Armand Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator:
Notes, Paratexts, Avant-Garde Poetics and Institutional Form(ation)s
Alan Golding
“The commentator takes on a more active part. His ‘notes’ become ‘poems.’ What does that mean? What are the differences in the first place? ‘Poem’ is what?” And again: “Prose is eloquence, wants to instruct, to convince; wants to produce in the soul of the reader a state of knowledge. Poetry is the producer of joy, its reader participates in the creative act. Thus Commentary and Text in The Tablets. (Is that distinction stupid?)”[1] The mode referred to in these remarks and questions from Armand Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator is represented most famously in U. S. American poetry by T. S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, of course, more extensively by his contemporary Marianne Moore, and continues in ever-expanding variations into the present. This is a mode in which poets use paratextual apparatus variously to offer supplemental (often self-exegetical) comments, to parody (while adopting) the conventions of scholarly explanation, to exploit the note’s potential for creating a hybrid, polyvocal, dialogic text, to foreground the visual materiality of the written text, its bibliographic codes, in the interests of defamiliarization, or to formally enact and work through themes of secondariness, originality, error, accuracy, and authenticity. Schwerner’s Tablets are a compelling example of the increasing visibility during the post-World War II period of poems, often serial poems, especially but not solely within an experimental or post-New American lineage, constructed out of footnotes, endnotes, editorial commentary and other forms of paratextual apparatus or that put them to some central formal use. If poetry is the scholar’s art, as Wallace Stevens (the subject of Schwerner’s MA thesis and a key influence) would have it, American poets, and particularly American avant-gardists, have with surprising frequency used the scholar’s forms, even if in ironic and resistant ways.[2] These forms have a special force in New American and post-New American poetry precisely because of that poetry’s historically skeptical relationship to the academy. To examine The Tablets as an emblematic, though unique, use of these forms enables us to complicate the historical opposition between avant-garde poetics and academic institutions and discourse, and to rethink their complex, entangled relationship. I want to consider, then, how The Tablets uses annotation and commentary as central to its formal construction and philosophical project and how, in the process, it both anticipates and provides ways to assess, respond to, or complicate critiques of the avant-garde’s purported academic assimilation.[3] Rather, Schwerner’s voracious experimental long poem assimilates academic convention into itself.
If, traditionally, poetry is primary, text, and institutional conventions and commentary are secondary, paratext, a work like The Tablets blurs these boundaries to engage in its material form with one site of its own reception. The Tablets is built out of headnotes, endnotes, the intercutting of “scholarly” commentary, fake and real citations, diacritical marks, constant variant readings, self-commentary, translations into non-existent languages, and, eventually, extensive meta-commentary by the Scholar/Translator who presents these ancient tablet-poems. In purely quantitative terms, it contains far more paratext than text.[4] “Often the line between redactor and author is hard to draw,” claims the Scholar/Translator: “the power of the unsullied literary imagination evident” in the fictional tablets only becomes “evident through the work of the so-called scribes, who were of course redactors” (T 71). For Schwerner, appeals to pedagogical authority, received vocabularies, and interpretive convention are “all a plot to make [the student or reader] accept a nuclear self,” a self that the sequence insistently works to dissolve. “Attention must be paid” (quoting Arthur Miller, in one of The Tablets’ many literary moments)
to the child’s good sense in the art appreciation classroom between slide and slide. He is told that slide a—Titian—is a finished painting because it is a finished painting and that a micron could be added or changed only at the risk of destroying the whole; he is told that the face in slide b—Van Gogh—incorporates weariness-decayed hope-internalized conflict-transpersonal love. He learns never to ask How do you really know when a, or anything, is finished? He knows never to say the face on b makes me happy and seems to me happy. It’s all a plot to make him accept a nuclear self. (T 134)
Here Schwerner narrates an example of institutional failure, a failure of intellectual integrity that leads him to write “I’m mortally affected by others’ categories; they damp up my ease; they are a prioris. Fuck them. They constitute Authority” (T 129). To examine his own use of these “categories” and conventions, however, enables us to complicate and rethink the historical opposition between avant-garde poetics and academic institutions. The Tablets are constantly in dialogue with the context of textual regulation, interpretation and annotation—the “secondary”—that the academy represents, and thus use—even need to use--the academy’s forms and rhetorics to make their point.
The basic mode of The Tablets is established in the first two lines. The sequence starts in ambiguity, interpretive improbability, and editorial self-questioning, in the relationship between text and commentary, the poetic “primary” and the scholarly “secondary.” “All that’s left is pattern (shoes?)”: this first line (repeated at various points in the sequence) gives us the concrete noun, “shoes,” as an unlikely variant reading of the abstract noun “pattern.”[5] It then turns out to be, in the language of line 2, a “doubtful reconstruction” (T 7). This alternating structure of text and commentary characterizes the whole first page, setting up the fundamental method of the poem. Eight lines in, “scholarship” and “meditation” are posed as possible translations of the same word in the non-existent original, while “modernism” is offered as a cryptic gloss on the phrase “wet socks” (T 7). Citations and commentary are intercut with the poetic text, reducing their status as paratext and making them part of the (dis)continuous whole. Thus The Tablets starts in interruption and is about interruption: not poesis interruptus, more interruption as poesis.[6] Especially in performance, the apparently intrusive commentary and the diacritical marks (which ask to be sounded out, even as they also deserve discussion in terms of a visual poetics) become part of the prosody, the pacing, of the whole.[7]
Schwerner comes to find the Scholar/Translator’s academic discourse a “necessary” if painful interruption of lyric felicity. By the end of the poem’s final section, “Tablets Journals / Divagations,” writing in his “own” voice a commentary on all the previous commentary, he describes “the pain I felt when I interrupted a lyric song by any of my unknown archaic speakers by intercalating—or rather by finding necessary the presence of—the S/T’s discursive, often apparently irrelevant comments” (T 160). Some readers have wanted out of The Tablets just those moments of unadulterated lyric beauty that the sequence refuses to provide, and that it uses that least archaic and yet most ritualistic of discourses, the discourse of the academy, to disrupt. From this point of view, the aesthetic risk of the Scholar/Translator’s interruptions is that of a narrowing askesis. (Though I’ll note here one remark from the concluding “Divagations”: “Yeats says poetry to be ‘ascetic, ecstatic, austere’” [T 129].) Schwerner “recalls a hearer’s wish that I omit the S/T’s commentary as unnecessarily clotting; I’d almost want to accede” (T 160).[8] But—and the “but” here is crucial—“precisely such ambiguities, left somewhat to integrally radiate, is useful work done. The thing is, I wanted not to separate the song from the entropic world. This and that” (T 160). On the relationship between song and entropic world, between text and paratext, consider Norman Finkelstein’s observation: “Not the modernist poet, but the modern scholar is the parallel to the archaic figure, who, in The Tablets, is just as often a scribe as a prophet, shaman, or seer . . . the labors of the modern paleographer take on the same burden of ritualized inscription as do the magical and sacred texts . . . that he and the reader encounter on the clay tablets supposedly before them.”[9] The Tablets’ “mock-pedantry,” “the technologies of scholarship that the poem continually parodies,” “deliberately frustrates” the “spirit of prophetic urgency” —and that is precisely the point.[10]
