Rothenberg's "Technicians of the Sacred"

In general I like Rothenberg's "Technicians of the Sacred" because it attempts to bring as much as it possibly can to the Ethnopoetics's table. I found his arrangement of materials to be interesting. For example that he includes a piece on Egyptian Gods followed several pages later by a Chinese piece, which is then followed by a Hebrew piece. I liked how the first five parts were a mix of various cultures under a single theme. However, I don't understand why he didnt continue to do this throughout the rest of the book. Especially, since he says of his reasons for arranging the rest of the book geographically was, "simply that it provides an alternate way of bringing the materials together" (xxxi). The reason that I like the first five parts is that they clearly illustrated to me that one can make various connections between the many cultures represented in this book, such as the need to want to create some sort of explanation for how and why things exist and what connection do human beings have to their environment.

The only problem that I had with Rothenberg's text is that he decided to place the commentaries about the individual pieces at the end of the book and not with the individual pieces themselves. As I felt that made it too easy to ignore the contextual issues surrounding the individual pieces. As Jed Rasula points out in his essay on Rotherberg's text, "the Commentaries clarify and amplify the poeisis underlying the aesthetic, but since they are seperated by hundreds of pages from the poems, a special effort has to be made to approach them in context" (137). However, in saying this I am grateful that he decided to include commetaries at all because it would have been very easy to just publish these pieces as a collection of poetry without any sort of contextual background. In having the Commentaries section Rotherberg puts together a body of work that exists somewhere in between Cronyn's "American Indian Poetry" and Densmore's "Chippewa Music," and in my opinion that makes this a very interesting and important text.