The messianic ethnography of Jerome Rothenberg's 'Poland/1931.'

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-SEP-98

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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press

The word `ethnopoetics' suggested itself, almost too easily, on the basis of such earlier terms as ethnohistory, ethnomusicology, ethnolinguistics, ethnopharmacology, and so on" (xi). So writes Jerome Rothenberg in the "Pre-Face" to his definitive anthology of ethnopoetics, Symposium of the Whole. There is a certain offhanded charm to this remark, perhaps even something of the archetypal trickster or ironist in the self-deprecating "almost too easily." Poet, performance artist, translator, editor, and anthologist, Rothenberg, as one of the figures most closely associated with the ethnopoetics movement, has labored mightily for over forty years in the field which he named. Not merely a development in the arts, and certainly not confined to the academy, ethnopoetics, as Rothenberg understands it, is a complex set of processes, activities, and engagements:

On the one hand, this discourse explored an ongoing "intersection between

poetry and anthropology," in Nathaniel Tarn's words, and on the

other hand, between contemporary poets as the "marginal" defenders of

an endangered human diversity and poets of other times and places who

represented that diversity itself and many of the values being uncovered

and recovered in the new poetic enterprises. The discourse opened as well

to include what Richard Schechner called the "poetics of performance"

across the spectrum of the arts, and it also tied in with movements of

self-definition and cultural liberation among third-world ethnic groups

in the United States and elsewhere.

(Symposium xv)

Rothenberg's goal, which he shares with his colleagues in the arts and social sciences, has always been "a redefinition of poetry in terms of cultural specifics, with an emphasis on those alternative traditions to which the West gave names like `pagan,' `gentile,' `tribal,' `oral,' and `ethnic'" (Symposium xi). This is, to say the least, an intriguing set of concerns for the New York son of Polish-Jewish immigrants originally from an Orthodox milieu. Yet as we shall see, the connection between Judaism and ethnopoetics is certainly no accident.

The "Pre-Face" to Exiled in the Word, the anthology of "poems & other visions of the Jews from tribal times to the present" which Rothenberg edited with Harris Lenowitz, begins with the poet's account of a dream that he came to regard as "central to my life, an event & mystery that has dogged me from the start" (3). In the dream, Rothenberg and all his friends find themselves in "THE HOUSE OF JEWS," facing a room that is "more like a great black hole in space." Rothenberg, as a Jew, must lead his companions into that room but can do so only by naming it. As he says, "I strained my eyes & body to get near the room, where I could feel, as though a voice was whispering to me, creation going on inside it. And I said that it was called CREATION" (3).

In the analysis that follows this recitation, Rothenberg connects "CREATION--poesis writ large" (3) with his identity as a Jew, which is to say that Rothenberg discovers that in his case, being a Jew and being a poet are bound together inextricably. Urged by Robert Duncan to explore his previously suppressed ancestral "world of Jewish mystics, thieves, & madmen" (4), Rothenberg, who had already edited a series of anthologies that brought together mythic, religious, and magical texts from numerous cultures under a poetic rubric, came to recognize that his own ethnopoetics must consist "of some supreme yiddish surrealist vaudeville" (4). The result was Exiled in the Word (in its original version called A Big Jewish Book) and Rothenberg's own collection, Poland/1931, one of the most important works of the ethnopoetics movement and one of the most extraordinary achievements in the canon of Jewish American poetry.

But before turning to this volume, let us stay for a moment in the antechamber of Rothenberg's dream house and consider a few more of its features. First, Rothenberg himself points out the Kafkaesque sense of reluctance that imbues the dream, noting its resemblance to both "Before the Law," with its ferocious guardian of a door "made just for you," and to the diary entry in which Kafka asks, "What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself" (3-4). I would relate this reluctance to a remark Rothenberg makes later in the "Pre-Face": "For many Jewish poets & artists, working within a Jewish context came to mean the surrender of claims to the sinister & dangerous sides of existence or to participation in the fullest range of historical human experience" (7). In other words, the modern Jew, due to the historical strictures of (and upon) Jewish tradition, especially the perceived need to endure what John Murray Cuddihy calls "the ordeal of civility," at first dissociates Jewishness from "CREATION." As Cuddihy wryly observes, "`Niceness' is as good a name as any for the informally yet pervasively institutionalized civility expected--indeed, required--of members (and of aspirant members) of that societal community called the civic culture" (13). Civility or "niceness" is "a dimension of the threat posed by modernization to a traditionally subculture .... the danger that the prospect of being `gentled' posed to an `underdeveloped' subculture indigenous to the West" (Cuddihy 14). For Rothenberg, only a profound, archetypal, visionary experience can realign a Jewish sense of the self with the primal processes of poesis readily seen in other cultures, so that one can enter into the creativity of Jewish tradition and recall "that the actual history of the Jews was as rich in powers & contradictions as that of the surrounding nations" ("Pre-Face," Exiled 7). Kafka, writing out of one of the most conflicted and dangerous moments of Jewish history, transforms his ambivalence into an oblique, hermetic art of the highest order. Rothenberg, writing in a very different milieu, one perhaps a little too comfortable for the Jewish artist longing for the "sinister & dangerous sides of existence," needs a more direct and thorough confrontation with the repressed dimensions of Jewish tradition.

This leads us to the second aspect of the dream: that creativity involves a confrontation with repressed material. In this respect, the dream, or Rothenberg's rehearsal of the dream, is patently, self-consciously "psychoanalytic" in nature. The dark, the unconscious, the abyss, the unknown, the mysterious, the forbidden--and the Jewish. In Rothenberg's analysis (invoking Duncan), the Jews take their place "among the `old excluded orders'" (4) and share with other peoples the mythic and ritualistic proclivities through which humanity represents to itself the sense of its material and spiritual being: "No minor channel, it is the poetic mainstream that he [the poet] finds here: magic, myth, & dream; earth, nature, orgy, love; the female presence the Jewish poets named Shekinah" (5). And lest this room in the House of Jews become too portentous, let us recall Rothenberg's use of the term "vaudeville": the all-encompassing poetic mainstream, perpetually transgressing and contradicting itself there in the female dark, is fundamentally comic in its performance of the orders of being. Thus the specifically Jewish material that Rothenberg uncovers and puts to poetic use is playful in all senses of the word, embodying processes of cultural and textual transformation and exchange that resist stabilization, orthodoxy, and canonization: "the framing, raising, of an endless, truly Jewish `book of questions'" (7).

This openness of Jewish verbal and cultural experience to what Rothenberg calls "the human" is the third crucial feature of his dream. The poet says of his friends in the House of Jews, "Whether they were Jews or not was unimportant: I was & because I was I had to lead them through it" (3). Here Rothenberg addresses the issue of exclusivism and universalism that has been at the center of Jewish experience since the beginning of Jewish history. Rothenberg's notion of ethnopoetics is certainly one of the more recent representations of the universalizing strain in Judaism, though paradoxically its universalism opposes...

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