^* Such an assertion may not seem self-evident, but insofar as it is, it reveals a tacit alliance of the project of This Compost with that of ethnopoetics, which Jerome Rothenberg defines as “the reinterpretation of the poetic past, the recurrent question of a primitive-civilized dichotomy (particularly in its post-Platonic, Western manifestations), the idea of a visionary poetics and of the shaman as a paradigmatic proto-poet, the idea of a great subculture and of the persistence of an oral poetics in all of the ‘higher’ civilizations, the concept of wilderness and of the role of the poet as a defender of biological and psychological diversity, the issue of the monoculture and the issue of cultural imperialism, the question of communal and individual expression in traditional societies, the relation of culture and language to mental processes, the divergence of oral and written cultures (and their projected reconciliation), and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images (the goddess, the trickster, the human universe, etc.)” (“Pre-Face” to Symposium of the Whole, xvi).