Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (9)

Toward a Poetry of the Americas (9): Raul Bopp

Raul Bopp, from 'Cobra Norato: Nheengatu on the Left Bank of the Amazon,' with notes by the translator

Translation from Portuguese by Jennifer Sarah Cooper

 

Julian Beck: the state will be served even by poets

[Reposted here as a follow-up to recent discussions of the use of Ezra Pound’s name by the neofascist Casa Pound party in Italy, as a reminder of the larger problem that confronts us, even today, even as poets. In memory, too, of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. (J.R.)]

[Reposted here as a follow-up to recent discussions of the use of Ezra Pound’s name by the neofascist Casa Pound party in Italy, as a reminder of the larger problem that confronts us, even today, even as poets. In memory, too, of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. (J.R.)]

 

the breasts of all the women crumpled like gas bags when neruda wrote his hymn celebrating the explosion of a hydrogen bomb by soviet authorities

 

Jerome Rothenberg: 'The Pound Project,' sixteen poems after lines by Ezra Pound

Jerome Rothenberg: 'The Pound Project'

[The abomination of the neofascist “Casa Pound” party in contemporary Italian politics brings me back to a sixteen-poem series I wrote several years ago, with Ezra Pound — a strong poetry influence for many of us (myself included) and in politics a fool or worse — as the central focus.

Michael Davidson: 'Cleavings: Critical Losses in the Politics of Gain'

[Reposted from Disability Studies QuarterlyVol 36, No 2 (2016), where all sources are cited with pertinent footnotes. In the present version, however, I would like to stress the fusion of critical and personal voices by Michael Davidson, himself a pioneer in literature-based disability studies and a poet and essayist of considerable accomplishment. A major essay of his on “the poetics of disability” in the work of Larry Eigner can be found here and on Poems and Poetics. It also forms a chapter in his book Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, University of Michigan Press, 2008. (J.R.)]

[Reposted from Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 36, No 2 (2016), where all sources are cited with pertinent footnotes. In the present version, however, I would like to stress the fusion of critical and personal voices by Michael Davidson, himself a pioneer in literature-based disability studies and a poet and essayist of considerable accomplishment.

Irakli Qolbaia: Three new poems in English, with a note on poetics by the author

Irakli Qolbaia: Three new poems in English

In dream I was writing, but writing a real book (for I believe there are real books, the books behind books, that deepest in the roots of our books of which only shadow casts itself on the ground once we put up the copy we create or rip off it to stand like a tree), this real book, in that dream, was written in this manner:

[An important poet, writer, and translator in his native Georgian, Irakli Qolbaia is in a line of modern and postmodern poets who have used English or other foreign languages as additional and particularized mediums for poetry. There is more to be said about this, but Qolbaia’s poems and notes presented here are a new start in that direction, for which we should be duly grateful. (j.r.)]