Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

An open letter to Kenneth Goldsmith from Anne Tardos

Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low, 1981.
Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low, 1981.

Dear Kenny,

Your piece “The Burden of Artists’ Crap” posted over a year ago in Harriet (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-burden-of-artists-crap/), has just been brought to my attention. I am shocked and dismayed by your characterization of me.

Outside & subterranean poems, a mini-anthology in progress (55): 'Figures in the Dark, the Dancer at Trois Frères'

The opening selection from a work in progress, 'Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry,' edited with John Bloomberg-Rissman

COMMENTARY

The first traces of poetic mind begin in darkness: a mystery of figures — sorcerers or shamans — on a journey into hidden places, beyond the boundaries of light & human dwellings.  It is in the depths of those caves — 30,000 years in the past — that we get the first glimmers of a move toward the recording of memory & an active imagination that frees such memory & brings it into a new configuration.

Geraldine Green: 'Stories that Connect' (as an introduction to her book 'Salt Road')

[Green’s work over the last several years has involved an intense & detailed immersion into the specifics of her native Cumbria in the northwest of England.  Her latest book, Salt Road (Indigo Dreams Publishers, scheduled for mid-August), is “a mix of poems and prose, memories, travel notes and anecdotes,” but an entry as well into the wider discourse on ethnopoetics.

Peter Valente: From 'The Artaud Variations,' with commentary by Cole Heinowitz

Drawing with text by Antonin Artaud
Drawing with text by Antonin Artaud

There is a Hole in things
that resists classification
and cannot be understood in the terms
that explain it