SOURCE: Christensen, Paul. “Some Bearings on Ethnopoetics.” Parnassus 15, no. 1 (spring 1989): 125-62.

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...