The Tablets

by Armand Schwerner

Poetry. THE TABLETS takes its place as a worthy successor of the great American long poems of our Pound's Cantos, Williams' Paterson, Olson's Maximus, Zukofsky's A. The first edition, published in 1968, included eight tablets. Over the years, THE TABLETS continued to grow. The present edition is the first to include all twenty-seven tablets that Schwerner had completed at the time of his death, along with the poet's own commentary on the work in the form of Journals/Divagations. This edition also includes a CD of Schwerner reading extensive selections of THE TABLETS. Schwerner's poem mimics the conventions observed in real scholarly editions of ancient cuneiform texts ... THE TABLETS is a Chinese-box puzzle, in place of a primal scene of archeological insight, a game of hide-and-seek, in place of 'knowledge,' uncertainty, speculation, make-believe and trompe l'oeil effects--Brian McHale.

Genres: Poetry

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words.
Schwerner was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and his family moved to the United States when he was nine years old. He attended Columbia University (B.A. 1950, M.A. 1964) and taught at universities in the New York City area until his retirement in 1998.

Reviews

[Dead · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad's father wrote this.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great unacknowledged masterpieces of late-20th C literature.

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empty holes in the fish-dying-becoming directions.

[Colin Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is such a pleasure. Presented as a faux-scholarly translation of an ancient text, there’s as much poetry in the “translations” as the scholarly apparatus that surrounds them. I most loved the humorous contrast between the analytical, dry scholar and these effusive poems about sex, food, the divine.

[Will Lashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schwerner's supposed "reconstruction" of 27 Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions grounds the avant garde eclecticism of Ezra Pound, John Cage and the Beats in the archaic crypto-mystical veils of Bronze Age mythology, with nods to Sappho, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament and the hermeneutic tradition.