The ambivalence of Schwerner’s relationship to the academy is reflected in a 1998 interview with Edward Foster. On the one hand, this career professor of English registers an understandable skepticism about the academy’s compulsion toward labeling and its competitive politics:
In the colleges and universities an important aspect of the modern rage for categorizations . . . rests on trumping, on unwitting creation of ‘new’ and exploitable lines of thought. More name chairs. More tornadoes in the departments and in the Pied Piper value of professorial prophets. More young acolytes for the universities intent on survival and the overcoming of competitors’ advance men and women.[11]
Counter to all the daily practices of the scholarly and critical (and translational) academy, “The Tablets are involved in wave after wave of denial about any significance in all the looking, checking, interpreting which their own Scholar / Translator apparently embodies.”[12] At the same time, in “Tablets Journals / Divagations,” the thirty pages of self-commentary that conclude The Tablets, Schwerner looks back (apparently tongue in cheek, though I find the tone hard to read here) on his aspirations for the work’s reception: “I assumed there would be a worldly reward, a permanent order of recognition, a clear and continuous placement of my work in the critical adumbrations of the establishing world” (T 146). Schwerner’s attitude towards his own and The Tablets’ reception changed in the course of his career; indeed, he viewed the very term and idea of “this weird fuckass thing called the poetic career” skeptically for many years. Until the late 1980s, he resisted explaining his work in any way: “I didn’t even want to write essays about what I do. I didn’t want to have interviews about what I do, a profoundly anti-belletristic stance on my part.” But by the time of a 1993 interview, he can say that “I increasingly accept [the value of publicly discussing one’s work], and I increasingly see the price that one pays [in critical neglect] for not perceiving the necessity in this particular age of hyper-communication.”[13]
Of one “explanatory essay” reluctantly written “to discuss textures and the motivations for the late Tablets,” his late essay “Glosses,” Schwerner admits that it involves “a kind of identification of myself with the aggressor” (the Scholar/Translator) as he finds himself willing to dig into and do violence to his “own” text.[14] That scholarly aggressor, however, has already been built into the sequence as the medium of the poem’s very survival. The Scholar/Translator is quite explicitly a canonical gatekeeper who acknowledges his institutional investments. In the language of the ‘80s canon debates, he acknowledges, to end Tablet XXVI, that he is centrally “involved in the process of formation of the canon of this sacred material, and . . . will be responsible for the slamming of the gates to any future inclusions” (T 95). In this (rather dizzying) sense, Schwerner-as-author’s canonical status depends on the success of his Scholar/Translator’s work.
Given The Tablets’ framework of “elaborately fake scholarship,” we can easily overlook the extent to which the work incorporates, rests on or talks back to real scholarship, just as the diacritical symbols of the Scholar/Translator’s key have a basis in Sumerian scholarship and can be found in editions of Sumerian texts.[15] Brian McHale identifies The Tablets’ formal and intellectual sources: “It imitates scholarly editions of cuneiform texts by academic Sumerologists and Assyriologists such as Samuel Noah Kramer—hence the nonalphabetic signs for missing, untranslatable, doubtful, and reconstructed passages, . . . which derive directly from editorial conventions in Sumerology.”[16] He goes on to locate the sequence within “the literature of mock scholarship,” the sub-genre of the mock hoax that is distinguished from the hoax because its “will to deceive” is debatable.[17] On analogy with “truthiness,” I’m inclined to coin the term “hoaxiness” for the constantly shifting space of accurate and bogus scholarship that The Tablets inhabits. For as Schwerner stresses, “the work doesn’t exist in a realm of fantasy; there’s too much deep structure of familiar archaeology and palaeography and ritual for that easy course, and thus the work is continuously subject to anchoring constraints”—the constraints imposed by actual, not fake, scholarship.[18] The genuine scholarship represents an embrace of that mode in tension with the ever-present parody of it.
While “sacred forgery” (T 97) is one of the Scholar/Translator’s terms for the project, he still alludes to actual scholars. In the spirit of the Scholar/Translator, then, I’ll do some violence to Schwerner’s text by tracking some of its sources. The Scholar/Translator (like his creator) is genuinely well-informed across a wide disciplinary range and decades of legitimate and relevant scholarly work. If one level of internal tension in The Tablets involves its hoaxiness, another involves the tension within the hoaxiness introduced by real scholarship, real citations and real sources. I’ll take just a couple of examples, both of which involve what Kathryn Van Spanckeren calls “ludicrous” “second-remove characters” incorrectly, though understandably, assumed to be fictional.[19] On the surface, Tablet XII seems to direct some rather crude irony against the improbably titled “mesmerizing work . . . The Music of the Sumerians and their Immediate Successors the Babylonians and Assyrians by the Sumeromusicologist F. W. Galpin” (T 35). But it does in fact cite two paragraphs of an actual 1937 book, reprinted in 1970 when Schwerner was working on the early Tablets. It even has something like a real tablet behind it, since it consists of the Scholar/Translator’s version of Francis William Galpin’s “free translation” of “A Sumerian Hymn on the Creation of Man.” Then the musical “adaptation from Canon Galpin’s hypothetical reconstruction” (T 38-39) reproduces directly a little more than one-third of Galpin’s own musical version of the hymn (26 out of 71 sections), though it excludes Galpin’s English translation.[20] The even more improbable Tablet VII “cannot be rendered into English” because the original, subsequently lost, was translated into a non-existent language, “Crypto-Icelandic,” by a prior Scholar/Translator, “Henrik L., an archaeologically gifted Norwegian divine” of the nineteenth century (T 21). Yet even this unlikely exercise has at least some ground in actual scholarship. “Only two segments of this extraordinary specialized version are clear; written in classical Old Icelandic, they probably derive from the skaldic Völuspá, the Prophecy of Völva” (T 21)—improbable as that sounds, it is actually the case, as the Scholar/Translator quotes the ancient Icelandic text accurately and directly in his headnote. And if we’re looking for nineteenth-century translations of the Poetic Edda (of which Völuspá is the first poem), we find, among the many, one not into Norwegian but Swedish by Per Henrik Ling—“Henrik L.” Hoaxiness indeed, as Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator complicates the terms of the overall mock-hoax with these unlikely (hoax-like) moments of genuine scholarship.
