Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

The Bard of Encinitas

Jerome Rothenberg and his poetry (a work in progress)

Avivson Films

 

Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada

'An Omnipoetics Manifesto,' from the preface to a gathering of the poetries and poetics of the Americas 'from origins to present'

On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions
Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:
I see a Serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.
O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire and my frost
Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent;
This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.

Mark Weiss

from 'A Suite of Dances,' a new gathering

XIV. Sings Forth

 

The bride of god wants it, now,

on her own terms.

 

We breed cattle

for the final predator.

 

There is always something to ask. This-or-that-ness or

this-or-that-less-ness.

 

Two translations

Lermontov and Nezval — in collaboration with Milos Sovak

[In celebration of what would have been the eightieth birthday, July 31, of Milos Sovak, I’m posting the following translations which he and I coauthored in the last years of his life. By the time of his death in 2009, our friendship had lasted over thirty years and had given me the opportunity to work with him on a series of translations, the most important a book of selected poems from the great Czech modernist Vitezslav Nezval and scattered poems from the late Russian Romantic Mikhail Lermontov.

Ariel Resnikoff

'Shattered Exegetical Echoes,' notes on reading Hank Lazer's 'Thinking in Jewish'

Hank Lazer’s shape-writing walks a very narrow bridge, which is — as the Hasidic mystic, Reb Nahman of Breslov teaches — the world itself, hung across a shattering vessel, swung in awesome cosmic doubt.