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A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris

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Scholars speculate that the collection of sayings attributed to Christ in the Book of Thomas were used as a kind of oracle. Many of the utterances are familiar parables, but others are dream-like, perverse, shocking.

This book, too, could be used as an oracle. The voice working here is not that of Jerome Rothenberg, but of something outside the boundaries of the finite self. Each of the 100 poems included in this collection is the by-product of a shamanic ascent (or descent) into the Other that Rimbaud so revealingly invoked in his famous voyant letters. The difference between the two poets, however, is striking. Rimbaud was a brash 15 year old prodigy, ready to set off on an inward voyage, while Rothenberg, who has cast his nets across most of the world's cultures in search of the sources of the visionary, is here returning to the limitations of an aging self, as evidenced by the moving portrait included on the jacket of the book.

Interestingly enough, Rothenberg speaks of the shamaness Maria Sabina in his Postface and discusses her use of the "I," in the mushroom-induced, hallucinatory chants that brought her to the notice of ethnologists decades ago. He doesn't mention the fact that Sabina's shiftings from self to larger self were in search of a language that could heal the bodies of her clients. This omission, I believe, is quite a telling one, for clearly Rothenberg is also on a quest for healing words in these pages. In fact, one could almost say that this volume is one of the poet's most personal books, although the language, striking as it often is, seems to be the product of Oulipo-like processes.

Ultimately, every inward voyager returns to the vehicle that enables the voyage to happen--the body. Rothenberg gives witness to his ascent in a vibrant language whose source is somewhere and nowhere, but is nevertheless locked within the interval between his own birth and his future mortality.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in new and experimental poetry, as it maintains the visionary tradition of people like Moses de Leon, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman, etc. etc., in a time when that tradition has become something of a cartoon in the hands of the neo-beats. I recommend it highly.