Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Rochelle Owens: 'Hermaphropoetics' / 'Desire'

In this story

ripening on the vine so to speak

 

In this story a warhol-like

playfulness

 

a vinyl fruit of desire

teasing femme/homme

 

bringing millions to their knees

 

Antonin Artaud: 'The Old Caca Love Box'

A first translation from French by Clayton Eshleman

                                                                 Paris, 27 December 1946
                                                                 To M. Gilbert 
Lély

          Sir,

     I did indeed receive your letter urging me to send you the promised text
for your special issue on love. But I did warn you that I could tell you only what I
think. It was you who questioned me, it is to you that I respond.
     For I have had, for a long time, nothing more to say about love. It’s a feeling
that I believed I had and understood, at a time when I was developing false ideas
about life, for in truth I never found any love in it, only in me:

Charles Stein: 'The Speed of Thought,' part one

[The following is text of a talk I gave early this fall at the Philadelphia conference on Psychedemia (C.S.)]

The point is that a thought — any thought —
retards time:
The infinitely rapid rush of transition —
the white susurrus of the immediate movement
from one instant to its successor.
To be possessed of a thought —
it is as if there were a station in time
at which one could have a recess from its passage.
One stops to consider.
One places before oneself
that which a thought contains
in order to elaborate, reflect, develop, associate . . .
while holding the position of the original thought.
Time flies on, but the thought remains...
Sort of.

Jerome Rothenberg: 'A Further Witness,' for Anselm Hollo

All things possess intelligence, and a share of thought.
– Empedocles of Acragas

1/

I who
am dead
call to
the living
little
brothers
how absurd
your walk
is
unencumbered
& adrift
you run across
life’s
stage

Anne Waldman: Excerpts from 'Jaguar Harmonics' [person woven of, of tesserae]

“and I// hear all, the new moon new in all/ the ancient sky”
-- Charles Olson