Tarn is at least two people. And he has always known he is at least two people, since he’s written about this fact or situation severally (in Views from the Weaving Mountains, in the recent odes of The Hölderliniae). Being one’s own döppelganger, feeling split and torn, yearning in both/ all directions and “The missed sensation of being one person” (xvii) are a basso continuo in this quite enthralling and sprawling book. The person in question is “a Young Scholar Who Wanted to Be a Poet” (35) and he succeeds in both. How does Tarn reveal or articulate his two selves and two vocations? In a thrilling rush of stimuli. How does he experience them? Sometimes as a burden. Nevertheless Tarn cultivated two lives, two professions, two names, and enough activities and contacts for each.

Atlantis is an uncanny read, because these field notes are a blistering and hyper-active account of having been almost everywhere and meeting almost everybody. A scholar/poet and a poet/scholar found that “the ability to spend more than one life at a time was finally achieved” (9). And his struggles along the way fascinate, for it’s as if he were running a relay race with himself, passing the baton between each other self as he rounds the turns. So the book is like being “on the road” with Janus.

It’s singularly interesting experience to ingest this book, to be amid it, even to be overwhelmed by it. Atlantis, is a readable avalanche, a discontinuous (but still chronological) memoir, a Big Bricolage of notations, essayistic forays, diary squibs of living life, field notes and polemics, giving the reader charming and telling vignettes (as a little Jewish boy at private school; as oriented off-handedly at Yale on a Fulbright)—these being anecdotes of rare drollery, along with polemics of incisive, and sometimes got-a-bee-in-bonnet challenges)—and have I come to the end of this sentence yet? The book almost convinces us that Tarn is a tribe (“I is a throng of voices” in Janet Rodney’s epigraph), a tribe with some unique traits; hence an autoanthropology is accurate as the genre rubric: to help investigate this entity.

Field work reports: This tribe of two has a taste for elegant categorization—with uniforms, heraldry and birding, as well as for neologisms, and dramatic, staged impatiences and triumphs. The tribe has a thrilling lust for textiles—I can only applaud—whose world-ranging collection would eventually go to the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe (90). Despite his somewhat bitter internal epistle about laziness, the ethnographer of this tribe of two has done lifetimes of work recording observations and findings. He bases this work on arrays of field notes (perhaps journals), notes exciting, reflective, dramatic, witty, sketch-pad penetrating, certainly with enough gossip to delight—and sometimes astonish. The reports also contain bemusements at missed friendships, bad connections, dramatic suspicions, enough to regale and even charm with frankness and payback. (Tarn’s contemporary and current domestic life is declared off limits, xviii)

Self One. (That’s a falsifying title just for convenience, since these selves are constantly in interactive motion. . .). Self One is a professional Ethnographer —here a specialist in the study of myths, and rituals, done by empathetic participation and saturation in the chosen culture. Ethnography is a methodology of saturation and learning from the inside out. The field of anthropology (a quondam synonym) is seen as a drier discipline combining sociology, linguistic analysis of categories, and various kinds of political and social analyses summarizing social structures and patterns of a society (at a certain time and place, for sure)—a decoding and placing. Tarn sought and found the top of the field of anthropology in the early 1950s. This self was awakened by an ethnographic museum (in Paris) and propelled by some giant scholars and theorists. He seems to have met the field-changers, attended lectures by significant thinkers in three countries and in two languages. Tarn’s first encounters with anthropology as a field led to studies with Marcel Griule, Germaine Dieterlen, and appropriate resistance to the too-magisterial Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book is filled with parallel encounters of a kind and quantity that are literally dazzling in all the interesting sites for academic studies of anthropology.

In anthropology (and the human sciences), we see Tarn’s staggering lists of contacts, then we see episodes of fieldwork with little rehearsal (here) of findings/ interpretations—and their effect on his future work. The chapters are generally experiential. Tarn considers his work on Messianic Buddhism (113-116) to be his most original, but it got dropped in favor of “literary interests” (115), and later rescued as a text by a helper figure. We do see that that his anthropological written work (from Guatemala) is dropped variously, tossed around, deposited in libraries, then later published, and became, Tarn says, a gold standard for research.

Significant research in two disparate societies (Guatemala and Burma) has been done—similarities? differences? none are named, but the reader gets a thrilling action picture adventure-film of life in both places—the anthropology of anthropologists, friends and administrators, colonial regime bureaucracies (cast as the ever impeding “burrokrassy,” 33, 53, 101,108). And all the little crimps and barriers of negotiating and surviving in such uneven, historically marked international settings. The man who-thinks- he-is-two absolutely knows how to manage however and whatever; he enters his spaces with a lavish curiosity and commitment even when overwhelmed. The book thereby is a towering bricolage, a week’s long festival, a set of case studies of magnificent international flair where landing on your feet —or sometimes not-is choreographed with dazzling panache. I think of it as being “one the road” with two selves and tribal allegiances—many, many travels, often professionally induced from ethnographic research that was, in fact, highly respected and gained grants, publication, and distinguished employment—the currency of that field.

Self Two: Poetry. In poetry, his meetings are palpable but always insufficient. Surrealism in France is a problem. The British poetry taking shape in the meetings with “The Group” (132-134) is not enough. Tarn becomes one self-elected conduit for new American poetry and French theory to enter England, through the mechanism of Cape Goliard, his brief, welcome foray into the editor’s role in publishing. Despite being everywhere and meeting everyone, he cannot forget that he did not manage to get to Black Mountain College in its heyday (86). However, he was transformed by the open-ended spiritual loft of the new American poetries, and he takes a skeptical and even resentful attitude to the ugliness and uselessness of pobiz worlds as a spoiling force. (204) I remember a very memorable Blast from Tarn on this topic in Montemora 5. He does not mince words.

