[In the following excerpt, Christensen surveys contemporary critical opinion of Schwerner's poetry and discusses his work within the context of ethnopoetics.]

In a 1986 issue of Dialectical Anthropology, “an independent international journal in the critical tradition committed to the transformation of our society and the humane union of theory and practice,” poets and anthropologists are thrust together in flanking compositions, the social scientists serving as critics who find in the poetry mythical formations usually belonging to folklore and oral cultures. Included here are poems by [Jerome] Rothenberg, Nathaniel Tarn, Gary Snyder, Dennis Tedlock, and Armand Schwerner, all prominent figures in ethnopoetics. In Kathryn van Spanckeren's essay, “Schwerner's The Tablets,” Schwerner's long poem is viewed as the attempt to “recreate archaic art not as metaphor but as given psychological process and concrete/phenomenological reality.” His authorial self or presence in the poem is, in her words, “relatively invisible,” and “increasingly important.” But the term “invisible” used by van Spanckeren in the negative may turn out to be the aperçu needed for grasping what is, in the photographic sense, the positive identity of this poet. Kenner coined “invisible” to describe Eliot, but with Schwerner one must upholster the word a little differently because he is a hermit crab, an inhabitor of forms in which he expresses a nature, but not necessarily his own. Schwerner appropriates formalities and patterns that conceal his own voice; consider the book he wrote with Donald Kaplan in 1963, The Domesday Dictionary, a cranky reference work full of nuclear malaise and anti-imperialist rage that took its modality from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary (1911), and, more vaguely, from the medieval property register, The Domesday Book. Schwerner's wry and ironic definitions are nearly as tangy and venomous as those of Bierce, but here again one is compelled—by Schwerner's own insistence—to make comparisons as the basis of an appreciation. The short poems of his canon follow, visually at least, the shapes and structures of almost every other contemporary poet's work, though he writes engagingly and with keen intelligence in many of them. Schwerner eludes personality by means of these borrowed guises; it is his reluctance to have a voice of his own that makes him a unique writer—the avoidance of a “style” that would emphasize ego over the “nature” of imagination.

Schwerner is a poet, an ethno poet, a worker on the motherlode of primitivism and the archaic. But his presence in the work is by turns baffling, annoying, frustrating, and devious, for rarely does one sense Schwerner's own personality or hand in the language. As Sherman Paul notes in his long essay on Schwerner, “In Love with the Gratuitous: Rereading Armand Schwerner” (1986), “Water and earth, it seems to me, are the primary elements” of his poetry, “fire and air of lesser importance.” I would take it that Schwerner sees himself as water, the river, the formless medium taking shape from the ground it runs through. Hence a book like Sounds of the River Naranjana, where poems of the first section are a voice speaking in impersonal phrases, some of which melt away all sense of the “I” uttering them. In a masterful little poem called “the boat,” the epigraph from Robert Duncan on the poet as lover of reality is the whole donnée of the lyric. After it, Schwerner merely jots down an incident in which this particle of doctrine is borne out. These poems make it seem that intelligence, consciousness, possession of knowledge are things outside oneself, borrowed here and there as materials for speech, but given back the moment concentration lapses. Perhaps Schwerner's mind does lie in some broad path of others' wisdom, whose tread upon his own psyche gives him pause to think and utter a few syllables of their impact upon him, as van Spanckeren declares.

None of Schwerner's critics want to say outright that his language is tentative, that it deflates selfhood by its indecision and its casual assimilation of almost anything lying near that could be turned to speech. Schwerner's lyricism is palimpsestic, his voice one whose depths shimmer with other voices, his mouth issuing language it conduits in from the past or the “outside” and uses as its own speech. But because they don't say it, his peculiar genius goes unnoticed while his lesser abilities as a “Postmodern” are trumpeted as virtues. Even in his addendum to The Tablets, the entries described as “Tablets Journals/Divagations,” Schwerner chooses mainly to speak through other writers' quotations, occasionally adding a bit of information on his own. Interviewers have tried to pin down Schwerner to a set of influences, most of which he demurs from acknowledging—particularly those “strong” egos like Pound's or Olson's. His literary tradition springs from Stevens, Oppen, Creeley—a strategic line of development in which a presence of self is deflected or filtered through a peculiar syntax.

One of the entries in “Divagations” asks simply, “What is ‘I’?”—a crucial question for Schwerner. He explores the answer in The Tablets, one of the more elaborate forms he inhabits in his writing. The frame of his sequence is those Sumero-Akkadian tablets that survive in fragments in various museum archives, half-eroded documents Schwerner appropriates as the medium of his own lyricism. Olson had already established the importance of Sumerian writing as a starting point of civilization, the first ciphers to be transcribed by a primordial culture. Schwerner's interest is in a first people, an undivided sensibility. The “I” of the Sumerian is only partly formed, a watery principle that mostly belongs to a communal ethos but occasionally exhibits an individual's awareness. The fragmentary state of the actual tablets serves Schwerner as a rhetorical principle for the unconscious things that elude speech. An “I” darts in and out of his texts wearing different guises, sometimes as scribe, or else as scholar of numerous footnotes, those wry commentaries that began in The Domesday Dictionary; at other times, “I” is Schwerner talking about himself. The voices overlay one another like the strata of various civilizations. Speech focuses casually on various aspects of a mythical narrative, but the mode of intervening voices has about it the cacophony and anonymity of spinning a radio dial through all of its frequencies. Except for “Tablet XII,” which is a translation of an actual tablet, the poems are a fictional recreation of a borrowed form carried out with such seriousness of purpose that the whole of it threatens to break down as a silly game, a parody of the “serious” work of other Postmodernists. But the dogged anthropologist van Spanckeren, with her dour prose and heavy-handed categories, plays right along with Schwerner and discovers some interesting things about the poem: that the jumble of phrases does add up to a genesis narrative, all crumbled and mixed with particles of personal experience, dubbed voices of other writers, mythic fragments, and allusions. She “reads” the tablets as if they were Sumerian rune stones, creating in her own critical mode an extension of the poem's various ruses.

