[Edging toward two decades since the first publication of PoemsfortheMillennium in 1995, the University of California Press will shortly be publishing volume4, both expanding & concentrating the focus into a 2000-year (two-millennium) mapping of Maghrebian (North African) literature with a range similar to what P
contemporary poetry insert: poem here insert: essay here call it: essay-poem insert: appropriated text call it: poetry insert: sound poem call it: wave score insert: visual poem call it: if sound could see claim: the text is dead just schrödinger: the text! insert: tired formatting like strikethrough fade: your erasures use: basic font variations insert: another footnote please instead please insert: some nu-sonnets inject: the bacterium!
[It was with Heriberto Yépez, first in Ojo del Testimonio (2008) and now, in the process of coediting Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, that I found myself digging into earlier work to come to terms with the idea of witnessing as a basis and prod for my own poetics. With that in mind I have come to a slow understanding of how that idea, still in process, has been central both to my poetics and to that of various others, known and unknown to me. The following are some short excerpts from Eye of Witness, but the body of my work in different genres seems permeated by the concept, and I find myself more willing than ever to stand behind it. While I know that others would come at it quite differently, I read it now as a common thread for all we hope to know. That “all,” I wrote some years ago, includes the world, the present, as it comes and goes. I am a witness to it like everyone else, and all the experiments for me … are steps toward the recovery/discovery of a language for that witnessing. It can never be more clear than that, nor should it. (J.R.)]
Poems and poetics