Commentaries

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A Reflection from Amish Trivedi

Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3am, that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.

Digital Poetics 1

The Self Does Not Exist

When I look for a place to start our discussion, I am reminded of a website from a few years ago. With the ominous address “thispersondoenotexist.com,” the site presents a single face filling the screen, with another face replacing it every time the user presses “ENTER.” No commentary or introductory text is offered, but a quick search returns cautionary news articles written when the site launched in 2019. The site is the work of a former NVIDIA engineer who created a custom A.I. that generates faces in real time from images scraped from social media platforms.

In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)

Photo by Emma Bee Bernstein.

This year's overwhelming procession of deaths within the poetry community continues with news that critic Marjorie Perloff passed away on March 24 at the age of 92.

Pataquerical Ballad, with Runa Bandyopadhyay

image by Susan Bee

Pataquerical Ballad by Runa Bandyopadhyay and Charles Bernstein. A two-volume set, one in English and one in Bengali. The English consists of Bandyopadhyay's performative commentary and set of inventive "fits" responding from and extending Bernstein's "The Pataquerical Imagination: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies" in Pitch of Poetry, along with the original essay. The Bengali volume also includes Bandyopadhyay's essay  and a translation of the "The Pataquerical Imagination.