Abstract
This chapter reads the musical tablet, “Tablet XII” of Armand Schwerner’s long poem The Tablets, as marking a hinge-point in the poem’s larger structure. To construct “Tablet XII,” Schwerner uses a hypothetical reconstruction of an ancient Sumerian hymn, scored by the archaeomusicologist Francis W. Galpin in 1937. Drawing upon modernist practices, particularly Pound’s score in “Canto 75,” Schwerner uses this score to open up the question of musical analogies in relation to poetic form. Appearing roughly in the middle of the work, the score, in effect, divides the question of the “musical” and the “lyrical” at the point of its appearance, marking a subjective and critical crux in the structure of the long poem.
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Carruthers, A.J. (2017). Long Poem Including Music: Reading the Score in Armand Schwerner’s “Tablet XII”. In: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 . Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46242-4_2
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