SOURCE: Lavazzi, Tom. “Playing It Loose with The Tablets.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 19 (winter 1998-1999): 90-94.

In the following essay, Lavazzi discusses the sexual and genital imagery and language of Schwerner's poetry.

To enter the world of The Tablets is to enter a pre-genital space where objects are decontextualized, identities disintegrated, and logical distinctions suspended. The tablets reanimate the world by “recreating the animistic” (Schwerner, Journals, SRN 118) [Citations as follows: SRN = Sounds of the River Naranjana and The Tablets I-XXIV; AS = “Armand Schwerner—A Conversation”; PI = personal interview with Armand Schwerner.]. In the linguistically motile landscape (wordscape?) of the poem, hands, fingertips, penises, vulvas, groins, wounds, parts of animals and insects, shoes, knives, and colors circulate freely, continually recontextualize themselves. Logical relationships, such as those between part and whole, large and small, self and other are inverted (“I am your vulva,” says the speaker...