THE SHADOWY (NON-)IDENTITY OF THE SHAMAN IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. POETRY: JIM MORRISON, GARY SNYDER, AND JEROME ROTHENBERG
THE SHADOWY (NON-)IDENTITY OF THE SHAMAN IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. POETRY: JIM MORRISON, GARY SNYDER, AND JEROME ROTHENBERG

Summary/Abstract: The shaman figure is an elusive character in contemporary US poetry as it involves both distant – in time, space, and language – and accessible – in terms of poetic relevance and poetic revaluation – cultural backgrounds and it induces a significant variety of possible relations between the shamanistic elements and the speakers in or the authors of certain poetries. By the presence of such a mysterious figure in a certain poetry, lyrical identity becomes a crossroads in which the alterity pervading rituals and initiations in traditional societies negotiates with the cultural alterity of the various layers of discourse involved and with the mutual otherness of the poetic voices employed to forge a para-original vision and a modern poetical complexity. The paper draws parallels between the ways in which the rock icon Jim Morrison involves shamanic scenarios and personas in his poetry – his lyrics but mostly and more significantly in his posthumous verse – and the significance of similar elements in the literary and mainstream poetries of two of the most important figures that have implicated shamanism, traditional society lore, anthropology and ethnopoetics in their works – Gary Snyder and Jerome Rothenberg. The most important theoretical treatise the paper draws on in establishing the salient similarities and differences between the three poetries is Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The author’s research shows that the ecstatic shamanistic ‘individualist (non)identity’ of Romantic and early modernist extraction, operating in Morrison’s poetry, becomes a ‘communal identity / tribal alterity’ in Snyder – where the shamanistically ecstatic gets to reside in euphony – and then an ever-eclectic and at the same time idealistically univocal reservoir of poetry in Rothenberg, whereby a maximalist inter-cultural shamanism nourishes singular language pearls.

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