ARMAND SCHWERNER: IN THE LATITUDE OF SPEECH-MODES
Introduction to Armand Schwerner, The Tablets, Selected Poems and Translations
Michael Heller

The poet is a creature of process and risks disintegration every time the things he has learned fall away from the real to whose radiance he slowly and patiently submits himself.
—Armand Schwerner (Nomad/New York, 1962)
This volume brings together Armand Schwerner’s masterpiece The Tablets—an immense and varied parody of the anthropological enterprise, that, in its range and stylistic abundance, has been compared to Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land—along with a selection of equally masterful poems and translations from across the poet’s entire career.

I first met Armand Schwerner in early 1967. Early sections of The Tablets, in which “newly discovered” four-thousand-year-old Sumero-Akkadian clay tablets are translated and annotated by the figure of a comic Scholar-Translator, were beginning to appear in all their polyvalent and satiric glory in little magazines of the period. Just as extraordinary were Schwerner’s readings of these works, alternately serious and comic, which he performed in a variety of moods and voices, accompanied by a clutter of ancient and new instruments. These exuberant performances would leave his audiences astonished and deeply moved. And they were of a piece with the Armand Schwerner I knew personally for thirty years, witty, mercurial, learned and wildly inventive, at once sarcastic and observant and, like his work, unpredictable.

The Tablets, intricately constructed and consciously performative, are in some ways a reflection of their author’s own complicated relations with language. Born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1927, Schwerner, aged nine, arrived in New York in 1936 speaking only French and, as he writes in his autobiographical essay “The Aquarium Fancier,” experienced an “ongoing linguistic peristalsis where nothing mattered so much as my committed observation of and stealing from the goings-on, dartings and suspensions of the new, crucial language, as if my life depended upon [it].” By the age of eleven, he had a “certitude about the primacy of American as the tongue I talked and thought in.” Not only did he carry his newfound proficiency into all he wrote and spoke but continued those probes and dartings into other languages, including perhaps the most difficult of all, the one by which poetry is made. A glance at his published writings confirms him as one of the most polylingual and polymathic poets of his generation.

The move from one mother tongue to another has a curious advantage. It puts language and its usages at odds with itself and seems to have liberated Schwerner from a naive nativism about representation and naming. It also surely invited thoughts on the demystifying powers and pliabilities of language in ways that might not occur to the monolingual speaker. A self-estrangement from ongoing conventions, especially those that construct rigid linguistic realities, can be—as with Kafka or Beckett—the fuel of mastery. In Schwerner’s case, the transmutation into a new tongue (into many new tongues) led to a poetry of intense, intellectually charged, propulsive phrasing, edgy, full of quick wit and depth of thought, and through which he transformed sometimes chaotic personal experience into imaginative travails of language.

Schwerner published his first poems while an undergraduate student at Cornell. By the early nineteen fifties he had begun his long association with poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Robert Kelly, Diane Wakoski, and Jackson Mac Low, each of whom shared a vision of poetry as the communal binding of culture and were interested in ethnopoetics, archaic and preliterate poetic modes, and the performance aspect of poetry. They also shared an enthusiasm for the poetics and sensibilities of the early twentieth-century European poets associated with Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, a number of whom Schwerner would translate.

Yet despite the proximities and interactions of what Schwerner describes as the “elective affinities” of these poets, there was too for him an area of personal experience, of subjectivity and its psychological complexities, “Icarian wings” and “falls to earth” he called them, that he felt he needed to explore. As his notes and letters indicate, the anthropological and archaeological soundings of his fellow poets were for him an epiphenomenon leading to even deeper substrata of the psychic energies that shape mind and culture. Almost from the beginning of his career, these dissonances, as he wrote in “The Aquarium Fancier,” were his affective material, the “self as subject of the separations and tanglings of the confounded threads, all of which may make for nightmare and an unslaked thirst for luminosity.” These energies and forces fed into the making of The Tablets.

