of the Millennium series published by the University of California Press and edited by Jerome Rothenberg (an old ally of Schwerner’s). John and I were eager to take such a book up with Verge.
Initially, the scope of the book we would publish was a version of the selected poems that Mike was editing for California. But as we discussed the prospects of a book with Verge, its scope expanded. After a period of consideration, at Mike’s urging, we decided to include the entirety of The Tablets, along with the brilliant and searching “Tablets Journals / Divagations.” To this, in the light of Mike’s editorial vision, we added 150 pages of Schwerner’s lyric poetry, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, and translations from the French, from Dante, and from Sophocles. Producing the book was a long process, in part because the design of the book, which includes the use of primitive computer characters in the text of The Tablets in addition to a mixture of typefaces and stagings (to mimic the work and sources of the Scholar/Translator), was complicated. Jeff Clark, working as Crisis, devised a visionary design for the book, so that Schwerner’s genius might be optimally appreciated in its visual and musical dimensions.
Which brings us to the moment of celebrating Schwerner’s work in the form of this symposium. No surprise, the bulk of these essays concern The Tablets, a work of such committed parody, satire, Modernism, and persuasion, you can easily imagine many future symposia. By way of orienting readers to the entirety of Schwerner’s work, this symposium begins with Michael Heller’s comprehensive introduction to the new Verge volume. There is also a short reflection by Tirzah Goldenberg, who performed the meticulous work of copyediting the manuscript. To these are added four remarkable essays about The Tablets: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. writes about delamination of “Tablet XII”; Stephen Williams makes a twelve-sided prism out of Mesopotamian models for Schwerner’s text; Alan Golding looks into the pocket of scholarly commentary (and footnoting) that The Tablets seem uniquely to have stitched; and Joseph Donahue explores the cosmic (Buddhist) implications of Schwerner’s poem in light of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot. All of these contributions orient around the common claim that Schwerner’s work both derives from and sends up Modernism in a way that is unique, and uniquely pleasurable.
Peter O’Leary is the editor of Verge Books. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Onlikenesses, as well as three collections of prose, including The Four Horsemen: Poetry and Apocalypse. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With John Tipton, he edits Verge Books.
Along with such figures as Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, David Antin, and Nathaniel Tarn, Armand Schwerner (1927-1999) was major figure in (and critic of) the ethnopoetics movement, which had a profound international influence on both poetry and cultural anthropology from the 1960s through the 1990s, and up to our present moment. Schwerner was also more broadly an heir to the sweeping modernist vision of poetry as a vehicle for historical investigation and cultural exchange, and as a means of bringing us closer to what Schwerner, following Wallace Stevens, calls “the real.” Thus it is no accident that Schwerner was a friend of the Objectivist George Oppen (“Some of the young men / Have become aware of the Indian...”) and an intimate of Heller, perhaps the most important of what can be called the second generation of Objectivists. The Tablets bears the mark of these associations, but also remains absolutely unique among the major long poems of our time. Staging the enigmatic confrontation of the archaic and the now, and encompassing all that this confrontation implies, it returns to us in this new edition as required reading.
—Norman Finkelstein
Introduction
Peter O’Leary
I first started reading Armand Schwerner in 1996 after I saw him read at the Poetry of the 1960s Conference in Orono at the University of Maine in the summer of 1996. He was introduced at that reading by the host of this symposium, Norman Finkelstein. I remember Norman’s cheerful, enthused, and persuasive suggestion that the opening line of The Tablets, “All that’s left is pattern* (shoes?),” initiates you in six words and one scholarly diacritical mark into the mischievous genius of Schwerner’s masterpiece as well as the satirical power of his work as a whole.
Schwerner followed Norman to the podium, delivering a memorable recitation of parts of The Tablets and some of his other work as well. He had an arresting, performative presence, a clear sense of what made his work funny and compelling, something informed, as I would learn, from his commitment to Dada, among other twentieth-century avant garde movements. As a result of that reading, I became a committed reader.
This meant following The Tablets through a handful of editions (Atlas, NPF), as well as tracking down the earlier, non-Tablets work in fugitive editions, which I would seek out in used bookstores and the stacks of the library. When Schwerner died in 1999, I was just beginning to become aware of his work as a translator. His Cantos from Dante’s Inferno, published in 2000, attracted my attention especially.
When John Tipton and I started Verge Books in 2013, Schwerner was on our radar. From Michael Heller, I learned that an edition of Schwerner’s selected poems, that Mike had been involved with editing, had been scrapped from the short-lived but excellent Poets of the Millennium series published by the University of California Press and edited by Jerome Rothenberg (an old ally of Schwerner’s). John and I were eager to take such a book up with Verge.
Initially, the scope of the book we would publish was a version of the selected poems that Mike was editing for California. But as we discussed the prospects of a book with Verge, its scope expanded. After a period of consideration, at Mike’s urging, we decided to include the entirety of The Tablets, along with the brilliant and searching “Tablets Journals / Divagations.” To this, in the light of Mike’s editorial vision, we added 150 pages of Schwerner’s lyric poetry, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, and translations from the French, from Dante, and from Sophocles. Producing the book was a long process, in part because the design of the book, which includes the use of primitive computer characters in the text of The Tablets in addition to a mixture of typefaces and stagings (to mimic the work and sources of the Scholar/Translator), was complicated. Jeff Clark, working as Crisis, devised a visionary design for the book, so that Schwerner’s genius might be optimally appreciated in its visual and musical dimensions.
Which brings us to the moment of celebrating Schwerner’s work in the form of this symposium. No surprise, the bulk of these essays concern The Tablets, a work of such committed parody, satire, Modernism, and persuasion, you can easily imagine many future symposia. By way of orienting readers to the entirety of Schwerner’s work, this symposium begins with Michael Heller’s comprehensive introduction to the new Verge volume. There is also a short reflection by Tirzah Goldenberg, who performed the meticulous work of copyediting the manuscript. To these are added four remarkable essays about The Tablets: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. writes about delamination of “Tablet XII”; Stephen Williams makes a twelve-sided prism out of Mesopotamian models for Schwerner’s text; Alan Golding looks into the pocket of scholarly commentary (and footnoting) that The Tablets seem uniquely to have stitched; and Joseph Donahue explores the cosmic (Buddhist) implications of Schwerner’s poem in light of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot. All of these contributions orient around the common claim that Schwerner’s work both derives from and sends up Modernism in a way that is unique, and uniquely pleasurable.
Peter O’Leary is the editor of Verge Books. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Onlikenesses, as well as three collections of prose, including The Four Horsemen: Poetry and Apocalypse. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With John Tipton, he edits Verge Books.