Finalist for the PEN Center USA's Literary Award in Poetry (2003) For some forty years, Nathaniel Tarn has been celebrated as an extraordinary figure in American writing. His work in a variety of scholarly and literary genres has ranged from Maya ritual to Jewish mysticism, the monasteries of Burma to the arctic seas of Alaska. One of the founders of ethnopoetics, he has brought to poetry an almost limitless range of interests and a remarkable dexterity in both open and closed forms. As Eliot Weinberger has written, “What holds it together is Tarn’s ecstatic vision, his continuing enthusiasm for the stuff of the world.”

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century’s major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person.” Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

"For students and scholars of contemporary writing, this index is an excellent resource for locating and tracing the publication of individual works by authors and poets."--BOOK JACKET.

Avia is a book-length epic poem that takes for its subject matter the war in the air in World War Two. The verse narratives are stories told by combat pilots from all the major battle theatres, but are related to Charles Lindbergh in a dream as he returns to the United States following his 1927 transatlantic flight. Voices from his future and from our past.