Journal of Poetry Therapy, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1992

B o o k Review

View from the Weaving Mountain: Selected Essays in Poetics and Anthropology. By Nathaniel Tarn. Albuquerque: College of Arts and Sciences, University of New Mexico, 1991. 368 pp., $19.95 paper.

Nathaniel Tarn's View from the Weaving Mountain, Selected Essays in Poetics & Anthropology, An American Poetry Book, 1991, Albuquerque, N. M., is a valuable contribution and deals with ethnopoetics and the confluence of anthropology and poetics that has come about in the modernist movements of this century. Tam, unlike most writers involved in ethnopoetics, can claim to have had a full career in both disciplines. He has a nuanced and informed view of the difficulties involved in bringing the two bodies of knowledge together. This volume of essays is his try at offering a selection of occasional papers which documents the coming together of these two disciplines over a period of forty years. This book is divided into four sets of papers. Two sets are most likely to appeal to those readers interested in poetics and communication. The first set, "Toward Any America Whatsoever," includes two papers I found instructive. The first, "Poetry and Communication," written nearly thirty years ago, is as true today as it was when first written. Poetry today is private. People take their poetry not from poets but from the popular culture. The world we live in is a world where poetry is not "necessary." The poet is on the defensive. Tarn sets about to show that poetic fate, like human fate, is universal, and that, as it survives, it will again be asking those familiar traditional questions: "where we come from and where we go and what is that we are doing here." The other essay in the first set is "Open Letter Regarding a Proposal for an Order of Silence." This is a letter addressed to Eliot Weinberger. Quoting at page 32, Nathanial Tam, when he speaks of poetry, refers "to a maximal investment in language for the sake of language on the part of 111 9 1992 Human Sciences Press, lnc.

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an individual who should be--but isn't always--prepared for a minimal return: in goods, in services, in status. When I speak of a poet: I mean one who has married his/her art, as so defined, beyond the grave. This means something more than one who has had x number of poems accepted in y number of magazines in the last z years." This, unfortunately, is the truth. The fourth set, "Exile Out of Silence into Cunning," contained the most interesting papers from a poet's point of view. The paper I liked best was "Fresh Frozen Fenix: Notes on the Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Ugly in the Postmodern Era." The most relevant were the last two: "Exile Out of Silence into Cunning: Being Notes on Elsewhere and the Myth of Presence," and "Regarding the Issue of "New Forms"." The second set of papers, "Sages and Kings," is more anthropological in nature. I found these papers fascinating. I lost something in the reading, however, as they were not written for a layman but for the author's equal. This is also true of the third set, "Auto-Anthropologies." The papers taken as a whole are a monument to the author's interests and thought. Being both a poet and an anthropologist, Tarn illuminates both areas of endeavor with a brilliance I've rarely seen equalled. There are disadvantages which Tarn recognizes. Therein lies the sting. Except for rare individuals, most poets have always had to be both a poet and something else. The something else may be a playright, novelist, school teacher, soldier, lawyer (as I am), clergyman, criminal, or one of a number of other incompatible occupations, either reputable or not. Prior to this century, poets were rarely academics. By being a professional anthropologist and a superb poet, Nathanial Tarn brings a first-rate mind and talent to both disciplines. For people who struggle with related fields in the social sciences such as psychology, psychotherapy, and medicine in a professional day to day context and have an avocation, or even vocation, for poetry and poetics, the papers in this book will be of absorbing interest. It has been this struggle by poets trained in anthropology and other related disciplines that much of the modern drama of contemporary poetry is best presented. Poets such as Robert Duncan and Jerome Rothenberg have sought to marry a poetic vocation with the scientific nature of a social science such as anthropology. Tarn's essays indicate the worthwhileness of the effort. Though, as Tarn admits, the effort may be doomed to failure, it is of more interest that such efforts continue to be made by the best minds we have. Poetry has always been both a left brain and a right brain activity. The great poets we remember have always achieved a harmony and a balance between the two halves of human reality. What has happened in the past century is that the study of man has become more and more a science, and that left brain activity in their study is more predominant than ever

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before. Anthropology is studied in the University setting only within a scientific context. Its language, a technical jargon, requires an exactitude and precision in a way most poetry, despite what certain critics say, does not. The ambiguities of language, which is the lifeblood of a poet's mission, can have no place in a discipline in which language has to be technical and shorn of extrangeous and imprecise meanings. The scientic process is a reductive one. The poetry process can't be. Anthropology, being a science, tends to be expressed in reductive terms. The study of man, for a poet, can't be. The scope for the right brain is lessened in academia. Too much left brain activity stultifies the poet and robs him or her not only of life but of balance. To live is to live in balance, not on one side of the brain or on the other. We can go to one side or the other but to remain there for long periods of time is not healthy. Poetry, if it is to be relevant, has to redress the onesidedness of contemporary modern life by bringing people back to a center which in our culture has been largely lost. Tarn, I feel, is aware of this dichotomy, which makes what he writes worth prolonged study. This problem Tarn faces in his profession doggedly pursues him in his explorations into linguistics and religion. It is too left brain. The creative impulse gets obscured. The essence is lost. The poet is in a straight-jacket. What should be a balance between what is static and what is dynamic becomes wholly static. Poetry, it seems to me, is concerned with values. The quality of life. The ambiguities of experience. Growth. Change. Birth. Death. Emotions. The exercise of Will. Power. Trauma. Chance. Rage. Love. Anthropology, if it were more of a study of man and aware of values, which people sense and live by, even though undefinable in scientific terms, would, like poetry, be susceptible to the same creative right brain urge. A balance could be achieved. We are all in a straight-jacket, however. I don't know of anyone who has tried to resolve this inherent dichotomy and conflict in our reality better than Nathaniel Tarn. It is a pity that there is only one poem in the book, "lines for the c. issue of c.r.," pp. 191-194. More of his poetry would have been an added joy to this reader.

John Brander, LL.M., Editor California State Poetry Quarterly, 1200 E. Ocean Blvd, #64 Long Beach, CA 90802