The Forgotten Topologies of Armand Schwerner: Echoes Through the Tablets
Among the many voices submerged beneath the tide of postmodern American poetics, the work of Armand Schwerner (1927–1999) presents a singular topography—part excavation, part incantation, and in every regard a radical act of aesthetic archaeology. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, and raised in the United States, Schwerner was not a poet for the anthologies. His work persisted at the margins—semiotically dense, flirtatious with mysticism, and resolutely irreverent toward traditional forms. This outsider status was not a resignation but an integral component of his artistic philosophy.
He studied at Columbia and served as a professor at the College of Staten Island, but such biographical fixtures are minor compared to the gravitational pull of his masterwork: “The Tablets.” Begun in the 1960s and continued until his death, this sprawling poetic endeavor simulates the translation of cuneiform texts allegedly from ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Yet, in a ludic and recursive twist, these tablets are entirely of Schwerner’s own invention. Through fictitious, fragmentary “translations,” intentional lacunae, editorial footnotes, and glosses, he blurs the line between the ancient and the postmodern, creating a lyric space in which time, authorship, and authenticity are continuously destabilized.
On first encounter, “The Tablets” presents as parody; soon it reveals itself as ritual. Consider Tablet VII, with lines resounding: “like the subtle names of god / which are / vibrations & untouchable / the first words / I say to the clay” (Schwerner, 1999). Here is not merely an evocation of deity or sacred craft, but a philosophical engagement with the material of language itself. Clay, in its duality of permanence and malleability, becomes the medium of poetic memory—eternal yet susceptible to erosion.
Schwerner’s imaginary scribe-voice, riddled with interruptions from “translators”—often Schwerner himself—reflects a mode of self-conscious authorship that prefigures later theorists. In Tablet XIV, for instance, we encounter: “[1. This line excised by being cut out of the tablet. Translator.]” and later, “moist silk peel / the scribe went blind at this point, and I can only offer conjecture” (Schwerner, 1999). The frailty of the authorial body mirrors the fragility of historical continuity. The text as palimpsest here is not metaphor—it is structure. In this light, Schwerner invites a meta-linguistic reflection: are we reading poetry, history, or both through the fog of our own projections?
According to critic Peter Middleton, Schwerner “problematizes the relation of the self to the mythic, the historical, and the bodily” by adopting a “false historical consciousness as poetic method.”¹ This method is illuminating when examined in the backdrop of Cold War America, where narratives were continuously rewritten, and authority—linguistic or otherwise—was deeply suspect. If Schwerner’s fake tablets unsettle the logics of textual faith, it is because official knowledge was itself untrustworthy. His work, then, operates as both symptom and critique of epistemological crisis.
But what deeper philosophical impulse motivates Schwerner’s endeavor? To translate—that seemingly innocent scholarly pursuit—becomes here an act of creating origin. If no source text exists, then the translation gestures toward a metaphysical act: it invokes a world as it invokes a word. It is not only that the poem simulates translation, but that translation becomes a path to being. Echoing Heidgger’s assertion that “language is the house of Being,” Schwerner operates as both householder and thief, sneaking texts into being through rituals of fictional recovery.
This instantiates the poetic act as sacrament. Tablet XIX reflects this theological urgency: “limbed god / press downward / the silt of the verb is inside you.” What he offers is not the genealogy of a narrative, but the ritual of its invocation—an epiphany that is always crumbling. The medium of clay implies fragility; the medium of poetry, in Schwerner’s poetics, implies haunting.
Scholars and critics seldom know where to place Schwerner. He is too playful to be taken seriously by historians, too obscure to be canonical among American poets. Yet it is through this marginality that his importance is best understood. As scholar Robert Kaufman notes, Schwerner’s “fake” poetics asks us to confront how all texts, even sacred ones, are constructed, reimagined, and mythologized over time.² Schwerner’s act of “translation” becomes a form of philosophical resistance against the tyranny of fixed origin.
It is in this liminal zone, between awe and irony, that we might locate the religious function of Schwerner’s work. Indeed, as I reclined one fog-drenched evening in the Monestarium—a spare white room with a window open to the moon’s blue stare—I revisited Tablet X. The scribe, mid-mystical reverie, describes a divine encounter thus: “I called upon the belly haze / the horned vision of my days / and within the bowl of fire / heard the vowels return me.” This line, so riddled with emotional disorientation, evokes another passage of Homer or Hildegard, while somehow feeling like the scribble found in the margins of a dream.
To hear the vowels return you—what, then, is Schwerner’s ultimate gift? The poem is not a message or a memento; rather, it is the voice that has never ceased speaking. As readers, we do not merely read Schwerner; we enact him, becoming modern midrash-makers scraping meaning from missing letters. The verse gestures not toward understanding but toward being understood, calling its reader into sympathetic ritual.
I once asked an anthropologist friend what he thought of Schwerner’s work after introducing him to Tablet XXIII. He responded, “It reads like a sacred object built to decay. Like an artifact whose function is to disappear in the hands of its reader.” In that comment lies the dark, theological seduction of Schwerner’s oeuvre—the articulation of the sacred, disfigured beautifully by time and translation.³
In the end, we are left with silence and fragments, an occasional vowel, and the shiver of language being born again inside us. Schwerner’s “The Tablets” invite the reader not merely to interpret but to inhabit—a world almost lost, but never fully imagined.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, ritual, translation
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¹ Middleton, Peter. “Poetry and the Problem of Doubt.” Textual Practice 18, no. 1 (2004): 29–46.
² Kaufman, Robert. “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 682–724.
³ Meyer, Leonard. “Emotion and Meaning in Music,” University of Chicago Press, 1956. While discussing music theory, Meyer’s notions of decay and excerpted meaning have found analogical application in Schwerner’s poetic temporality.