As a discipline ethnopoetics differs radically from general poetics, negates the Empire, asserts that everything is marginal, and that consequently there are no margins.

                                                               —Michel Benamou

In 1968, I was living around the corner from Moe’s Books in Berkeley. That was where I found Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (Doubleday), along with the first double issue of George Quasha’s magazine, Stony Brook. They were new arrivals, displayed face up and sharing the same space with Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of  Don Juan (first published in 1968 by the University of California Press) and John J. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (available as a Bison Book paperback since 1961). This was a time when many stores, from City Lights in North Beach (which is still there) to the Eighth Street Bookshop in the Village (long gone), had begun devoting entire sections to titles dealing with the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

When Technicians and Stony Brook appeared, I had been working on the problem of how to translate the stories Andrew Peynetsa and Walter Sanchez had told me in Shiwi’ma, the language spoken at the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico. Spoken narratives, whatever the language, had always been transformed into prose for the printed page, but what I was hearing on my tape recordings struck me as something more like projective verse. I used line breaks to indicate pauses, changes of type size to indicate changes in loudness, and parenthetical stage directions to indicate tones of voice and gestures. I showed my translations and read them aloud to various people in Berkeley, and I got an enthusiastic response in a gathering that included Josephine Miles and Robert Grenier. But no one was able to suggest a likely place of publication. When the opening came, it came from the opposite coast.

The first issue of Stony Brook carried an excerpt from Technicians (pp. 205-223), and the masthead (inside back cover) listed Rothenberg as an advisory editor specializing in “ethnopoetics.” I later learned that he had coined this term when Quasha urged him to find a name for what he was doing. Anthropologists had long been using such terms as ethnobotany and ethnozoology and would later add others, notably ethnomedicine and ethnomathematics. In practice, studies carried out under such rubrics are devoted to the ways in which ethnic others organize their knowledge, but in theory, there is no botany, zoology, medicine, or mathematics that is not embedded in ethnicity. In the same way, there is no poetics that is not an ethnopoetics.