The “proximate cause” of The Tablets, Schwerner says, was accidentally coming across “a large format edition of Samuel Noah Kramer’s translation and transliteration from the Sumerian” while working as a grad student in anthropology at Columbia before switching to English.[21] (The poem’s very creation seems to depend on access to an excellent academic library.) While he claimed that he couldn’t remember the specific book in question, I’m guessing that it was Kramer’s Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta: A Sumerian Epic Tale of Iraq and Iran (University Museum, U of Pennsylvania, 1952), which is indeed a large-format (11” x 8”) book containing the eponymous tale in what Kramer calls “transliteration and translation” before moving on to sections of “Commentary” and “Notes.” This book provides a formal and visual model for The Tablets along with texts such as those translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh that use Schwerner’s diacritical marks, title the narrative sections “Tablet I,” “Tablet II,” and so on and intercut notes and commentary. Meanwhile, as one possible model for the Scholar/Translator’s preoccupation with literary “firsts”—“the first socialist voice in recorded human history,” “the first musically notated chant in written human history,” “this one may be the first boustrophedon!” and, most significantly, the possibility that “we are faced for the first time with a particularized man, this man” representing the first individualized poetic voice (T 33, 35, 32, 19)—we might consider Kramer’s 1959 popular text, History Begins at Sumer, organized as a sequence of “firsts” with chapter titles like “The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency,” “The First Experiment in Shade-Tree Gardening,” and, appropriately, “The First Literary Borrowing.”
In the two final Tablets XXVI and XXVII, now emanating “from the Laboratory-Teachings-Memoirs of the Scholar/Translator” (T 70, 96), the framing voice and commentary of the Scholar/Translator has come to dominate in a way and to a degree that separates them methodologically and stylistically from the previous twenty-five, which means that the lines between scholarly terminology and ancient poetry, between the academic and the aesthetic, increasingly blur. The Scholar/Translator generates acronyms worthy of Charles Bernstein: Utterance/Text/Indicators (T 97), for instance, or U/T/I’s, the medical acronym for urinary tract infections. But as one concerned with his terms, the Scholar/Translator writes “Names matter; they suggest directions for later research; they convey texture which influences further scholarly speculation” (T 96). Imagining “directions for later research” is one conventional part of the Scholar/Translator’s rhetoric: later in “Tablet XXVII” he observes punctiliously that “a more matured hypothesis awaits further examination of associated data” (T 118) and that “those who come after us may consider these efforts as usable initial steps in trekking over this uncharted terrain” (T 120).
Despite his concern for “examination of data,” however, the Scholar/Translator’s criteria for choosing terms to describe the nine cylinder-seals of “Tablet XXVII” that mix cuneiform and hieroglyph are aesthetic. He upbraids himself for the aural clunkiness of his rejected first term, “pictocunei”—“rhythmic cripple” (T 96), he sniffs, in a nice front-rhymed trochee. The sound of his next option invokes unwanted connotations: in “’cuneopicts,’ the constant [consonant?] cluster, now massively terminal, conveyed the image of an early golden-haired Brit at his ravaging work” (T 96). Hence, he goes on, “I came finally to choose the less literal, euphonious, more complexly relevant term, ‘ominacunei’” (T 97). Prosodic felicity, attention to consonant clusters and euphony, the multivalent over the literal: these are the bases on which poets, not scholars, make their choices. The scholar who projects possible further scholarly work, meanwhile, also is preoccupied—more than in any previous tablet—with the future of poetics. Not just scholars but “some contemporary poets . . . might find our work useful”: after all, the poets, “these husbandmen now serve systems unflavored by the immense allusive powers and the multiple sensations associated with logograph and ideogram” (T 117).
The more confident, the less anxiety-ridden he becomes, the more the Scholar/Translator comes to take over the text in Tablets XXVI and XXVII and the greater the expressive latitude and imaginative deviation from conventional scholarly prose he allows himself. It’s not just that commentary takes over the so-called primary text, the poetry (itself interrupted by commentary from the beginning), but that, in a further move, poetic tropes take over the commentary. Simile, metaphor, anaphoric lists come to the fore: “I live in the weather of my work like a gauzy pillaging ghost”; Medusa “gazes at herself, the play of her hot changing eyes pointillistically seeding her world and herself with rapidly swelling masses turning rockhard”; “the utterances of a small forest” are imagined “transmogrifi[ed] into a detailed list of the number of the forest’s trees and bushes, of the weight of its brush, of the degrees and minutes of its nests, . . . , of seeds fallen and of seeds still integral with their origin” (T 112, 115). The Scholar/Translator becomes a kind of James Tate or Russell Edson of the archaic, as Kafka meets the Human Centipede:
Waking up from my dream seems about the same as being inside it. The lower half of my body is mired in some sort of holdfast earthworks, in spite of which my 49 pairs of legs tread in a fluid language as if protectively cloistered in a viscous embrace; my torso, very long and straining towards the sunlight, is punctured by seven clean holes, the diameter of the posterior exit wounds two to three times that of the anterior holes, which expand comically. (T 110)
And so on for another half-paragraph. As David Wojahn observes, by these last two tablets the Scholar/Translator’s comments “have taken on a distinctly bardic tone while at the same time always veering back to a semblance of scholarly jargon” in “a Borgesian parody of an academic paper.”[22]
If The Tablets “ought to be received not in the spirit of exegesis but in the spirit of delight and play,” as Michael Heller puts it, nevertheless Schwerner knows that exegesis is part of what people, including himself, do—Homo Fodens, Man the Digger in his phrase.[23] The Tablets engages throughout with the exegetical impulse, running the gamut from embrace to resistance to dismissal. Schwerner says in an interview with Willard Gingerich that the Scholar/Translator “has a suspicion that his inclination towards meaning must find other paths from those he has been given by his own modes of scholarship and research, his own culture, his own theological antecedents,” and he has moved quite a way down those paths by the end of the sequence.[24] Indeed, one point of the Scholar/Translator’s commentary is its inadequacy to its self-appointed tasks. At the same time, however, far from being solely an object of parody, a kind of abject Other, in the poem—though it is that too—the scholar / translator’s critical discourse is stylistically and structurally central to The Tablets, in a way that marks a particular point in the history of the poetic avant-garde’s relationship to the academy.
