THE POETRY OF PRE-LITERATE PEOPLES
An unpublished anthology gathered by Kenneth Rexroth (ca. 1975)
Introduction
Words are power. Even today in our own civilization, debauched with advertising,
newspapers, radio, television, until the mind becomes completely fluent and no
words possess stability, much less power, the idea still survives — at least
amongst the minority who still read the Bible. In the opening chapter of the
Gospel According to St. John, the Word has creative power. Let there be light,
and there was light. The Word of the Gospel speaks in Genesis. Let there be good
hunting, and a seal or a springbok appears. It is usually assumed that this is
the difference between the poetry of pre-literate peoples and that of so-called
civilized society. Primitive poetry is surcharged with mana, tremendum,
with Rudoph Otto’s Das Heilige [The Idea of the Holy] as the ultimate source of value.
As a matter of fact, this is not strictly true. Much of the poetry of civilized nations, and most of it worthy of serious attention since the transformation of the sensibility in poetry begun by Baudelaire, Holderlin, William Blake at the beginning of modern civilization, consciously, even self-consciously, seeks precisely tremendum. There is only one possible definition of poetry which can survive destructive comparative criticism — “Poetry is what poets write and what their audience concedes to be poetry.” There are all kinds of poems for all kinds of purposes in the literature of the high civilizations, and so too are there amongst pre-literate peoples, certainly if taken as a whole.
Amongst many American Indian tribes, songs, most especially those secret songs that are revealed to a person and define his personality, have something of the character of Zen Buddhist koans, except that they are affirmative rather than interrogatory. Not “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” But “I hear the sound of one hand clapping.” “As my eyes search the prairie I see the summer in the spring.” Many of the songs of the Objibwa Mide Lodge have this character. They are revelations, little channels opening into the ultimate source of power — mantras. In the Mide Lodge they are arrived at by a group ceremony of dancing, drumming, and chanting. In other cases the Indian youth, usually after he has gone through puberty rites, goes off to a lonely place, perhaps high on the side of a mountain, and fasts and meditates until meditation verges into vision. Perhaps a white bear or a golden crow will appear to him and give him a sentence, one short song which greatly resembles in many cases a Japanese tanka of thirty-one syllables or even a seventeen-syllable haiku. This song is his own mystery. It is himself as mana, as tremendum, as the Holy, a tiny crystal out of which, as his life goes on, crystalline lattices, called forth by all the contingencies of living, will build his achieved personality. True, like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant when questioned as to the meaning of a distich by Tu Fu hanging on the wall, he is very apt to tell the anthropologist that his song just means “Good Luck.”
It is this type of song, this conception of the poem as a direct opening of vision, that has misled many people in their response to the poetry of pre-literate peoples. As a matter of fact, the poem as sacrament seems to be confined almost exclusively to hunting and gathering societies, true primitives, and to a minority of the literature of our own civilization since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even with us such practice or interpretation of poetry is rare. The best examples are some of the shortest poems of Mallarmé, passages in his disciple, Paul Valéry, a few lines of Rainer Rilke, and perhaps some early Yvor Winters, some Gary Snyder. To the uninitiated Gertrude Stein may look that way, but as one becomes familiar with her work one makes the shocking discovery that she just means what she says — just as she always said she did. Nevertheless, as a philosophy of poetry the notion of the poem as sacramental perhaps dominates all modern poetry from Gunnar Ekelöf to Antonio Machado and Ezra Pound. With the exception of Mary Austin, Lou Sarrett, Yvor Winters, and myself, few poets of the older generation have been directly influenced by primitive poetry. Today the picture is different. Jerome Rothenberg has almost single-handedly invented the scholarly subject (discipline, as the professors call it) of ethno-poetics. His own poetry is deeply influenced by that of pre-literate peoples all over the world, and he publishes the only magazine, Alcheringa, devoted to the subject.
In the so-called high civilizations poetry is written for all sorts of reasons, as the vatic utterance come out from mystic vision, to seduce a pretty woman, to overthrow the government, to assert the rights of those who feel themselves oppressed.
