Reissues is excited to launch an online archive of Alcheringa, the trailblazing ethnopoetics journal edited by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg through Boston University from 1970 to 1980. Commisioned for Internet distribution by Dennis Tedlock and Jon Cotner in 2010, with site design and information architecture by Danny Snelson, the Alcheringa archive presents a robust network of resources including searchable PDFs, high-resolution images, rapid magazine browsing, and full information on each issue and disc insert of this essential journal operating at the crossroads of translation, ethnography, performance, and contemporary poetics. Download searchable PDFs and high-fidelity MP3s in the Reissues sidebar or navigate the archival interface at ethnopoetics.com.
Opening a new series of the journal in 1975, Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock clearly define their editorial aims:
[...] As the first magazine of the world's tribal poetries, ALCHERINGA will offer a place where tribal poetry can appear in English translation and can act (in the oldest and newest of poetic traditions) to change men's minds and lives. It will be aiming at the startling and revelatory presentation that has been common to our own avant-gardes. By exploring the full range of man's poetries, we hope
— to enlarge our understanding of what a poem may be — to provide a ground for experiments in the translation of tribal/oral poetry and a forum for the discussion of the problems and possibilities of translation from widely divergent languages and cultures — to encourage poets to participate actively in the translation of tribal/oral poetry — to encourage ethnologists and linguists to do work increasingly ignored by academic publications in their fields, namely to present tribal poe tries as values in themselves rather than as ethnographic data — to initiate cooperative projects along these lines among poets, ethnologists, performers, and others — to emphasize by example and commentary the relevance of tribal poetry to where-we-are today.
