By the late 1950s Armand Schwerner, then in his thirties, was evolving as a poet and musician. Living in Manhattan and studying anthropology at Columbia University, he began a close association with the city's overlapping circles of experimental poets, innovative scholars, translators, publishers, artists, actors, and performers. With the editors and contributors to the journal Alcheringa and the poets who read at the St. Mark's poetry series in Greenwich Village or who published with Black Sparrow Press, Schwerner engaged in formative discussions of ideas that have become central to the contemporary era's fin de siècle literary discourse. Crucial issues, both then and now, have been the poetics of ordinary speech and poetic language; native poetries, aleatoric operations, ethnopoetics, and translation; and open-field poetry, poetic genres, and performance. Schwerner's own writings, translation projects, and approaches to performances derived significantly from the multiplicity of concerns within his community...