Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Mutsuo Takahashi: From 'Twelve Views from the Distance'

Translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Uncle Ken’ichi, a photo in wartime
Uncle Ken’ichi, a photo in wartime

In every sense, Uncle Ken’ichi seemed to have been born in order to be sacrificed to the war effort. He was born more than a decade after my father, and so the entire process of his personal development coincided with the process of Japan’s descent into conflict. In the end, his young flesh and fragile soul were placed as burnt offerings upon the altar of war.

From 'A Cruel Nirvana' (2): Four narratives & two praise poems from narratives & realtheater pieces

In celebration of the publication by SplitLevel Texts

Eleanor Antin: Poland/1931 collage with Jerome Rothenberg (c.1974)
Eleanor Antin: Poland/1931 collage with Jerome Rothenberg (c.1974)

A DREAM NARRATIVE

. . . .

It is dark & I go
It is dark & I don’t go
I go & I don’t go
It is dark
& I go
& I don’t go

A FIRST NARRATIVE

He is King.
He matters.
He is King.
He forgives.
He is King
He is King.
He attends a wedding.
He is King.
He attends a decision.
He attends.
He attends.
He dances.
We see.
He is King.
We siphon.
The inheritors dance.
He matters.
He is King.
We attend a wedding.

Milton Resnick 1917 – 2004: Three poems recovered

[Milton Resnick was a very visible & dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release for ideas & feelings that were a necessary supplement to his life’s work as a painter.

Outsider poems, a mini-anthology in progress (51): From 'The Library of Unwritten Books'

001. The End, by Anon.

 I think I’d have to write a very short book. Yes, I have wanted to write lots of books before. I think my first book would be about actually how to get into the position of having to write a book in the first place.…

 The book would be red and white. That’s all I know. The colour of snow. I don’t think it would have pictures.

 And yes, it is about isolation. Maybe the whiteness is the blank page. Maybe it’s the blank page.

 (Recorded at Brompton Cemetery May 2001)

 116. This Is a Story, by Anon.

 … My dream would be to write it in a column. I’d have a big book but only write in an inch and-a-half space down the middle, with lots of paper on either side so you can draw pictures. If you are writing in short blasts, like I was saying, you can fill out the details with little stick figures doing stuff. If you can’t figure out how to write it, you can do it visually.

Kitasono Katue: Three poems from 'BLACK FIRE (Kuroi hi),' 1951, with a note on typography

Translation & note by John Solt

Kitasono Katue: Plastic Poem (Even from Trifling Objects), 1966
Kitasono Katue: Plastic Poem (Even from Trifling Objects), 1966

[Kitasono Katue (1902-1978), whom Pound admired & renamed Kit Kat, was on his own grounds a major, truly experimental poet & artist. Beyond that, in the 1950s, he designed the first four covers of Black Mountain Review, & Robert Creeley’s Divers Press published a book of his poems in his own English translations & containing a few of his colored drawings (or”katto” [cuts] as they say in Japanese – or so John Solt informs me).