Schwerner’s search for “luminosity” also led toward a Buddhist outlook in both his life and his poetics. While still at Columbia in the late nineteen forties, he wrote a brilliant master’s thesis on Wallace Stevens’s work, seeing its supreme fictions of self and philosophical play as a personal path for himself. He was later to call Stevens “his Buddhist daddy, the first of my teachers.” In the next twenty years, he explored and participated in a number of spiritual traditions—shamanistic, Western, philosophical, and psychological systems of thought—but the carryover into Buddhist thinking and practice, both Tibetan and Zen, remained the most important influence. The Buddhist outlook in his work, which might seem like exotic plumage in other writers, strikes as fully absorbed and integrated, a true if complicated heart literature, animated by a poetics as up-to-date as any on the American scene.

Schwerner’s investigations of spiritual paths, his forays into Dada, surrealism, the anthropological and the Deep Image poetics of the sixties are what make The Tablets among the most ambitiously complex of major twentieth-century poems. In this immensely varied work, the deployment of techniques is ironical; as Schwerner put it, they are “a rip-off on everything I find valuable in the contemporary situation.” In “Tablets Journals/Divagations,” he writes of “psychological freedom for me for lewdness, bawdy, irony, satire, unplumbable misery = tones,” reminding the reader that “good taste is boredom and death.” He writes that “poetry must make us live and perceive more intensely, not by the direct use of symbols, but by a religious concern for the present real.” His “tones” are often doubled, dissonant, exaggerated, and contradictory, drawing the reader away from any straightforward take on mood or expression.

Schwerner’s “Scholar‑Translator,” one of the most comic characters in modern poetry, comparable to the personae of Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Berryman’s “Henry,” and Nabokov’s “Kinbote,” monitors the work’s shifting tonalities, functioning as both straight man and self-conscious interlocutor. In some sense “a send-up” of the bumbling, blundering academician, the Scholar-Translator appears throughout The Tablets, busily, hurriedly, distractedly engaged in deciphering the clay tablets of the fictitious, ancient proto‑Sumerian “civilization,” which Schwerner has “inscribed” with everything from scatological religious hymns to metaphysical shopping lists to poignant and searching poems of love and spirituality. All along, the Scholar-Translator meditates on these inscribed texts in his care, deducing things from them (often hilariously), but just as often finding in them sources of scholarly anxiety, which, as they accumulate, allow The Tablets to transcend the elements of parody from which they emerged. In The Tablets, Schwerner artfully clashes the archaic with the modern. But just as artfully he brings these forces into an interpenetrating relationship. The Tablets invents its own archaic world rather than seeking to reproduce one. In the “Tablets Journals,” Schwerner explains his motivation:
The Tablets’s ingenious explorations privilege neither the archaic nor the modern. Instead, the sequence deploys various symbols created by the Scholar-Translator to indicate the confoundings and erasures caused by the passage of time, including “untranslatables” (. . . .) and “missings” (+ + + +). These, in turn, awaken satire and parody, which mock and undermine our certainties, especially as they are expressed in our anthropological reconstructions of the past, where vital truths are often missing or untranslatable. Consider in this light the beginning of “Tablet XXIV”:
The first line, echoing the The Heart Sutra, one of Buddhism’s central texts, brilliantly plays at negating or dismissing a number of concept-words around which civilization organizes its thought patterns and culture. The next phrase, “harmony / of rabid openness,” seems to propose an almost gleeful possibility of untethered thought, added to, qualified, or contradicted by the missing language indicated by the + sign symbol. The Scholar-Translator’s odd or inappropriate guesses compound the uncertainty until the Tablet itself represents the vastness of unfulfilled human longing in the desire for “a light” less easily defined than acknowledged as something shared, which gets expressed in the Tablet’s last vexing line: “circulation + + + + + + sky-veins, and very slowly with many other people.” What has been erased leaves the reader wondering whether the Tablet is merely absurd. Or is it possibly tutelary? Perhaps it’s a cautionary pause of impossibility, in which “cities sigh / under the fullness of too much [heavy cream]” (a delightful prospect, nevertheless). Has the Scholar-Translator mistranslated here, we wonder, or is the very richness of culture the problem? As we follow along with the Scholar-Translator, we can experience “the ruminant anxiety that the old question / is the new question.” In these constructs, wildness of form earns a legitimacy, despite the gaps and omissions.

