The Poet and the Shaman: Radical Language Praxis

Traces continuity between the shaman's song as it appears in myth, legend, shamanic narratives and ethnographic literature, and mystical, visionary, avant-garde and experimental poetries within the Western tradition. I suggest a poetics of liminality in the ancient epics of Gilgamesh, Inanna and Homer, in the magico-religious philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus and Giordano Bruno, and in the Great Vision of Black Elk, and trace a lineage of poets from the Romantics, to the Modernists, to the Post-Moderns, showing how poetry exacts a continual tension between individual spirituality and cultural constraints on shamanic power and vision. Closely associated with shamanic praxis in the West is a discontinuous body of Gnostic speculation. Texts by Blake, Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, Carrington, Kaufman, Burroughs, and Notley show the shaman's perennial theme of the Otherworldly Journey ever reconfigured according to the artist's relationship to a specific culture, and that culture's relationship to the shamanic paradigm.