The Poet and the Shaman

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.