Lola Ridge

'reflecting each other as obliquely as in cracked mirrors'

Lola Ridge and poetry’s refractions in Aotearoa

Some time ago I was traversing through Papers Past, an archive of digitised newspapers managed by the National Library of New Zealand, when I fortuitously encountered six poems by Lola Ridge in the New Zealand Illustrated and The New Zealand Tablet.

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Javier Taboada

'Three visions of Toño,' translated by Cole Heinowitz

Jerome Rothenberg

[In celebration of our work together coediting the transnational assemblage of North and South American poetry “from origins to present,” in progress and scheduled for publication by University of California Press, I’m posting here these three connected poems from Javier Taboada’s most recent gathering.

Joel Newberger

'Bamidbar' (In the Desert) from HEXATEUCH, 2019

Jerome Rothenberg

[What follows is a section of Joel Newberger’s elaboration of the Bible’s first five books (Torah in Hebrew, Pentateuch in Greek-derived English), in what Robert Kelly succinctly calls “Newberger’s imaginative disclosure of the multitudinous meanings of the Five Books so rightly called of Moses.” Presented below, then, is what the English Bible knows as The Book of Numbers, but named in the old book itself as Bamidbar: “In the Desert,” or closer to my own concerns “In the Wilderness.” And Kelly further: “This is a book of recovery, adventure, shock, high comedy, tenderness. The Bible will never seem the same again, thank God. And one privilege of his Hexateuch, is that it does a good job of contributing to the vital revolution in religious studies leading to a fresh and altogether anti-patriarchal awareness of Judaism and Christianity as one religion, not two … and understanding how they are linked by a shared eschaton.” That Newberger’s is a brave and important new poem as well is also to be noted. (J.R.)]