So too, once we pass beyond the simple societies, usually small clans or wandering families, the poetry of pre-literate peoples tends to move away from the invocation of hidden immanent power and the expression of mystic vision, and even away from poetry as spell, as an incantation to force game on the hunt next day to present themselves for execution, or to thank them for being executed. What we tend to call primitive societies are often not very primitive. Most white Americans and Europeans look on Black Africans as “savages.” To use the word in a purely technical, non-pejorative sense, most societies south of the Sahara are “barbaric,” comparable to that of the Scottish Highlands two hundred years ago, or the society revealed in Homer — in fact, again speaking technically, they are a little less barbaric than the people of The Iliad. Black Africans are mostly peasants or herdsmen, and the great West African kingdoms based on peasant agriculture were anything but primitive. They in fact showed many symptoms of decadence of an overdeveloped monarchy, or were sometimes clearly feudal. It is interesting indeed that such societies have produced, at least in translation, almost no songs or poems which resemble those of the Ojibwa or Teton Sioux, or even the Pygmies of the African jungles with whom many Negro communities are in a direct symbiotic relationship — they depend upon the Pygmy hunters for a sufficient supply of protein. The Pygmies are right there, just a long walk into the jungle, but the Negro village produces mostly songs and poems which resemble our own eighteenth century, love songs of direct appeal, hymns in praise of kings, work songs, ballads, while the Pygmies sing mysterious invocations that invoke the living and placate the dead game. This is even more true of the Bushmen of the South African Kalahari Desert, few of whom are in symbiotic relationship with anybody. Those who became houseservants for the Boers mostly died off.
As for the high civilizations of the Americas, they are only “pre-literate” for convenience in putting together an anthology. Mayans and Aztecs and apparently many other nations of the Mexican Plateau before the Aztec conquest were certainly literate, although their writing seems to have been used as a mnemonic device rather than for the communication of continuous sentence information, direct communication as in speech. The Aztec codices shade off into the “picture writing” of the Plains Indians. The Mayans, of course, had a highly developed, almost over-developed, system of writing, but even to this day no one can read much of it except the calendric symbols, although the Mayan hieroglyphs are a fertile field for cranks. The Inca, as most people know who paid attention to their lessons in grammar school, used knotted cords — quipu. To this day it is disputed how much information quipu impart. Are they simply mnemonic devices or did they impart consecutive information open to only one interpretation? This is not as unusual as it seems, to us, who think of the high civilizations as beginning with ancient Egypt and culminating with the twentieth-century imperial nations. Pre-Homeric Crete gives evidence of being a much nicer civilization than our own, but its writing seems to have been used mostly for bookkeeping, and the same is probably true of the Indus Civilization, whose seals marked with hieroglyphs no one has yet deciphered. The degree of civilization cannot be reliably measured by its literacy. Certainly Peru today is less civilized than it was before it was visited by Pizarro, a thug of thugs.
On the other hand, in reading it in translation it is hard to believe that Polynesian poetry is not the product of centuries of literacy. Much of it is epic and most resembles the cosmogonic poems of the Mayans, the Japanese Kojiki, or where it becomes more diffuse, the Finnish Kalevala, not in the original form of the folk ballads but as systematized by the collector Lonnröt; in other words, it sounds like Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Polynesian poetry generally seems to have been collected and translated by missionaries capable only of doggerel or by cranks with a semi-theosophical approach to Polynesian culture — and unfortunately the translations by modern literate Polynesians are at least as unsatisfactory. Arnold Toynbee called Polynesian culture an “aborted civilization,” as he did the Eskimos. But if they aborted they did it at widely separated levels of development. Maori, Tahitian, Hawaiian oral literature might just as well be written in an overmature civilization. Eskimo poetry survives translation into any language — Danish, English, German, French, all seem unable to reduce the mystery and the presentational immediacy.
