Foreword

Reading these contributions, I feel honored that my workshop provided the occasion for these fine and various pieces of writing. Anthropology remains contemporary as long as its practitioners are prepared to keep reinventing it.  So here are a few scattered thoughts about poetry.

poetry comes in many shapes and sizes

including, sometimes, the shape of prose[1]

or prose can be disassembled, reassembled

in the shape of verse

poetry is a refusal

of containment

and an affirmation

of being uncontained

poetry opens borders

when most of us hear the word “poetry”

we are inclined perhaps

to think of lyric poetry

which is most of the poetry

written today

short, often first person

gaze turned inward

on thoughts and feelings

that are often denied a place

in academic prose

not surprising then

that many fine experiments in “anthropoetry”

have followed just such a course

Adrie Kusserow’s explorations in verse

of the traumatized subjectivities

of Sudanese lost boys and girls

detained in the limbo of refugee camps

or struggling to make new lives

in the suburban United States[2]

Renato Rosaldo’s antropoesía

through which he revisits

decades after the event

the death of his partner, anthropologist Shelly Rosaldo

who missed her footing and fell

from a cliff on the island of Luzon

in the Philippines[3]

for both of these anthropologist-poets

lyric provides a conduit

for all that scholarly writing

in its more conventional forms

seeks to exclude

anger, desire, grief, pain, remorse, self-doubt . . .

all the mess that muddies claims to expertise

and that moody Malinowski sought to siphon off

into the safe container of his strict-sense-of-the-term diary

only to have it leak out – all too messily - in posthumous publication[4]

still, feelings are not the only kind of mess

and lyric is not the only kind of poetry

for the ancient Greeks

lyric poetry was so-called

because it was sung

to the accompaniment

of a lyre[5]

a techno-prosthesis of sorts

plucked sounds amplifying and extending

human language

or channeling the vibrations

of a world before words

but lyric was just one kind of poetry among others

there was also dramatic poetry

spoken in the course

of a theatrical performance

individually voiced characters

late arrivals on the scene

preceded by the Chorus

a voice of collective enunciation

prior to the splitting of selves

might the Chorus too hearken back

to a place beyond the human?

more ancient than lyric or dramatic poetry

more ancient than writing

is epic poetry

before Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides

was the artist subsequently known as Homer

recounter of the travails

of gods and heroes

and of Odysseus’s

long journey home[6]

and before Homer

Hesiod

bard of theogony

the coming-to being

of gods and universe

battling primordial forces

extravagantly bodied Titans

the neatly proportioned Olympian gods

a late-in-the-day victory

over a turbulent all-that-came-before[7]

or tracking backward and eastward

to once-was-Mesopotamia

and the cosmogonic clash

of Marduk and Tiamat

victory for him

her vanquished, precursor body

dismembered and repurposed

as architecture

of a new universe[8]

or centuries later

Lucretius

physicist-poet

likening his own verses

to the cascading, colliding atoms

that make and unmake

everything and everyone

himself included[9]

epic speaks

of and from a time and space

before the lyric “I”

speaks of ontogenesis

of cosmogenesis

of the coming-to being

of worlds

not only human

is it over now, like Tiamat and the Titans?

a victim of the usual suspects

capitalism

Western hegemony

the Disenchantment of the World

the Great Divide of “Nature” from “Culture”?

in place of epic expansiveness

Modernity’s Great Indoors

home to a polite plurality

of similarly unique individuals

gods and nature spirits whittled down

to psychic projections

chthonic and elemental powers

displaced by me-feelings

has epic gone?

or made way for epigone?

like the diluted nationalist variants

spawned in Romanticism’s wake

national epics shrinking polyphony

to a single, mobilizing voice

demarcating belonging from not

with lines ever more sharply etched[10]

is national epic the lyric

of the ethno-subject

as securitized, single-celled self

writ large and shouted loud?

Brexit poetry

MAGA poetry

poetry so bad

it becomes anti-poetry

anti-becoming

anti-worlding

the not-poetry

of the not-open-to-question

we know who we are

and it’s not you

but epic is the poetry

of what is before

or between

or around

“You” and “I”

the poetry of what makes “Us”

any “Us”

possible

not a readymade form

to be used or discarded

or assigned its place

on a straight, white, European timeline

but a tendency that perdures

even in the poetry

we think of as lyric

British poet Alice Oswald writes:

Sometimes epic is no more than a whiff of darkness, a shiver of not knowing that passes under the surface of a poem, but if you miss its movement then you’re left with only small, personal, sealed up poetry, the poetry of what has been, rather than what might be.[11]

epic is the universe pressing into words

which can happen wherever

whenever

poetry leans toward epic when it becomes

a jailbreak from solipsism

an expeditionary foray

into worlding substance

vaster than any conceivable “I”

[1] See for example Adrie Kusserow’s recent The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.

[2] Adrie Kurrerow, “Anthropoetry.” In Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean ed. Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 71-90.

[3] Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly’s Death.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

[4] Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict sense of the Term. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

[5] Cecil Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 3.

[6] Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by. Walter Shewring.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

[7] Hesiod, Theogony/ Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

[8] Stephanie Daley, ed. And trans., Myths from Mesopotamia.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

[9] Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe.  Translated by R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 2005.

[10] On intersections between epic poetry, nationalism, and imperialism, see Colin Graham, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire, and Victorian Epic Poetry.  Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

[11] Alice Oswald, “Lines.” (https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/lines-alice-oswald).