Is that the most beautiful church in the world In “Marimar” (58 lines across three pages), Barot draws readers from the Spanish invasion, through phantasmagoria of the Catholic Church grinding beauty out of the poverty and struggles for self-identity it inflicted on Indigenous communities, through lingering traces of the past that underlie contemporary life. I started at 9:30 one evening, and by the following morning had gulped the entire book.
ECOTONE PERMACULTURE GENERATOR
Nine of the ten longlist finalists for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry (Not pictured, Travesty Generator by Lillian Yvonn-Bertram)Īfter I ordered the books on the list, I sat down first to read The Galleons by Rick Barot. Our collective social imaginations will become more resilient in meeting the challenges of our times if we develop better deep listening to what these poets speak. Anthropologists sometimes talk about “giving voice to the voiceless,” but in our current moment of multiple social crises, the poets on this list provide their own voices. Ten powerful books, with poems exploring topics relevant to contemporary anthropology: racism and social justice, postcolonialism, political turmoil, death and its echoes for the living, love and passion, borders and history, animating the present with stories and thoughts of people whose lives have frequently been ignored and often actively destroyed by the powerful. Poetry that speaks to anthropologyĬonsider the longlist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Recent poetry challenges Williams’s claim-our understandings of the world can be both informed in the ways of social sciences and transformed in the ways of poetry. William Carlos Williams wrote in “Asphodel”: It is difficult The same can be said of thick description in ethnography where theory is to be discovered in the details.Įthnographers and poets should both start from an understanding that we must attend to people’s experiences with dynamic awareness and living language. If one knows precisely where a poem is going before beginning to write there is no point in going further. Antropoesia is a process of discovery more than a confirmation of what is already known. In antropoesia, my term (in Spanish) for verse informed by an ethnographic sensibility, I strive for accuracy and engage in forms of inquiry where I am surprised by the unexpected. In neither case do concrete particulars illustrate an already formulated theory. Poetic exploration resembles ethnographic inquiry in that insight emerges from specifics more than from generalizations. In The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Death, Renato Rosaldo writes:
ECOTONE PERMACULTURE FULL
Poetry attends to experience through living language, animates the present, and brings the full range of ourselves to our writing. This meeting place of poetry and anthropology-this ecotone, a region of transition between two ecological communities-bears special attention. The unsettledness of our times fuels a deepening engagement between poetry (speaking as if speaking matters in shaping the world) and anthropology (knowing ourselves and our lives merely as one among many ways of being). The meeting place of anthropology and poetry offers a deeper, more expansive understanding of what it means to be human in our world.
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