Again, the notion of “savage” has corrupted the understanding of the American Indian. Culturally speaking, there are all kinds of American Indians. Most of those of the southeastern quarter of the United States bore a considerable resemblance to the Mayan, and have been considered, especially by the anthropologist Paul Radin, as provincial outliers of Mexican and Central American high civilizations. Today they are extinct, largely due to diseases brought by the first Europeans, Hernando de Soto, Ponce de Leon, Cabeza de Vaca, and their immediate successors — nothing so serious as syphilis and tuberculosis, although they took their toll too, but ordinary so-called childhood diseases such as measles and mumps to which the Indians had no immunity. Out from De Soto’s track of cruelty and rapine, lethal disease spread like a poisonous cloud. In 1534 and 1535 Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as the present site of Montreal. When Samuel de Champlain began the French colonization of the same territory seventy years later, the entire political geography, so to speak, the distribution and numbers of population of the tribes Cartier met had completely changed, due primarily to the devastating effects of epidemics introduced by a few canoe-loads of Europeans, who made only transitory contact with the Indians.
The white invasion of the Americas set in process a whirlpool of the Indian populations, a Völkswanderung more extensive than that which followed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The East Coast was dotted with towns based on an agricultural peasantry. They were almost always at war with one another, but warfare was conducted as a dangerous sport, not as a systematic conquest, as it was for instance by the Aztecs. In southwestern Ohio was a great Indian city which might well be christened as the City of Miami. Almost due west in Illinois was a possibly even greater city still thriving when visited by Joliet and Marquette.
The Indians of the moving pictures, the herdsmen of the wild buffalo, were originally agriculturists practicing a slash-and-burn agriculture in the woodlands, or farming the fertile river bottoms of the Great Plains. It was the introduction of the horse that enabled them to develop an economy and a culture based almost entirely on the buffalo. The Mandan (Sioux-speaking people) refused to give up town life and remained, farming their fertile acres along the Missouri, and their culture shades off into that of the Sioux-speaking, buffalo-herding nomads. This greatly puzzled the white men who first encountered them, who believed they were a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel, or later, Norsemen who had fought their way from Vinland to the Missouri. So the whole complex of hunting and gathering Indian cultures of the Great Plains cannot be compared to that of the South African or Australian Bushmen. The Indians who fought Custer on the Little Bighorn were only a few generations removed from typical neolithic agricultural village, town, and even in the instances of Illinois and Miami, city societies. Of course, scattered all over both Americas, South American more than North, were far more primitive societies, but even they, in the most remote reaches of the Orinoco-Amazon watershed, practiced a slash-and-burn agriculture.
The real hunters and gatherers are to be found mostly along the edges of the desert in the intermountain country, but even the Paiute on the eastern edge of the Sierras practiced a primitive irrigation, guiding water from the mountain streams crisscross over the alluvial fens to water the piñon pines whose large nuts were their staple, and the bulbous plants which grew beneath them. There were plenty of hunters and gatherers in California, but this was due to the incredible abundance of wild food. The Miwok of Yosemite Valley and Marin County north of San Francisco carried ceremonially a compound laminated recurved bow which no one in the tribe could pull, but the original of which must have had the killing power of the finest Turkish bows, which could shoot an arrow across the Bosphorus. Nobody knew how to use it. The Miwok almost never ate venison. Their meat was rabbits, which the young boys killed with accurately hurled flat cobbles from the creek beds.
A hunting and gathering society, no matter how it came about, lived in an extremely closed relationship with the animals it hunted. Sioux and Bushmen are expert at mimetic dances imitating the buffalo and antelope, and their songs assume an almost symbiotic relationship. The game animal becomes what the Japanese call a kami, surcharged with mana, with mysterious power. In the act of hunting, the game animal is godded just as a great work of art or even a heroic character in Noh drama becomes a kind of deity. Some anthropologists still call this by the popular nineteenth-century word “animism,” or, when more highly developed, as part of a religion called “pantheism.” These terms are now pretty much out of fashion. Anthropologists concentrate on the actual relationship and its psychological reflex. The dance, the word, the dream is Power.
This is why the poetry of so-called primitive peoples is important to us. It provides us with contact, however slight, with the sources of poetry in its most significant form.
