Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Eliot Cardinaux

Poems and music from the forthcoming trio album 'Out of Our Systems' with a note by the author

Photo in concert at iBeam in Brooklyn, by Peter Gannushkin.
Photo in concert at iBeam in Brooklyn, by Peter Gannushkin.

“I am a poet of the lyric lineage, favoring the lucidly bent, bare syntax of George Oppen, & the strange torn-off clarity of Paul Celan. Mine are poems of compressed language, of a self folded in on itself. It has been said that there is a void in my work, & a trace left by other poets. That void might be filled or left be, at the edge of our correspondence.

Diane Rothenberg

'The Economic Memories of Harry Watt' (complete): The Setting, The Text, and The Commentary

[Originally published in part in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, edited by Christine Ward Gailey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992). Copies of Diane Rothenberg’s book, Mothers of the Nation, in which this essay also appeared, may still be available through Ta’wil Books, pjoris@icloud.com. Another essay, “Corn Soup & Fry Bread,” was posted earlier on December 5, 2008, in Poems and Poetics, and parts one and two of the present essay first appeared there in September 2014.

Amish Trivedi

from 'FuturePanic,' new poems with notes by the author and the publisher

The universe, too,

is held together by the same gravity

 

that holds us together. The same abyss

swallows us all,

 

and our hate cannot command the sea —

we cannot beg it back,

 

deny it any longer. But we can fight on, stare

Rodrigo Rojas

from 'Exercises on Infidelity,' two new poems in English, with a concluding 'footnote'

[Known as a poet-translator of contemporary Mapuche-language poets such as Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, and others, the Chilean Spanish-language poet Rodrigo Rojas has now made a further translingual shift into a series of poems written entirely in English. Of these he tells us: “These are not translations; the poems were written directly in English. The book is called Exercises on Infidelity because English is not my first language, but also because the idea of an original poem as the source of the poetic experience is questioned.

Inuhiko Yomota

from 'A Beggar of Life,' title poem translated by Hiroaki Sato

[For many years now Hiroaki Sato has brought the work of a range of Japanese experimental modernists into English, among the latest of whom is Inuhiko Yomota, whose book My Purgatory was published in 2015 by Red Moon Press in Virginia. Sato describes Yomota, a prolific writer in many areas, as follows: “Inuhiko Yomota (b. 1953) aptly calls himself a tuttologista.