Gathering of Artifacts

Since early 2004, the Paleolithic artifacts uncovered in the Hohle Fels Cave of southern Germany and the Danube River Valley have offered human "civilization" and humanity itself, at this moment of relentlessly gathering warnings over the fate of mankind, another equally mysterious gathering. The artifacts are at once peculiar, sophisticated, delicate, and raw. There are superbly carved mammoth ivory horses, mallards, a small female Venus-like figurine, and most recently, an eight-and-a-half inch flute hollowed from the bone of a griffon vulture. The female figurine is the oldest ever found. The flute with its five finger holes, is, at 40,000 calendar years, the earliest of the similar artifacts so far discovered at this site. It is also contemporary to the settlement of the region.

"Settlement" of a region in this instance refers to the initial migration of "modern" Homo sapiens into Europe. This site, with its abundance of ivory and stone objects, flint knapping scraps, and remains of hunted animals, may be one of the isolated places where humans began the experiment with themselves as art-making creatures. Do these objects invoke the possible accompanying experiments of dance, singing, storytelling, syllabic innovations of utterance and how these activities related to methods of daily concentration, dream, visionary inspiration, and the recognition of those boundaries of mortality which form and give breath to the life of curiosity?

The flute is a sensuous, spare, keenly present, deep-breathed object from the primordial beginnings of humanity. It bespeaks of an already realized unrestrained fertility of nerve moving forward from that point toward an unbroken 25,000-year tradition of art making that defines what we know of Ice Age peoples. Is the term "humanity" still fresh and applicable to these recently unearthed things so much a part, as they must have been, of communal resources and living nearnesses of awe, cognition, and generative watchfulness?

There is a sharp, aware new anthology that in its challenge relates most directly to these artifacts. A "where we are and where we've come from" possibility of tracings that matter. The anthology is Poems for the Millennium, edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson. Rothenberg's and Robinson's "volume" brings forward a courageous sense of wonder filled with composure, peril, dread, and energies sexual, political, mythological, comic, and dangerous. This "gathering," to use the editors' word, proposes "a new mapping that will stress connections, too often denied, while paying equal attention to the conflicts within the lineage…."

The editors' focus on "Romanticism" holds a composure unlike any other collection with a supposed similar intent I have ever seen as both a writer and teacher. Their collection is made up of a "Preludium," three separate "Galleries," and closes with "Manifestos & Poetics." It presents "British," "Continental," and "American" Romanticism and risks inclusions that not only animate the Imaginative crisis of this tradition, but re-invigorate the rapturous, full-of-the-trouble-of-being-alive knowledge its poets refuse to exorcise. Its variety unfolds into fascinations as one wanders the "Galleries" and "Commentaries": Dionysios Solomos, Joseph Joubert, Wu Tsao, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Adah Isaacs Menken, Shaker vision drawings, José Martí, Rubén Darío, Sándor Petöfr, an "Anonymous Revolutionary Pamphlet," Germaine de Staël, Denis Diderot, Aleksander Pushkin, Adam Mickiewicz, Lady Charlotte Guest, and Francisco Goya to indicate only a luring few.

Detail from cover

Presences of the anonymous, the traditional, fine translations, and the poised exuberance of what is allowed freshly to come to breathe allows the reader equally to chance upon an unexpected substantive intimacy other anthologies either dismally avoid or scorn. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance, in his "Ode to Liberty" reminds us, in the abyss of passivities marking the present destruction of the US Constitution, and the rampant gutting of ethics betraying and transforming daily life into venom, that the wildest Bacchanalia hovering...