What Schwerner's critics catch in their ideological grids is not so much a passable long poem as what an ethnopoetic poem should really be—a transpersonal, I-negating testament of consciousness, poised like a spinderweb in someone else's attic, full of the dust motes of a long human history, part real and part apparition in the half-light of its tentative structure. Schwerner's door-mat tongue becomes an eerie rhetorical device for recording the presence of the tribe in an individual's skull. Schwerner makes us feel the weight of ethnos in the soul—the group's priority over the ego's whimperings. He gives in to any interruption of his attention, like a teacher losing out to a classroom of noisy students. There is no effort to maintain a particular line of expression from one source, since all of them together contribute to the development of a “tablet.” In the process, ego seems to crumble and dissolve as some other mode of self-expression takes its place. As Schwerner noted in a letter to Sherman Paul, “What is pathological to the ego is not pathological to the psyche.”

For that reason, The Tablets is one of the more unnerving documents of Postmodernism to get through. It is part of the whole, a whole in which there is simply no aggression to distinguish self as self. There is no desire to be bright, interesting, distinctive. The sustaining force of the language is its faltering progress through some sort of genetic plot, some unfolding of awareness that reluctantly ascribes authorship to any source among its chorus of contributors. [A key given for the symbols in The Tablets explains that … denotes untranslatable, and + + + missing material.]

… in the world. I can't come
you have oozed into my + + + + + + + + + old Water Dryer
+ + + + + + + + because when I reach the end of my story, I'll still have
all of it to tell in me waiting to explode
like the constipation in a plugged-up man after …
Big Mover I still can't come, my woman is unhappy with me
she waits but she's getting + + + + + + + + and madder
old Water Dryer you are fat tree-gum and … and fungus in my loins
this is not me, o Pa-pa-the-Flying-Slime, this is not me
I am not what I was, even my children know,
their jokes cover their pity, stories
about ice, about frozen wheat
show yourself Pnou, let me see you Lak,
come into my house with a face just once old No-Name
I will call you simple death
show yourself Lak, let me blind you Pnou
o Pinitou Pinitou Pinitou, this is not me

(from “Tablet VI”)

This passage works by naïve literalness when it calls upon supposedly external forces, the gods, who stand for the mortal processes occurring in the man complaining of age and debility. The externalizing of interior sensations and events into gods, great powers ruling over humanity, lets everyone share the experience an individual had perceived within himself. Aging has its principles, its ritual course; the Water Dryer, the Big Mover, and Pnou are all ways in which the one speaks to and for the many here. There is keen sensitivity to the linguistic processes of ancient communication on Schwerner's part throughout The Tablets; he is not only writing a poem from an ethnopoetic perspective, he is decoding the simplicity of primitive ciphers and finding in them a range of complicated subjective signals, the art of speaking of precise mental events in bold, seemingly clumsy signifiers.

“The poet is a namer,” Schwerner wrote in the “Divagations,” and goes on to say, “there is no nuclear self. / there is no nuclear self.” “The made thing, poem, artifact, product, will appear to the maker as Other and yet give the pleasure of recognition … The voices in the made thing, poem, object, need no ascription by the maker.” And this: “He [the poet] does not know the necessary identity of a voice or many voices. They speak him in a way he later discovers.” Continuity of reason hinges upon our ability as readers to leap over the disjunctions incorporated into the text, to figure out an underlying development that stitches all these floating statements together into a complete, multiphasic “statement,” i.e., a tablet as the unit of measure in a mythological event. Olson would have found this pastiche and self-abnegating generality unbearable to sustain. The hovering asterisks, pluses, brackets, and ellipses thwart the development of an individual voice and drive the text back into its mosaic mode of multiple voices, the pluriloge. If critics seem at times a little reluctant to praise Schwerner for these qualities of his writing, and concentrate instead on the “content” of his poems, quite likely it is a reluctance to join him in his enterprise—the destruction of ego in the literary act. But this is where Schwerner has pitched his tent, and to ignore or avoid this aspect of his poetry is to overlook the one thing about him that is unique. His poetic strategy derives in part from his vision of an ethnopoetics, but it also follows his convictions as a Western Buddhist. The Tablets is “increasingly important” because it is “invisible,” one of the more starkly demonstrated instances of trading in ego for ethnos in the making of literature. Its depersonalization of language and imagination produces a sense of community and of a crowded human past—an awareness in which boundaries of self dissolve into that “sea of connections” Rothenberg described as the source of the “deep image.” At these depths of mind one enters the collective unconscious and hears more than speaks; one transmits from the continuum of being instead of inventing or arguing from isolation. The lassitude and uncontrol that are conventions of Schwerner's mode of writing are crucial elements of his rhetoric—and of his form: One surrenders selfhood in order to descend into that Jungian landscape of archetype and primordial ethnos, the wavelengths at the bottom of consciousness. To praise Schwerner, one must be prepared to renounce a fundamental aspect of Western awareness, the individual psyche, and join him in the anonymity of an Asian or archaic human dimension. Schwerner's poetry has put the buoy marker out at the furthest shoal of selfhood, where the ground leaves off; the work is intriguing as a kind of limit to literary possibility, and for that reason his work is “increasingly important.” The Tablets takes apart the nexus of assumptions that has been brought to a pitch of near perfection in Western philosophy, giving us a version of consciousness that is alarmingly unpossessive and entangled in other people's minds.