In the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, Schwerner’s life underwent a series of terrible misfortunes. In 1994, his younger son Ari was killed by a train in a freak accident as he tried to drive through a railroad crossing. Then a cancer of the jaw and tongue recurred for Schwerner; this condition ultimately metastasized, taking his life in 1999. Nevertheless, during this period Schwerner worked on the two final Tablets, XXVI and XXVII. These unusual Tablets are characterized by a new mordancy and occasional wistfulness of tone. They also include his eccentric use of newly developed computer graphic capabilities to design a complex set of hieroglyphic symbols “discovered” by the Scholar-Translator, which he gnomically labels “Mind/Texture/Determinatives” and “Utterance/Texture/Indicators.” These symbols, meant to resemble the incised images on ancient cylinder-seals, are combined with the “translated” text into sublime meditations on illness and death, as with these lines from “Tablet XXVI”:
The passage is elegiac yet suffused with the comic diction and brilliant invention that mark the Scholar-Translator’s ruminations. In these late works, refracted through the Scholar-Translator’s activities, Schwerner gives voice to the pain and bewilderment of facing death, seeking to locate an eternal present in his poetry amid the volatile realities of time and age. As he writes, “There’s no old or new in it as long as I’m in language’s changing weathers.”

Change, uncertainty, bewilderment. Sherman Paul, one of Schwerner’s most acute and insightful critics, writes, “No poet I have read lives as close to his confusions.” In the Tibetan Kagyu Buddhist tradition in which Schwerner practiced, “confusion” is the seed-source of wisdom, a recognition that the exploration of the mind and its conflicting emotions is the path not only to self-knowledge but to an empowering of both language and action. His “confusion” is less an attempt to beguile the reader than to place the work within the canonical traditions, those “weathers,” that surround the space in which it appears. For all its literariness, invention, and sophisticated comedy, The Tablets is a work of great beauty and lyric power, which like the great modernist poems that it emulates, offers a glimpse of paradise, albeit seen through broken lenses and colored throughout by supreme wit and humor.

For all its complexities and challenges, The Tablets has enjoyed a rich, distinguished reception. Somewhat outside the cabals that constituted official “experimental” poetry from the mid-sixties to the late eighties, individual Tablets were continually published and were collected in at least three separate volumes. They formed the basis for an opera, for numerous dance and musical performances, and were staged in a production by Judith Malina’s Living Theatre. Dragon Bond Rite, a multimedia mask-dance ritual drawing on Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian sources incorporated text and hieroglyphs from The Tablets. Schwerner actively participated in directing and staging this work, which was presented at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, New York’s Japan Society, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. These events and numerous reviews and publications testify to the enduring magnetism of The Tablets.

Not as well-known but equally impressive, Schwerner’s work in poetry and translation outside of The Tablets constitutes an impressive body of work, which, like The Tablets, is characterized by the vast arsenal of the techniques and modalities of international Modernism he developed during his long career. This work remains as challenging and idiosyncratic as anything in the contemporary canon. While The Tablets bears the marks of impersonality in its satiric approach, Schwerner’s lyric poems from early on were vehicles for an exploration of the personal as it relates to love, history, carnality, and spirituality. They “emblematize,” he writes, “some of my sense of loss and homelessness, whose natures I could access through poetic work.” They address temporality, contingency, and the uncertainty of his endeavors, even as they take astonishing linguistic turns and play games with genre and the conventions of literature. They range through politics, social and moral history, and, most powerfully, the ever-modulating surround of the sacred as both daily life and ritual.

In “old dog sermon,” dedicated to his friend Jackson Mac Low, the poet is “waylaid by his hunt / he’s bloodmeal watchfulness for the narwhal invisible / he’s harpoon.” “Watchfulness” and “harpoon” suggest the poet’s ambiguous yet predatory grasp of contingency, an awareness of place or situation, and of intensities captured with “his only power the attentiveness.” In other poems, such as “the violence around us,” “speech for LeRoi” or “breathing in & out: Leonard Crowdog and Wallace Black Elk,” Schwerner’s radical aesthetics in which the psychological and the spiritual are entwined transcends any kind of easy sloganeering. They also show the degree to which he wrote his poetry in dialogue with the company of his friends and in response to the turbulent times in which he lived.