The Paleolithic hunters who painted the bison on the ceiling of the cave in Altamira in Spain knew the animals with an intimacy quite unlike that of a modern artist. They spent many long and often frustrating hours stalking the animals and after they had killed them they skinned them and cut them up. They were expert bison anatomists, but they also had an extreme kinesthetic identification with the moving, living beasts. Hunting of this sort is a kind of meditation. No one has ever written a book called Zen and the Art of Fly Fishing, but someone will. Perhaps it already exists in Japanese. Something very like it is a minor English classic, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. The songs of hunting and gathering people restore to us just a little bit of our place in the interlocking and interwoven community of nature. Ecology is a very fashionable word today, but few people who talk about it realize that it is a modern statement of the Hindu Net of Indra, every knot of which is a jewel in which is reflected every other jewel, each a nexus in an infinite net of relations, all contained in each, and each in all.
In communities with a thoroughgoing agricultural economy this sense of the tremendum of infinite interrelatedness usually dies away, but not always, and the songs of the Plains Indians, once sedentary agriculturalists, show how quickly it can return when the economy returns to that of the men and animals of Altamira. The people who have retained this kind of poetry to this day or at least to the eve of an overwhelming technological civilization are the Eskimos.
The highly developed civilization that has attempted to preserve its most primitive heritage both of creation and response is of course the Japanese. They have a whole vocabulary of terms — the one best known to Westerners is yugen — to describe the subtle variations of response to aesthetic situations remarkably like those of the songs of many American Indians. The translations of Francis Densmore are scarcely to be distinguished from the thirty-one-syllable poems of the earliest Japanese anthology, The Manyoshu, and many of them could be inserted in that book and never be suspected by anyone but scholars.
A great deal of African poetry seems specifically to lack precisely these qualities. The African peasant cultures seem to be undergoing a poetic devolution not unlike the English eighteenth century. There are several reasons for this. However wild and savage the African “native” may look to a French anthropologist writing a work of theoretical anthropology at a table in the Café Flore, most African societies are very ancient. Except as disturbed by warfare, and before the disruptions of the slave trade, they were very stable and conservative, more conservative in all these qualities than for instance even France itself. Most of the African poetry available to us in translation is “practical” — work songs, war songs, and lengthy praises of kings and chieftains. But of course we must not forget that the collectors were missionaries or anthropologists who could only make contact with the dominant society, the Establishment. The Leopard Men were not likely to give away magic words of power to missionaries. Wherever white men or women like Ulli Beier and his wife have made contact with African mystery religion — in the widest sense of that term — a different kind of poetry has been discovered. The same is true of the black people of the Western Pacific, where Beier has also worked. It is very interesting that he has encouraged both Africans and Papuans, young college students in many cases, to write poetry and paint pictures which go directly back to the sources of their culture in profound mystery.
It is shocking to discover that perhaps ninety percent of the books by anthropologists on the shelves of a university library completely ignore the songs and oral literature of the peoples studied — and now most of this is gone forever. Soon it will all be gone unless the so-called developing nations make strenuous efforts to preserve it as the living element in their culture. Whatever the United States did to the Indian, at least the government established the Bureau of Ethnology, whose publications include, along with many other subjects, the largest body of “aboriginal” literature ever gathered by a conquering race. It is there in many feet of olive-green volumes, waiting.
[Note to the prospective publisher]
While The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples is not intended to be an
anthology, it is likely to be used as one by teachers, students, and anyone who
is interested in the poetry of other cultures. Judging by the collections
presently available in bookstores and libraries, this book and Rothenberg’s
offer the widest range of cultures, and at the same time attempt to select poems
not just because they represent a culture (as in comprehensive collections of
all obtainable material from a given society) but because the poetry is
interesting, “good,” worth reading. The attempt to cover so many cultures,
however, does present particular problems. An introduction to a book of Zuni
poetry can hope to anticipate questions that will probably be asked by an
uninitiated reader, but however intelligently it provides a context for reading,
an introductory chapter for a global collection can’t serve the same purpose.
