Native American cultural context. Ethnopoetics: aesthetic movement or academic discipline? Various other writers and poets can be said to have contributed to the field of ethnopoetics as an aesthetic movement. For example, Tristan Tzara created calligrams and William Bright worked with the Karuk tribe to preserve their native language. However, within the fields of linguistics, folkloristics, and anthropology, ethnopoetics refers to a particular method of analyzing the linguistic features and syntactical structures of oral literature (such as poetry, myths, narratives, folk tales, ceremonial speeches, etc.) in ways that pay attention to poetic patterns within speech. Overall, then, ethnopoetic methods and theories strive to capture on the written page the unique aesthetic elements of individual cultures’ oral poetry and narrative performance traditions, or what folklorists would call their verbal lore. Classicist Steve Reece has attempted to envision how folklorists like Dennis Tedlock or Elizabeth Fine, if transported to an eighth-century BCE social gathering in Ionia where Homer was performing a version of the Odyssey, would transcribe that oral performance into a textual form. This exercise is not entirely hypothetical: Homer’s Odyssey was, after all, written down at some point in history; otherwise it would not have survived. References Bibliography Blommaert, Jan. 2007. “Applied Ethnopoetics.” Narrative–State of the Art. Edited by Michael G. W. Bamberg. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Benjamins Current Topics Series (Number: 595215). 215–224. Quick, Catherine. 1999. "Ethnopoetics." Folklore Forum 30(1/2): 95–105. Tedlock, Dennis. Syllabus. “English 699: Ethnopoetics.” Colleges of Arts and Sciences. University at Buffalo. Accessed 22 November 2011. Toelken, Barre. 2003. The Anguish of Snails. Vol. 2, Folklife of the West, edited by Barre Toelken and William A. Wilson. Logan: Utah State University Press. Additional resources Hymes, Dell H. 1981. "In vain I tried to tell you": Essays in Native American ethnopoetics. Studies in Native American Literature 1. University of Pennsylvania publications in conduct and communication. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. . Hymes, Dell H. 2003. Now I know only so far: Essays in ethnopoetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (hbk); (pbk). Tedlock, Dennis. 1972. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuñi Indians. New York: Dial Press. Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. The spoken word and the work of interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. . Tedlock, Dennis. 1999. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller (Second Edition). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. . External links Ethnopoetics, Prof. Dennis Tedlock Ethnopoetics at the millennium, Jerome Rothenberg,