Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Outside & subterranean poems, a mini-anthology in progress (55): 'Figures in the Dark, the Dancer at Trois Frères'

The opening selection from a work in progress, 'Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry,' edited with John Bloomberg-Rissman

COMMENTARY

The first traces of poetic mind begin in darkness: a mystery of figures — sorcerers or shamans — on a journey into hidden places, beyond the boundaries of light & human dwellings.  It is in the depths of those caves — 30,000 years in the past — that we get the first glimmers of a move toward the recording of memory & an active imagination that frees such memory & brings it into a new configuration.

Geraldine Green: 'Stories that Connect' (as an introduction to her book 'Salt Road')

[Green’s work over the last several years has involved an intense & detailed immersion into the specifics of her native Cumbria in the northwest of England.  Her latest book, Salt Road (Indigo Dreams Publishers, scheduled for mid-August), is “a mix of poems and prose, memories, travel notes and anecdotes,” but an entry as well into the wider discourse on ethnopoetics.

Peter Valente: From 'The Artaud Variations,' with commentary by Cole Heinowitz

Drawing with text by Antonin Artaud
Drawing with text by Antonin Artaud

There is a Hole in things
that resists classification
and cannot be understood in the terms
that explain it 

Jerome Rothenberg: From 'A Further Witness,' a poem in progress

AS THE SKY GOES BLACK

 

fixed in place

or running

half a man

& half

a crazed

machine

 

he feels himself

becoming

what he ran from