Alan Golding is the author of two critical studies, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry and Writing Into the Future: New American Poetries from The Dial to the Digital. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Louisville.
[1] Armand Schwerner, The Tablets: Selected Poems and Translations, introduced and edited by Michael Heller, Verge, 2026, 128, 133. Cited parenthetically hereafter as T.
[2] For a useful analysis of Schwerner’s response to Stevens—including using the last two words of Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump,” “the the,” as the only two words (and at the precise mathematical center) in “Tablet X”—see Norman Finkelstein, “Wallace Stevens, Armand Schwerner, and ‘The The,’” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, Fall 2000, pp. 151-60.
[3] For one such (controversial) critique in a longstanding tradition, responding to the period during which Schwerner was writing The Tablets, see Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Indiana UP, 1991.
[4] The project that most resembles The Tablets in its impulses, George Economou’s Ananios of Kleitor (Shearsman, 2009), consists of forty-one poem fragments by the fictional ancient Greek poet Ananios across ten pages, followed by close to one hundred and twenty-five pages of editorial apparatus: “Reception,” “Correspondences,” “Endnotes,” and “Index Nominum.”
[5] As Schwerner comments, “part of what [the Scholar/Translator] does a great deal . . . is to manufacture indissolubly concrete and abstract combinations in images so that you can’t pin the tail on either one of those donkeys.” See Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner: An Interview,” with Willard Gingerich, The American Poetry Review, vol. 24, no. 5, September/October 1995, p. 32.
[6] In a different essay, I can imagine arguing that the relationship between text and paratext enacts formally at the macro level a recurring thematic concern with the signifier-signified relationship. On that recurring theme, see such comments of Schwerner’s as the following: “The reason [the Scholar/Translator] hates the alphabet has to do with a kind of unending hunger for something more immediate . . . a very deep wish that the thing and the way the thing is represented be as close to each other as possible.” Tablet XXVII in particular “has to do with a desire and a desperation having to do with unity of thing and sign.” “Schwerner: An Interview,” pp. 28, 31.
[7] An invitation to a reading by way of visual poetics and the poetics of erasure appears early in the interpolated commentary: “The tablet seems rubbed out with care. Is this segment an early attempt to unite form and meaning? graphic as well as substantial emptiness?” (T 9) Such a reading might also attend more closely than many readers have done to the unnumbered mandala-like “Design Tablet” inserted between Tablets XII and XIII, to the visual effects of the diacritical marks, and to the computer-generated symbols of the later Tablets, and pursue the implications of Schwerner’s statement that “I’m excited by being able to put in holes wherever I want” (T 135).
[8] For an informed reading of The Tablets that shares this response but also unpacks it, see Hank Lazer, “Sacred Forgery and the Grounds of Poetic Archaeology: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets,” Chicago Review, vol. 46, no. 1, 2000, pp. 142-54. For Lazer, the principled refusal of various “modes of beauty” that the S/T’s interventions enact means that “too much of the intelligence and beauty of The Tablets exists outside the text itself—in the form, ethics, and wisdom of its compositional methodology—and . . . not enough in the primary text itself” (151). In “Divagations,” however, “the flaw or error of an overly absolute erasure of self-immediacy gets beautifully corrected” (153).
[9] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision: Forms of The Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry, U of Iowa P, 2010, pp. 209-10.
[10] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, pp. 213, 210.
[11] Armand Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” Poetry and Poetics in a New Millennium, by Edward Foster, Talisman House, 2000, p. 116.
[12] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 116.
[13] All the observations on “career” in this paragraph derive from Schwerner, “An Interview with Armand Schwerner,” with Willard Gingerich, Hambone, no. 11, spring 1994, p. 41. In the same interview, he suggests that The Tablets’ distinctive kinds of generic hybridity—the very features foregrounded in this essay—explain “why this work . . . seems to constantly evade certain kinds of mainstream critical considerations. When people write about the long poem, for instance, they don’t write about The Tablets, which is one of the longest long poems in contemporary American poetic tradition” (p. 30). Even though The Tablets is itself a kind of anthology, Schwerner senses also that one particular effect of its hybridity—the difficulty of anthologizing selections from it—may also underpin its under-the-radar status: “it’s very hard to excerpt poem-poems from the work” (pp. 30, 40).
[14] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 119.
[15] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, p. 211.
[16] McHale, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems, U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 102.
[17] McHale, Obligation, pp. 120, 122.
[18] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 120.
[19] Van Spanckeren, “Moonrise in Ancient Sumer: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets,” American Poetry Review, vol. 22, no.4, July/August 1993, p. 16.
[20] For a detailed, informative historical contextualization and analysis of how Schwerner reworks Galpin’s score, see A. J. Carruthers, “Long Poem Including Music: Reading the Score in Armand Schwerner’s ‘Tablet XII,’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, fall 2016, pp. 22-41.
[21] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 128.
[22] Wojahn, Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, U of Arkansas P, 2000, p. 259.
[23] Heller. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics, Salt, 2005, p. 129.
[24] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner: An Interview,” p. 32. In this interview, Schwerner projects a total of forty-nine Tablets—that “theoretically might end the series, which I had originally thought would only end with my death” (p. 32).
