Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Aaron McCollough: 'Four Preliminary Notes' & 'A Stray Note' from 'Underlight'

[Reprinted from Underlight, published 2012 by Ugly Duckling Presse]

 

     In Contact with the Ground (Personal Sun) 

 

I needed to match our feelings, mine and the other living things.

 

May I tell you how this became deadly without polluting you.

 

I reached out for the dog that lay on the downed wire that led to

     the lightning.

 

I put the wrong things in my body till my skin extended to harder

     surfaces. Canals.

 

Practiced the sacrifice. Bought a gun.

Outsider poems, a mini-anthology in progress (53): Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 – 1911), from 'Memoirs of My Nervous Illness'

1/

The talking of all free flying birds has persisted without interruption in the past years in which I frequently changed my residence, and it persists to this day … I would now prefer to use the expression “talking bird” to “miraculously created bird” which is used in the text. Earlier on I thought I could not explain the talking of the birds other than by assuming that they were as such created by miracle, that is to say were created anew each time. After what I have observed meantime I consider it more likely that they were birds produced by natural reproduction, into whose bodies the remnants of the “forecourts of heaven,” that is to say erstwhile blessed human souls, had been inserted in some supernatural way or were inserted anew each time. But that these souls [nerves] were actually inside the bodies of these birds [perhaps in addition to the nerves which these birds naturally possess and in any case without awareness of their previous identity] remains as before without any doubt for me for reasons developed in the text.

Celia Dropkin: From 'In Her White Wake: The Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin'

Translated from Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon

[From the bilingual book forthcoming from Tebot Bach Press]


MY HANDS

 

My hands, two little bits

of my body I'm never

ashamed to show. With fingers—

the branches of coral,

fingers—two nests

of white serpents,

Jerome Rothenberg: Some addenda to 'A Seneca Journal'

Original cover drawing by Allan D’Arcangelo
Original cover drawing by Allan D’Arcangelo

[In advance of the forthcoming reprint by Nine Point Publishing of my 1978 book, A Seneca Journal, the following are some of the poems omitted from the original publication & now ready to be seen anew.  Other work from the Seneca years has appeared since then in Shaking the Pumpkin & elsewhere. (J.R.)]

A Seneca Memory

At Harry Watt’s old place

above the Allegany River

Leo Cooper tells me:

Heriberto Yépez: From 'The Empire of Neomemory'

Translated from Spanish by Jen Hofer, Christian Nager, and Brian Whitener

[Excerpted from the edition published by Chain Links in 2013]

There are Laws: Taking Down the Pantopia