Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Simon Ortiz: 'What Indians?' (complete)

The Truth Is: “No kidding?” “No.” “Come on! That can't be true!” “No kidding.”

 

“What Indians?” is my too-often unspoken response to people who ask “When do the Indians dance?” Like other colonized Indigenous peoples, cultures, and communities throughout the world, Native Americans have experienced and endured identities imposed on them by colonial powers, most of which originated in Europe.

American Sign Language as a medium for poetry

 Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner of the Flying Words project performing ASL poetry (
Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner of the Flying Words project performing ASL poetry (Jessica Munyon)

for Joseph Castronovo & Edward S. Klima, in memoriam

[The great breakthrough resulting from a new signing poetry in Deaf Culture has been to call into question a poetics in which orality & sounding are assumed to be the foundational bases of all poetic expression. That revelation goes back three decades & more, recently & notably presented in Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. by Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, & Heidi M. Rose (University of California Press, 2006).

'Technicians of the Sacred,' revised & expanded: An announcement & an appeal

 [The following is an early announcement of a work now in progress: the latest expanded & revised edition of Technicians of the Sacred that the University of California Press will be publishing in 2017, almost in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication in 1968.  As I launch into the work I’m posting my proposals for the book as an indication of what’s in store & in the hope, as with other assemblages of mine, that others will come forward with suggestions for materials relevant as texts & commentaries that fall along the lines of those in

Ariel Resnikoff, with Jerome Rothenberg: From an interview (continued), on Jews & experimental modernism, with notes toward a poetry of witness & an omnipoetics

Jerome Rothenberg, from a production circa 1984 of "That Dada Strain" by Luke Morrison & the Center for Theater Science & Research, San Diego & Lexington, NY

[The following is a continuation of an interview, the first part of which appeared in Poems and Poetics on December 10. 2014.  The full interview, conducted by Resnikoff over a period of several months, was published later in The Wolf  magazine, number 31, edited by James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar.]