Notes, Paratexts, Avant-Garde Poetics and Institutional Form(ation)s
Alan Golding
“The commentator takes on a more active part. His ‘notes’ become ‘poems.’ What does that mean? What are the differences in the first place? ‘Poem’ is what?” And again: “Prose is eloquence, wants to instruct, to convince; wants to produce in the soul of the reader a state of knowledge. Poetry is the producer of joy, its reader participates in the creative act. Thus Commentary and Text in The Tablets. (Is that distinction stupid?)”[1] The mode referred to in these remarks and questions from Armand Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator is represented most famously in U. S. American poetry by T. S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, of course, more extensively by his contemporary Marianne Moore, and continues in ever-expanding variations into the present. This is a mode in which poets use paratextual apparatus variously to offer supplemental (often self-exegetical) comments, to parody (while adopting) the conventions of scholarly explanation, to exploit the note’s potential for creating a hybrid, polyvocal, dialogic text, to foreground the visual materiality of the written text, its bibliographic codes, in the interests of defamiliarization, or to formally enact and work through themes of secondariness, originality, error, accuracy, and authenticity. Schwerner’s Tablets are a compelling example of the increasing visibility during the post-World War II period of poems, often serial poems, especially but not solely within an experimental or post-New American lineage, constructed out of footnotes, endnotes, editorial commentary and other forms of paratextual apparatus or that put them to some central formal use. If poetry is the scholar’s art, as Wallace Stevens (the subject of Schwerner’s MA thesis and a key influence) would have it, American poets, and particularly American avant-gardists, have with surprising frequency used the scholar’s forms, even if in ironic and resistant ways.[2] These forms have a special force in New American and post-New American poetry precisely because of that poetry’s historically skeptical relationship to the academy. To examine The Tablets as an emblematic, though unique, use of these forms enables us to complicate the historical opposition between avant-garde poetics and academic institutions and discourse, and to rethink their complex, entangled relationship. I want to consider, then, how The Tablets uses annotation and commentary as central to its formal construction and philosophical project and how, in the process, it both anticipates and provides ways to assess, respond to, or complicate critiques of the avant-garde’s purported academic assimilation.[3] Rather, Schwerner’s voracious experimental long poem assimilates academic convention into itself.
If, traditionally, poetry is primary, text, and institutional conventions and commentary are secondary, paratext, a work like The Tablets blurs these boundaries to engage in its material form with one site of its own reception. The Tablets is built out of headnotes, endnotes, the intercutting of “scholarly” commentary, fake and real citations, diacritical marks, constant variant readings, self-commentary, translations into non-existent languages, and, eventually, extensive meta-commentary by the Scholar/Translator who presents these ancient tablet-poems. In purely quantitative terms, it contains far more paratext than text.[4] “Often the line between redactor and author is hard to draw,” claims the Scholar/Translator: “the power of the unsullied literary imagination evident” in the fictional tablets only becomes “evident through the work of the so-called scribes, who were of course redactors” (T 71). For Schwerner, appeals to pedagogical authority, received vocabularies, and interpretive convention are “all a plot to make [the student or reader] accept a nuclear self,” a self that the sequence insistently works to dissolve. “Attention must be paid” (quoting Arthur Miller, in one of The Tablets’ many literary moments)
to the child’s good sense in the art appreciation classroom between slide and slide. He is told that slide a—Titian—is a finished painting because it is a finished painting and that a micron could be added or changed only at the risk of destroying the whole; he is told that the face in slide b—Van Gogh—incorporates weariness-decayed hope-internalized conflict-transpersonal love. He learns never to ask How do you really know when a, or anything, is finished? He knows never to say the face on b makes me happy and seems to me happy. It’s all a plot to make him accept a nuclear self. (T 134)
Here Schwerner narrates an example of institutional failure, a failure of intellectual integrity that leads him to write “I’m mortally affected by others’ categories; they damp up my ease; they are a prioris. Fuck them. They constitute Authority” (T 129). To examine his own use of these “categories” and conventions, however, enables us to complicate and rethink the historical opposition between avant-garde poetics and academic institutions. The Tablets are constantly in dialogue with the context of textual regulation, interpretation and annotation—the “secondary”—that the academy represents, and thus use—even need to use--the academy’s forms and rhetorics to make their point.
The basic mode of The Tablets is established in the first two lines. The sequence starts in ambiguity, interpretive improbability, and editorial self-questioning, in the relationship between text and commentary, the poetic “primary” and the scholarly “secondary.” “All that’s left is pattern (shoes?)”: this first line (repeated at various points in the sequence) gives us the concrete noun, “shoes,” as an unlikely variant reading of the abstract noun “pattern.”[5] It then turns out to be, in the language of line 2, a “doubtful reconstruction” (T 7). This alternating structure of text and commentary characterizes the whole first page, setting up the fundamental method of the poem. Eight lines in, “scholarship” and “meditation” are posed as possible translations of the same word in the non-existent original, while “modernism” is offered as a cryptic gloss on the phrase “wet socks” (T 7). Citations and commentary are intercut with the poetic text, reducing their status as paratext and making them part of the (dis)continuous whole. Thus The Tablets starts in interruption and is about interruption: not poesis interruptus, more interruption as poesis.[6] Especially in performance, the apparently intrusive commentary and the diacritical marks (which ask to be sounded out, even as they also deserve discussion in terms of a visual poetics) become part of the prosody, the pacing, of the whole.[7]
Schwerner comes to find the Scholar/Translator’s academic discourse a “necessary” if painful interruption of lyric felicity. By the end of the poem’s final section, “Tablets Journals / Divagations,” writing in his “own” voice a commentary on all the previous commentary, he describes “the pain I felt when I interrupted a lyric song by any of my unknown archaic speakers by intercalating—or rather by finding necessary the presence of—the S/T’s discursive, often apparently irrelevant comments” (T 160). Some readers have wanted out of The Tablets just those moments of unadulterated lyric beauty that the sequence refuses to provide, and that it uses that least archaic and yet most ritualistic of discourses, the discourse of the academy, to disrupt. From this point of view, the aesthetic risk of the Scholar/Translator’s interruptions is that of a narrowing askesis. (Though I’ll note here one remark from the concluding “Divagations”: “Yeats says poetry to be ‘ascetic, ecstatic, austere’” [T 129].) Schwerner “recalls a hearer’s wish that I omit the S/T’s commentary as unnecessarily clotting; I’d almost want to accede” (T 160).[8] But—and the “but” here is crucial—“precisely such ambiguities, left somewhat to integrally radiate, is useful work done. The thing is, I wanted not to separate the song from the entropic world. This and that” (T 160). On the relationship between song and entropic world, between text and paratext, consider Norman Finkelstein’s observation: “Not the modernist poet, but the modern scholar is the parallel to the archaic figure, who, in The Tablets, is just as often a scribe as a prophet, shaman, or seer . . . the labors of the modern paleographer take on the same burden of ritualized inscription as do the magical and sacred texts . . . that he and the reader encounter on the clay tablets supposedly before them.”[9] The Tablets’ “mock-pedantry,” “the technologies of scholarship that the poem continually parodies,” “deliberately frustrates” the “spirit of prophetic urgency” —and that is precisely the point.[10]
