Vitalpoetics

For those of you unaware of Lascaux, the story is simple – it’s an archaeological site in southwestern France, home to 17,000 year old Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, but which is now under threat from fungi and bacteria thanks to the installation of a new air-conditioning unit begun in 1999, and general bureaucratic mismanagement. The full story can be found here.

Saving Lascaux has received the support of some of my real heroes in the world of poetry, especially Pierre Joris and Clayton Eshleman (an article by Eshleman about Lascaux is available on Joris’ blog). The question is, why as poets we should care? Eshleman proposes that at Lascaux

humankind’s greatest endowment, imagination, is initiated, empowered, and fully realized. It is arguably the most spiritual spot on earth.

And others have spoken to the idea that Lascaux provides the ‘basis of contemporary art‘. But for me, there is something more fundamental about it. Jerome Rothenberg, in the preface to the original 1967 collection Technicians of the Sacred asks what is primitive poetry?

the work will probably not end with the “single” line & its various configurations – will more likely be preceded & followed by other lines. Are all of these separate “lines” (each of considerable duration) separate poems, or are they the component parts of a single, larger poem moving toward some specific (ceremonial) end? Is it enough, then, if the lines happen in succession & aren’t otherwise tied? Will some further connection be needed? Is the group of lines a poem if “we” can make the connection? Is it a poem where no specific connection is apparent to “us”? If the lines come in sequence on a single occasion does the unity of the occasion connect them into a single poem? Can many poems be a single poem as well? (They often are.)
What’s a sequence anyway?
What’s unity?

Such questions don’t apply to just ‘primitive’ (Rothenberg uses the term in no way disparagingly) poetry, but for poetry at all its localities in time and geography: poetry is much bigger than the 400 yr old Western cannon we learn at universities, and much much bigger than my generation’s cannon of post-WWI modernisms. Lascaux reminds us that what we understand by ‘poetry’ needs to be de-centred, non-hegemonic. Poetry is more than lines, stanzas, pages, books, movements etc. Poetry existed in other times. Poetry is written in other languages. Poetry is performance, song, dance, music, spoken, written…poetry doesn’t just come now from the metropole. It isn’t a stretch to admit that an imagination that can comprehend poetry outside of what we understand by the Western tradition can also begin to comprehend equally ideological assumptions, like that capitalism is a natural, neutral and global system.

If, as Zukofsky says, “Education begins with poetry” that “informs…the intellect” or as Sidney says that it’s a “first nurse” that allows us to feed on “tougher knowledges,” then Lascaux is worth us caring about.