Technicians Of The Sacred

Essays document the author's theories of poetry, discuss the goals of oral poetry, and analyze brief poems and poetic concepts.

"A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania."--Provided by publiher.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

'This book represents a major effort to bring Amerindian poetry to the reader in such a way that the total poetry, the dance, the vowel changes, the pauses, the movement, the interaction between speaker and audience is made evident...' -John Demos, Library Journal

EDWARD L. SCHIEFFELIN: From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.