A major source for the varied playfulness of Schwerner’s poetry, including the near-fractal look of many of the line breaks, comes from his involvement with contemporary music. His early “true love,” he tells us, was jazz; he studied improvisation on the alto sax with Lennie Tristano in the late nineteen forties, which imparted to him a style one hears throughout his work. He was also a student of classical and contemporary musical composition, a constant listener who felt influenced by composers from Beethoven to John Cage and La Monte Young. Schwerner was legendary for giving unconventional readings using musical instruments such as clay pitch pipes, alto sax, and assorted drums and cymbals to punctuate or add to the delivery of individual poems. He reveled in assembling ad hoc groups of musicians to accompany his readings, which took on the feel of happenings. Professional dancers and their groups such as Frances Alenikoff’s and Simone Forti’s were incorporated into these performances as part of the urge to give his work a spiritual and transcultural dimension.

As with the poetry and The Tablets itself, Schwerner’s many experiments in translation operate like performances in linguistic innovation. Highly stylized and often crudely comic, they were part of Schwerner’s project to invent and reinvent “the archaic.” His renderings of the oral poetries of Indigenous cultures, Native American and Inuit, and his use of a kind of European “primitiveness” found in Dada and surrealism, exhibit an immediacy of language, of dream and perception that short-circuit or outfox the Western impulse for somber reason and rationalizations.

These experiments inform two sustained translations of canonical Western works, his rendering of Sophocles’s Philoctetes and the several cantos of Dante’s Inferno that he completed before his death. Schwerner’s Philoctetes, whatever it may serve up to us as the undergirdings of Greek culture and the heritage of its mythos, is secondary to its very contemporary exposé of the seductions of language and rhetoric. Hugh Kenner in the New York Times Book Review called it “a speakable version of Sophocles’s ‘Philoctetes’: as it were, after 25 years, a sequel to Pound’s ‘The Women of Trachis.’” Schwerner writes that he sought a “playable vivacity,” with straightforward speech patterns and discourse, distant from the quaint, high-cultural, preserved-in-amber quality of the Loeb translations. He wanted to enable his readers and listeners to experience the drama for our time as the Athenians did for theirs.

With a similar gesture toward contemporary language, Schwerner’s Dante breaks with most standard translations of the work, forgoing the nostalgia of the terza rima form. His version of each canto is broken into two columns running down the page, separating exposition and narration from the characters speaking in order to foreground the dialogic dimension of the poem. We are reminded of the spirit of Dante’s own experiment, the radical shift from Latin to the colloquial speech of ordinary Italians. Schwerner reassembles Dante—one can call it a new defamiliarization, but it may in fact be much closer to refamiliarizing us with what Dante himself sought to achieve.

Time catches up with a poet’s work in odd ways and in odd places. A considerable amount of critical writing on Schwerner’s work has appeared in print and online, and complete translations of The Tablets into French and German are in progress. Over the years, individual Tablets and poems have been reprinted and performed. There is even a character in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives sitting in a Mexico City café reeling off a string of North American “avant-garde” works to his companions, one of them “Armand Schwerner (The Tablets).” One can see that, as with other commentators and readers, Bolaño is attracted to Schwerner’s trickster-like texts, their grab bag of literary techniques, where often elevated, even sublime, diction can sit side by side with cultural detritus, eroticism, and low-life obscenities. It was Schwerner’s genius to transform these materials (“availabilities,” he called them) into deeply moving near-spiritual texts. These imaginative constructions, from the genre-breaking Tablets to the poems and translations, constitute a wealth of ever-inventive, playful material, subtle in their reflective and transformative powers. They manifest the marks of classical genius, combining a feeling of surprise in each turn of the writing with a sense of its inevitability. As with Schwerner’s Buddhist practice, poetry arose from a passionate attempt to meet the contingencies of experience and challenges of his life and give them form. “You have gone that far in your surpriseable readiness,” he writes in his long, lyrical poem, “sounds of the river Naranjana”:
Rereading and then reassembling these works for this volume, I am carried away by their fierce imaginative power.

---

Michael Heller has published more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, essays, and memoir. His recent works include This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010, Dianoia, Beckman Variations and Other Poems, and Telescope: Selected Poems, published by NYRB/Poets. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City.