The ambivalence of Schwerner’s relationship to the academy is reflected in a 1998 interview with Edward Foster. On the one hand, this career professor of English registers an understandable skepticism about the academy’s compulsion toward labeling and its competitive politics:
In the colleges and universities an important aspect of the modern rage for categorizations . . . rests on trumping, on unwitting creation of ‘new’ and exploitable lines of thought. More name chairs. More tornadoes in the departments and in the Pied Piper value of professorial prophets. More young acolytes for the universities intent on survival and the overcoming of competitors’ advance men and women.[11]
Counter to all the daily practices of the scholarly and critical (and translational) academy, “The Tablets are involved in wave after wave of denial about any significance in all the looking, checking, interpreting which their own Scholar / Translator apparently embodies.”[12] At the same time, in “Tablets Journals / Divagations,” the thirty pages of self-commentary that conclude The Tablets, Schwerner looks back (apparently tongue in cheek, though I find the tone hard to read here) on his aspirations for the work’s reception: “I assumed there would be a worldly reward, a permanent order of recognition, a clear and continuous placement of my work in the critical adumbrations of the establishing world” (T 146). Schwerner’s attitude towards his own and The Tablets’ reception changed in the course of his career; indeed, he viewed the very term and idea of “this weird fuckass thing called the poetic career” skeptically for many years. Until the late 1980s, he resisted explaining his work in any way: “I didn’t even want to write essays about what I do. I didn’t want to have interviews about what I do, a profoundly anti-belletristic stance on my part.” But by the time of a 1993 interview, he can say that “I increasingly accept [the value of publicly discussing one’s work], and I increasingly see the price that one pays [in critical neglect] for not perceiving the necessity in this particular age of hyper-communication.”[13]
Of one “explanatory essay” reluctantly written “to discuss textures and the motivations for the late Tablets,” his late essay “Glosses,” Schwerner admits that it involves “a kind of identification of myself with the aggressor” (the Scholar/Translator) as he finds himself willing to dig into and do violence to his “own” text.[14] That scholarly aggressor, however, has already been built into the sequence as the medium of the poem’s very survival. The Scholar/Translator is quite explicitly a canonical gatekeeper who acknowledges his institutional investments. In the language of the ‘80s canon debates, he acknowledges, to end Tablet XXVI, that he is centrally “involved in the process of formation of the canon of this sacred material, and . . . will be responsible for the slamming of the gates to any future inclusions” (T 95). In this (rather dizzying) sense, Schwerner-as-author’s canonical status depends on the success of his Scholar/Translator’s work.
Given The Tablets’ framework of “elaborately fake scholarship,” we can easily overlook the extent to which the work incorporates, rests on or talks back to real scholarship, just as the diacritical symbols of the Scholar/Translator’s key have a basis in Sumerian scholarship and can be found in editions of Sumerian texts.[15] Brian McHale identifies The Tablets’ formal and intellectual sources: “It imitates scholarly editions of cuneiform texts by academic Sumerologists and Assyriologists such as Samuel Noah Kramer—hence the nonalphabetic signs for missing, untranslatable, doubtful, and reconstructed passages, . . . which derive directly from editorial conventions in Sumerology.”[16] He goes on to locate the sequence within “the literature of mock scholarship,” the sub-genre of the mock hoax that is distinguished from the hoax because its “will to deceive” is debatable.[17] On analogy with “truthiness,” I’m inclined to coin the term “hoaxiness” for the constantly shifting space of accurate and bogus scholarship that The Tablets inhabits. For as Schwerner stresses, “the work doesn’t exist in a realm of fantasy; there’s too much deep structure of familiar archaeology and palaeography and ritual for that easy course, and thus the work is continuously subject to anchoring constraints”—the constraints imposed by actual, not fake, scholarship.[18] The genuine scholarship represents an embrace of that mode in tension with the ever-present parody of it.
While “sacred forgery” (T 97) is one of the Scholar/Translator’s terms for the project, he still alludes to actual scholars. In the spirit of the Scholar/Translator, then, I’ll do some violence to Schwerner’s text by tracking some of its sources. The Scholar/Translator (like his creator) is genuinely well-informed across a wide disciplinary range and decades of legitimate and relevant scholarly work. If one level of internal tension in The Tablets involves its hoaxiness, another involves the tension within the hoaxiness introduced by real scholarship, real citations and real sources. I’ll take just a couple of examples, both of which involve what Kathryn Van Spanckeren calls “ludicrous” “second-remove characters” incorrectly, though understandably, assumed to be fictional.[19] On the surface, Tablet XII seems to direct some rather crude irony against the improbably titled “mesmerizing work . . . The Music of the Sumerians and their Immediate Successors the Babylonians and Assyrians by the Sumeromusicologist F. W. Galpin” (T 35). But it does in fact cite two paragraphs of an actual 1937 book, reprinted in 1970 when Schwerner was working on the early Tablets. It even has something like a real tablet behind it, since it consists of the Scholar/Translator’s version of Francis William Galpin’s “free translation” of “A Sumerian Hymn on the Creation of Man.” Then the musical “adaptation from Canon Galpin’s hypothetical reconstruction” (T 38-39) reproduces directly a little more than one-third of Galpin’s own musical version of the hymn (26 out of 71 sections), though it excludes Galpin’s English translation.[20] The even more improbable Tablet VII “cannot be rendered into English” because the original, subsequently lost, was translated into a non-existent language, “Crypto-Icelandic,” by a prior Scholar/Translator, “Henrik L., an archaeologically gifted Norwegian divine” of the nineteenth century (T 21). Yet even this unlikely exercise has at least some ground in actual scholarship. “Only two segments of this extraordinary specialized version are clear; written in classical Old Icelandic, they probably derive from the skaldic Völuspá, the Prophecy of Völva” (T 21)—improbable as that sounds, it is actually the case, as the Scholar/Translator quotes the ancient Icelandic text accurately and directly in his headnote. And if we’re looking for nineteenth-century translations of the Poetic Edda (of which Völuspá is the first poem), we find, among the many, one not into Norwegian but Swedish by Per Henrik Ling—“Henrik L.” Hoaxiness indeed, as Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator complicates the terms of the overall mock-hoax with these unlikely (hoax-like) moments of genuine scholarship.