Tarn throws himself into the experiences that he seeks out: these “throws” (of chance, of the die, of risky gambles) are his Chapter rubrics. These throws never fix time, experience or the future on one path; another throw may have another outcome. Is this “on the road” trajectory motivated by a shamanic evocation of Mallarmé? In a mid-book “Throw” (Thirteen), Tarn “gives up” anthropology in 1967—as "a career I had come to detest” (121) —the “detest” is underexplained. The ferocious attraction of poetry for Tarn is the rhetorical power and spiritual force that induces “the initiatic” (in Hölderliniae, 21).Tarn seeks the “initiatic” moment (Atlantis, 87) in travel, in landscape in rituals—peak moments of being. It’s this feeling of presence and engulfment that he tries to create in poetry. And he feels that authenticity, because it has happened for him in certain invested landscapes, like Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.

Poetry becomes a rapture, a desire. Ethnography might, however, give you legitimate access to desirable experiences of initiation. So the two selves need each other’s talents. There are dramatic, startling scenes of participation in rituals and what transpires is a sense of transcendence and presence in the world at once. He is not a divine amateur in these encounters but they transform and transfix him. In fact, he’s never an amateur, but he might be divine—there was an incident. . .an initiation. . .a noteworthy ritual participation: “costumbre.” This term mystifies as it means only custom or habit—but it is clearly a punctual ritual in Guatemala (192-95) and eventually precipitates the ego-sweet rumor that he is a god, or at least a reincarnated priest [196]. Let this cup pass...

Tarn tries to bring those two selves together—his poetry becomes an initiatic ritual evocation. “Ethnopoetics” is a word he claims to have invented—it’s possible enough,though it's rare that terminology is ever invented by one person alone or one person only. Simultaneous neologisms are also plausible, and claiming priority seems a proud desire for Firstness given a matrix of mates or peers. At least we have that term (defined and elaborated variously), with thanks to all involved. And yet within this loosely ethnopoetic world, he has episodes of feeling pushed away and out from other loosely anthropological poets—Snyder and Rothenberg, Quasha. Negative pushes are also intermingled with the hurtful relationship with a distinguished Super Ego—the critic (and quondam poet?) George Steiner. Tarn gives a lacerating analysis of Steiner’s over-invested advice to not try poetry but stick with ethnography (136-37). Not every relationship is fulfilling, though many, many contacts and persons are listed in the weavings of many enriching moments. And some losses.

As for his lives in literature (generally teaching “comparative literature,” a term he loathes)— this derision about certain distinguished East coast universities is balanced by a striking chapter of self-analysis—that seems to be belied by this very book itself. Tarn claims a reluctance to commit to the habit of working on poems out of “fear of my own energy (122); he notes his serious, hard-won competence in “rational argument” (122), but a blocking distrust of the desired acts of poetry with their “irrational jumps” (123). This is tied to a sense of the alternating pressures of mythology and a totalized view of the world with its heraldic or classificatory sense of security, here contrasted with a historical view of a world broken apart, trying for progress but achieving only anomie and statistics (125). There is a backbeat of golden age thinking in Tarn’s analyses; that position is, of course, hard to avoid in this world of woe.

Tarn structures many stances while facing contemporaneity as an almost hopeless dialectic. The third transcendent term is, for him, a commitment to a spiritual sense of mythologies and their deep forces infusing poetry. This is pursued (144) with an analysis of contemporary senses of a “structural messianism,” “a vision of the perpetuations of human hope and an all-encompassing idea of justice,” including the future persons. I wish he has discussed Benjamin at this moment, and also given his sense of the larger history and genealogy of some of the ideas that emerge in his book.

The speaking subjectivity in this book is hard to summarize. Is it the onrush of a tide, where the reader as surfer has to ride wave after wave of astonishment, awe, envy, pleasure—and the necessity for close study of the wind shears and rip tides. Is Tarn’s subjectivity, as I suggested before, the runner, enthralled by his own relay race, passing the baton between selves. Is it the traveler encountered by chance whose anecdotes make you jealous because you’ve missed—everything? That is—whenever/wherever you were born, and with what social shapes, it’s too late to see it unspoiled —it being Mexico City, Angkor Wat, the Parthenon —and any number of other places in which this world-ranging traveler has landed. This has some aristocratic appeal, I will say—except that you yourself (you, belated parvenue) might have helped “spoil” it. The reader is thus a figure never adequate to the golden moments of this memoir. Literally so in at least one case, given that Tarn holds a view of the female as mystery so intense that feminism (or gender modernities) are considered a spoiler for lyric poetry. What an awful outcome! He tempers this view but still admires having had that thought.

These doubled being-selves create a complex of engaging, unfinished persons and rhetorical pleasures. This complex is also one basis of Tarn’s recent book The Hölderliniae—a work of odic sublimity that maps Tarn’s and Hölderlin’s lives together, intertwining them on the page, particularly what is fixed upon as the Paternal (Parental) NO about the career of poetry (Hölderliniae, 34, 39.) When Tarn uses Hölderlin’s example of the task and costs of poetry he addresses, as Atlantis also does, that historical-spiritual role which he announces as the ultimate zone and responsibility of the poet.

Coda: Thanks are tendered by Tarn—and readers—to Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary as helper figures and maieutic assistants to the birth of this unique and enchanting text after its gestation.

Works forthcoming from Rachel Blau DuPlessis in 2022 and 2023 will be Selected Poems 1980-2020 from CHAX Publishing, Life in Handkerchiefs, a book of collage poems, from Materialist Press, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, from University of Alabama Press, and Eurydics, loosely based on Sonnets to Orpheus, from Shearsman.