For that reason, it seems that this would benefit from the addition of
footnotes, not as copious as they would be in an anthology but sufficient to
help a reader approach the more elusive poems.
On the simplest level, brief notes, such as the one on p. 215 about the Bushman rice-star [Africa #29], would do. A reader of the Teton Sioux poem on p. 55 [American Indian #30] should want to know and should be able to find out what the “scarlet relic” is. Some of the yellow slips flagged on pages raise similar questions, which (hopefully without extensive research) can be answered in short footnotes. In some cases a word is questioned for less apparent reasons — because it seems likely or possible that a fuller explanation than the poem itself provides would make reading it more interesting, or bring a reader closer to real understanding. For example, as shown by a note already provided (and there are probably many similar cases where there isn’t one) for the Yaqui poem on p. 128 [American Indian #102] (“The bush is sitting under the tree and singing”), the sense of the line would have been lost without the explanation, though without some knowledge of the Yaqui a reader would not even have known to ask what “singing” means. Because knowledge of a culture is sometimes needed to ask the right questions, many of the queries on yellow slips are merely guesses as to where notes are needed. They may often seem to be literal-minded, but the dividing line between metaphor and non-metaphor in some of the poetry is hard to find. In one sense (and probably in more) the request for a note should lead to the discovery that a word for which the reader would make up a simple explanation is more complex: The name “Khvum” in the pygmy poem on p. 197 might be assumed to refer to the dead man when (according to Rothenberg’s notes: Technicians of the Sacred, p. 448) it is a call upon “the father of life and death.”
There is some danger of reducing the mystery of the poems by explaining them away in lengthy notes; but it is an equal risk that readers will be lost when confronted with poems not as immediately attractive as those of the Eskimo, Yoruba, and others. Some of the complex Polynesian and Central American legends seem inaccessible without guiding notes. Would it be possible, without writing extensive footnotes more appropriate to an anthropology text, to provide some information, historical, linguistic, mythological (whatever is appropriate to individual poems) that will give readers a context in which to approach them? Again, the yellow slips attempt to locate difficult areas. Possibly the notes could follow each chapter, be unnumbered (except by page), and thus interfere little, if at all, with a first reading.
Another question — would it be worthwhile to include a note on the Eskimo poetry, or songs, such as Richard Lewis provides in the introduction to his book, about “breathing” and “making poetry” being the same word in Eskimo languages? It wouldn’t be a necessary note, but readers might find it particularly interesting.
In the chapter on the American Indians, would it be feasible to provide one or two contrasts to Margaret Link’s smooth renditions of Navaho songs, something more like Frances Densmore’s preservation (in the Sioux songs and elsewhere) of the linguistic feel of the original? Navaho is one of the most complex known languages, one of the most difficult to translate; Link’s versions seem almost sugary and rather over-refined. Also, if one of the Teton Sioux owl poems were omitted and perhaps two of the Pima, which all rely on much repetition, two otherwise fine sections might be brought into sharper focus; maybe another Zuni poem or two could be added in their place.
Hopefully, all the yellow flags and these pages of suggestions and comments won’t put you off the book but will indirectly lead to its becoming a more useful collection.
Kenneth Rexroth’s Introduction to his unpublished anthology The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples.
The Poetry of Pre-Literate Peoples is the manuscript of an unpublished anthology gathered by Kenneth Rexroth (ca. 1975). The Introduction and other editorial material by Rexroth in it are copyright 2024 and reproduced here with permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust. However, neither the Rexroth Trust nor Rexroth’s Literary Executor assumes any legal responsibility for my posting of the various translated song lyrics that Rexroth tentatively selected for inclusion in his anthology; they are posted here exclusively on my own responsibility. The sources of each of the translations are specified at the bottom of the webpage where they appear. These translations were originally published between 1875 and 1973. Most of the books and scholarly journals in which they originally appeared are long out of print, and many of them are in the public domain. I have reproduced them here as a noncommercial public service. If any of them are still copyrighted and the copyright owner has any objections, please notify me and I will remove them from this site. —Ken Knabb