The “proximate cause” of The Tablets, Schwerner says, was accidentally coming across “a large format edition of Samuel Noah Kramer’s translation and transliteration from the Sumerian” while working as a grad student in anthropology at Columbia before switching to English.[21] (The poem’s very creation seems to depend on access to an excellent academic library.) While he claimed that he couldn’t remember the specific book in question, I’m guessing that it was Kramer’s Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta: A Sumerian Epic Tale of Iraq and Iran (University Museum, U of Pennsylvania, 1952), which is indeed a large-format (11” x 8”) book containing the eponymous tale in what Kramer calls “transliteration and translation” before moving on to sections of “Commentary” and “Notes.” This book provides a formal and visual model for The Tablets along with texts such as those translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh that use Schwerner’s diacritical marks, title the narrative sections “Tablet I,” “Tablet II,” and so on and intercut notes and commentary. Meanwhile, as one possible model for the Scholar/Translator’s preoccupation with literary “firsts”—“the first socialist voice in recorded human history,” “the first musically notated chant in written human history,” “this one may be the first boustrophedon!” and, most significantly, the possibility that “we are faced for the first time with a particularized man, this man” representing the first individualized poetic voice (T 33, 35, 32, 19)—we might consider Kramer’s 1959 popular text, History Begins at Sumer, organized as a sequence of “firsts” with chapter titles like “The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency,” “The First Experiment in Shade-Tree Gardening,” and, appropriately, “The First Literary Borrowing.”
In the two final Tablets XXVI and XXVII, now emanating “from the Laboratory-Teachings-Memoirs of the Scholar/Translator” (T 70, 96), the framing voice and commentary of the Scholar/Translator has come to dominate in a way and to a degree that separates them methodologically and stylistically from the previous twenty-five, which means that the lines between scholarly terminology and ancient poetry, between the academic and the aesthetic, increasingly blur. The Scholar/Translator generates acronyms worthy of Charles Bernstein: Utterance/Text/Indicators (T 97), for instance, or U/T/I’s, the medical acronym for urinary tract infections. But as one concerned with his terms, the Scholar/Translator writes “Names matter; they suggest directions for later research; they convey texture which influences further scholarly speculation” (T 96). Imagining “directions for later research” is one conventional part of the Scholar/Translator’s rhetoric: later in “Tablet XXVII” he observes punctiliously that “a more matured hypothesis awaits further examination of associated data” (T 118) and that “those who come after us may consider these efforts as usable initial steps in trekking over this uncharted terrain” (T 120).
Despite his concern for “examination of data,” however, the Scholar/Translator’s criteria for choosing terms to describe the nine cylinder-seals of “Tablet XXVII” that mix cuneiform and hieroglyph are aesthetic. He upbraids himself for the aural clunkiness of his rejected first term, “pictocunei”—“rhythmic cripple” (T 96), he sniffs, in a nice front-rhymed trochee. The sound of his next option invokes unwanted connotations: in “’cuneopicts,’ the constant [consonant?] cluster, now massively terminal, conveyed the image of an early golden-haired Brit at his ravaging work” (T 96). Hence, he goes on, “I came finally to choose the less literal, euphonious, more complexly relevant term, ‘ominacunei’” (T 97). Prosodic felicity, attention to consonant clusters and euphony, the multivalent over the literal: these are the bases on which poets, not scholars, make their choices. The scholar who projects possible further scholarly work, meanwhile, also is preoccupied—more than in any previous tablet—with the future of poetics. Not just scholars but “some contemporary poets . . . might find our work useful”: after all, the poets, “these husbandmen now serve systems unflavored by the immense allusive powers and the multiple sensations associated with logograph and ideogram” (T 117).
The more confident, the less anxiety-ridden he becomes, the more the Scholar/Translator comes to take over the text in Tablets XXVI and XXVII and the greater the expressive latitude and imaginative deviation from conventional scholarly prose he allows himself. It’s not just that commentary takes over the so-called primary text, the poetry (itself interrupted by commentary from the beginning), but that, in a further move, poetic tropes take over the commentary. Simile, metaphor, anaphoric lists come to the fore: “I live in the weather of my work like a gauzy pillaging ghost”; Medusa “gazes at herself, the play of her hot changing eyes pointillistically seeding her world and herself with rapidly swelling masses turning rockhard”; “the utterances of a small forest” are imagined “transmogrifi[ed] into a detailed list of the number of the forest’s trees and bushes, of the weight of its brush, of the degrees and minutes of its nests, . . . , of seeds fallen and of seeds still integral with their origin” (T 112, 115). The Scholar/Translator becomes a kind of James Tate or Russell Edson of the archaic, as Kafka meets the Human Centipede:
Waking up from my dream seems about the same as being inside it. The lower half of my body is mired in some sort of holdfast earthworks, in spite of which my 49 pairs of legs tread in a fluid language as if protectively cloistered in a viscous embrace; my torso, very long and straining towards the sunlight, is punctured by seven clean holes, the diameter of the posterior exit wounds two to three times that of the anterior holes, which expand comically. (T 110)
And so on for another half-paragraph. As David Wojahn observes, by these last two tablets the Scholar/Translator’s comments “have taken on a distinctly bardic tone while at the same time always veering back to a semblance of scholarly jargon” in “a Borgesian parody of an academic paper.”[22]
If The Tablets “ought to be received not in the spirit of exegesis but in the spirit of delight and play,” as Michael Heller puts it, nevertheless Schwerner knows that exegesis is part of what people, including himself, do—Homo Fodens, Man the Digger in his phrase.[23] The Tablets engages throughout with the exegetical impulse, running the gamut from embrace to resistance to dismissal. Schwerner says in an interview with Willard Gingerich that the Scholar/Translator “has a suspicion that his inclination towards meaning must find other paths from those he has been given by his own modes of scholarship and research, his own culture, his own theological antecedents,” and he has moved quite a way down those paths by the end of the sequence.[24] Indeed, one point of the Scholar/Translator’s commentary is its inadequacy to its self-appointed tasks. At the same time, however, far from being solely an object of parody, a kind of abject Other, in the poem—though it is that too—the scholar / translator’s critical discourse is stylistically and structurally central to The Tablets, in a way that marks a particular point in the history of the poetic avant-garde’s relationship to the academy.
