[I have recently added the following to the revised & expanded edition of Technicians of the Sacred, still in progress. Its place is in a new section of the book called “Survivals & Revivals,” as an instance of old rituals of mourning & healing incorporating the threatening ghosts of those killed by political & social violence in a very real & contemporary local & national setting (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc.). The work from which I’m drawing, The Age of Wild Ghosts by Erik Mueggler (University of California Press, 2001), is a still more complex & detailed report on what’s at stake here. (J.R.)]
[The following is the critical postface to my new book, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000-2015 (Un Champ sur Mars), just published by Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre in both an English & a simultaneous French edition. Christophe Lamiot is an active poet & the editor of the Rouen press’s Jusqu’a (To) series of books devoted to contemporary American poetry & poets in separate English & French editions. The complete French translation of my Shaking the Pumpkin (Secouer la Citrouille) was also published under his editorship. (J.R.)]
(...) poetry as elation
A Field on Mars. A field on Mars: this is how Jerome Rothenberg tells of his writings in poetry from the last ten years. A former title was “Divagations and Auto-variations.” “Divagations & Autovariations” now stands as a subtitle. I like this gesture of naming, then renaming—from one of the most prolific, far-ranging, active and successful poets of XXth-century Anglophone America.
[NOTE. Since 1970 Steven Kushner (“Kush”) has been known to many of us as the founder & sole proprietor of Cloud House, an amazing & constantly expanding archive of contemporary American poetry, largely audiovisual & equal in size to most institutionally sponsored repositories of kindred materials, or even greater. As his life work he has come to view Cloud House as a poetmuseum (or, as he likes to say, a “poetmusée”) of the spirit, carrying it with him from New York City to what has been its ongoing residence for many years in San Fr
In the course of expanding & revising Technicians of the Sacred, still in progress, my attention landed on the following – one of the opening poems in the original book – which had appeared there in a shorter version of my own devising. Nearly fifty years later my new strategy is to give it in Pliny Earle Goddard’s full 1909 version (more than twice the earlier length in Technicians), & I would add even more, if I ever felt free to do so. The additional quote from Gertrude Stein, not in the original edition, nails it even more firmly in place, for now as well as for then.
[In the course of expanding & revising Technicians of the Sacred, still in progress, my attention landed on the following – one of the opening poems in the original book – which had appeared there in a shorter version of my own devising. Nearly fifty years later my new strategy is to give it in Pliny Earle Goddard’s full 1909 version (more than twice the earlier length in Technicians), & I would add even more, if I ever felt free to do so. The additional quote from Gertrude Stein, not in the original edition, nails
Poems and poetics