|
|
For as long as human culture has existed, 'Ethnopoetics'
have surely also always existed, although perhaps never by that name. The
oral traditions and poetries of different cultures exist in their own right
and in relation to those written and printed cultures of 'civilization'. Such
'Ethnopoetics' have only been accorded this name, however, for a couple of
centuries and, through such definition, have come to form a contrast to the
highly cultured verse of the 'Western Canon'.
'Ethnographic poetry', as demonstrated by Lowenstein's latest book - a rich
and dense poetry that Ted Hughes praised as 'original among young British
poets - quite exceptionally gifted' - is the process of a researcher both
actively participating in and observing
a community. Why? In order to understand it and represent it; in order to
generate new imaginative frissons between alternative forms of transcendent
'literatures'; and perhaps even to preserve the orality of the culture before
it dwindles and disappears with those individuals in whom it is
invested. In Lowenstein's case, his subjects are the Alaskan Inuits
with whom he has lived and worked at various stages of his life since the mid
1970s. Lowenstein has written his own poems; he has also included the oral
poems and stories of his observed subjects, to create a written text of his
findings. In this sense, Lownstein's work - and indeed all ethnographic work
- functions as a comparative approach, and is balanced somewhere between
poetry and scholarship.
Whilst the early modernist movements explored the oral poetries of Africa,
the Pacific, and the Americas, and Pound and others looked to the East, other
Twentieth Century writers have developed the genre with works about, and
including, other cultures. One thinks of Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians
of the Sacred and his late 60s
editing of the magazine Alcheringa; Gleason's Leaf and Bone: African Praise Poems; and Adrie
Kusserow's Hunting
Down the Monk (Boa Editions, 2002) - that
explores comparative representations of West meets east and east meets West
in poetry - to cite but a few. In these cases, and others, 'Ethnographic
Poetry' has traditionally taken a characteristic emphasis on low-technology
cultures; on orality and non-literate cultures, and (as I have hopefully
shown) is situated somewhere between literature and cultural and social
anthropology. It links the contemporary poem to both Romanticism and
Modernism via Primitivism, and the avant garde tendency to explore new and varied alternative
forms, subverting the hegemony of the literary poetic of the West. And it
demonstrates the postmodern tendency to question and problematise genre. In
these senses, Lownstein's work is a model of its kind.
Lowenstein's poetry also adheres to other central tenets of the Ethnographic
school: it's emphasis on the shaman as the paradigmatic proto-poet; its
celebration of rich sub-cultures, orality and wilderness; its fusing of both
physical, biologic and psychic terrains; its multi-faceted, multiply voiced
structures; and its comparisons of the individual expression of a Western
visitor with the communal poetries he encounters. It is an admirable and
intelligent work that contains much to be admired and praised for its
scholarly and humanistic intents. It also resists paraphrasing. But if
Shamen, whale hunts, men-becoming-animals, song, dance, orality,
anthropology, nature, birds and bones, human intrigue, the betrayal of
cultures, myth, goddesses, deep magic, Otherness, Difference and much more
appeal to you, then this is a remarkable book both for its subject matter and
for its poetry. You won't read anything else like it this year.
© Andy
Brown 2006
|