The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology

by Nathaniel Tarn

Overview

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804750530
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	06/04/2007
Series:	Verbal Art: Studies in Poetics
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nathaniel Tarn is a distinguished poet with academic training in anthropology and comparative literature. He was Professor of Poetry, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Professor of Anthopology at Rutgers University. His most well known books of poetry are The Beautiful Contradictions (1970), A Nowhere for Vallejo (1972), Lyrics for the Bride of God (1975), The House of Leaves (1976), and, most recently, Selected Poems, 1950-2000 (2002).

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
Toward Any America Whatsoever
Toward Any Geography/Toward Any America Whatsoever     3
Child as Father to Man in the American Uni-Verse or Dr. Jekyll, the Anthropologist, Emerges and Marches into the Notebook of Mr. Hyde, the Poet     9
Auto-Anthropology
Andre Breton, Anthropology, and the Limits of Culture     49
Newly Saying the Already Said: An Attached Comment in Honor of Keiji Nishitani     55
Pablo Neruda and Indigenous Culture     61
On Paul Celan     67
Vicente Huidobro: Some Notes among Altazors     73
Michel Leiris, Timor Mortis, and the Peopled Self: A Reading of L 'Afrique Fantome as Auto-Anthropology     77
The Search for the "Primitive" Outside and Inside: The Ethnopoetics of Antonin Artaud, with Notes on William Carlos Williams     90
Translation/Antitranslation // Culture/Multiculture: Some Contradictions?     102
Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry     115
Exile out of Silence into Cunning
Initiation and the Paradox of Power: A Sociological Approach     125
The Heraldic Vision: Some Cognitive Models for Comparative Aesthetics     132
Archaeology, Elegy, Architecture: A Poet's Program for Lyric     157
The Choral Voice: A Diptych re Anthropology and Poetry     179
Exile out of Silence intoCunning: Being Notes on Elsewhere and the Myths of Presence     187
Regarding the Issue of "New Forms"     193
On Refining a Model of Poetic Production     205
Critical Study and Interview   Shamoon Zamir
On Anthropology & Poetry: An Interview with Nathaniel Tarn   Shamoon Zamir     221
Index of Names and Places     263

Editorial Reviews

"Tarn as proven himself to be one of the most demanding and exacting of poetry's anthropologists. If his particular blend of density, polymathism, and accessibility have slipped him through the cracks of critical and popular attention, his investigations in The Embattled Lyric provide an entryway into the contexts of Tarn's poetics, and from there into his poetry."

Rain Taxi

"The Embattled Lyric is written from the viewpoint of a poet/anthropologist, a series of bright essays on Celan, Paz, Huidobro, and others."

The Age

"Tarn's poetry and criticism is remarkable for its expansiveness and willingness to absorb material from disparate sources and disciplines. This book takes the reader on a journey with both Tarn the anthropologist and Tarn the poet/thinker absorbed in the intellectual currents of the late twentieth century."

The Use of English

"Tarn as proven himself to be one of the most demanding and exacting of poetry's anthropologists. If his particular blend of density, polymathism, and accessibility have slipped him through the cracks of critical and popular attention, his investigations in The Embattled Lyric provide an entryway into the contexts of Tarn's poetics, and from there into his poetry."—Rain Taxi


"Tarn's poetry and criticism is remarkable for its expansiveness and willingness to absorb material from disparate sources and disciplines. This book takes the reader on a journey with both Tarn the anthropologist and Tarn the poet/thinker absorbed in the intellectual currents of the late twentieth century."—The Use of English


"The Embattled Lyric is written from the viewpoint of a poet/anthropologist, a series of bright essays on Celan, Paz, Huidobro, and others."—The Age

From the Publisher