Alan Golding is the author of two critical studies, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry and Writing Into the Future: New American Poetries from The Dial to the Digital. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Louisville.
[1] Armand Schwerner, The Tablets: Selected Poems and Translations, introduced and edited by Michael Heller, Verge, 2026, 128, 133. Cited parenthetically hereafter as T.
[2] For a useful analysis of Schwerner’s response to Stevens—including using the last two words of Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump,” “the the,” as the only two words (and at the precise mathematical center) in “Tablet X”—see Norman Finkelstein, “Wallace Stevens, Armand Schwerner, and ‘The The,’” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, Fall 2000, pp. 151-60.
[3] For one such (controversial) critique in a longstanding tradition, responding to the period during which Schwerner was writing The Tablets, see Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Indiana UP, 1991.
[4] The project that most resembles The Tablets in its impulses, George Economou’s Ananios of Kleitor (Shearsman, 2009), consists of forty-one poem fragments by the fictional ancient Greek poet Ananios across ten pages, followed by close to one hundred and twenty-five pages of editorial apparatus: “Reception,” “Correspondences,” “Endnotes,” and “Index Nominum.”
[5] As Schwerner comments, “part of what [the Scholar/Translator] does a great deal . . . is to manufacture indissolubly concrete and abstract combinations in images so that you can’t pin the tail on either one of those donkeys.” See Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner: An Interview,” with Willard Gingerich, The American Poetry Review, vol. 24, no. 5, September/October 1995, p. 32.
[6] In a different essay, I can imagine arguing that the relationship between text and paratext enacts formally at the macro level a recurring thematic concern with the signifier-signified relationship. On that recurring theme, see such comments of Schwerner’s as the following: “The reason [the Scholar/Translator] hates the alphabet has to do with a kind of unending hunger for something more immediate . . . a very deep wish that the thing and the way the thing is represented be as close to each other as possible.” Tablet XXVII in particular “has to do with a desire and a desperation having to do with unity of thing and sign.” “Schwerner: An Interview,” pp. 28, 31.
[7] An invitation to a reading by way of visual poetics and the poetics of erasure appears early in the interpolated commentary: “The tablet seems rubbed out with care. Is this segment an early attempt to unite form and meaning? graphic as well as substantial emptiness?” (T 9) Such a reading might also attend more closely than many readers have done to the unnumbered mandala-like “Design Tablet” inserted between Tablets XII and XIII, to the visual effects of the diacritical marks, and to the computer-generated symbols of the later Tablets, and pursue the implications of Schwerner’s statement that “I’m excited by being able to put in holes wherever I want” (T 135).
[8] For an informed reading of The Tablets that shares this response but also unpacks it, see Hank Lazer, “Sacred Forgery and the Grounds of Poetic Archaeology: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets,” Chicago Review, vol. 46, no. 1, 2000, pp. 142-54. For Lazer, the principled refusal of various “modes of beauty” that the S/T’s interventions enact means that “too much of the intelligence and beauty of The Tablets exists outside the text itself—in the form, ethics, and wisdom of its compositional methodology—and . . . not enough in the primary text itself” (151). In “Divagations,” however, “the flaw or error of an overly absolute erasure of self-immediacy gets beautifully corrected” (153).
[9] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision: Forms of The Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry, U of Iowa P, 2010, pp. 209-10.
[10] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, pp. 213, 210.
[11] Armand Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” Poetry and Poetics in a New Millennium, by Edward Foster, Talisman House, 2000, p. 116.
[12] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 116.
[13] All the observations on “career” in this paragraph derive from Schwerner, “An Interview with Armand Schwerner,” with Willard Gingerich, Hambone, no. 11, spring 1994, p. 41. In the same interview, he suggests that The Tablets’ distinctive kinds of generic hybridity—the very features foregrounded in this essay—explain “why this work . . . seems to constantly evade certain kinds of mainstream critical considerations. When people write about the long poem, for instance, they don’t write about The Tablets, which is one of the longest long poems in contemporary American poetic tradition” (p. 30). Even though The Tablets is itself a kind of anthology, Schwerner senses also that one particular effect of its hybridity—the difficulty of anthologizing selections from it—may also underpin its under-the-radar status: “it’s very hard to excerpt poem-poems from the work” (pp. 30, 40).
[14] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 119.
[15] Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, p. 211.
[16] McHale, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems, U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 102.
[17] McHale, Obligation, pp. 120, 122.
[18] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 120.
[19] Van Spanckeren, “Moonrise in Ancient Sumer: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets,” American Poetry Review, vol. 22, no.4, July/August 1993, p. 16.
[20] For a detailed, informative historical contextualization and analysis of how Schwerner reworks Galpin’s score, see A. J. Carruthers, “Long Poem Including Music: Reading the Score in Armand Schwerner’s ‘Tablet XII,’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, fall 2016, pp. 22-41.
[21] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner,” p. 128.
[22] Wojahn, Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, U of Arkansas P, 2000, p. 259.
[23] Heller. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics, Salt, 2005, p. 129.
[24] Schwerner, “Armand Schwerner: An Interview,” p. 32. In this interview, Schwerner projects a total of forty-nine Tablets—that “theoretically might end the series, which I had originally thought would only end with my death” (p. 32).