Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Jerome Rothenberg: After Gorky’s 'The Betrothal,' poem & autovariation, 1966 & 2014

Arshile Gorky’s “The Betrothal”
Arshile Gorky’s “The Betrothal”

[Using the procedure of “variations” that I began with The Lorca Variations (1993) I turn it here toward my own earlier work & show, below, both a poem from 1966 & the corresponding autovariation from 2014.   In the present instance I’ve gone back to a poem written & published as part of a book called “The Gorky Poems,” and, as in the  “variations” I’ve done from other poets, I systematically remove all nouns from the original & use them as building blocks or what Jackson Mac Low used to call “nuclei” in the const

Diane Rothenberg: From 'The Economic Memories of Harry Watt' (The setting & the text)

Harry Watt (right) with Ed Currey, circa 1970
Harry Watt (right) with Ed Currey, circa 1970

[To be published in 2015 as part of an expanded & revised edition of Diane Rothenberg’s Mothers of the Nation by Nine Point Publishing in Bridgton, Maine] 

 

THE SETTING

We first met Harry Watt in December, 1967.  Stanley Diamond prepared a letter for us to carry along and telephoned ahead to introduce us.  Diamond was interested in the experiments in translation that my husband, Jerome Rothenberg, was doing and thought that a meeting with some of the singers of the Allegany Seneca, a group among whom Diamond had worked, might be conducive to further explorations in translation.

Jerome Rothenberg & John Bloomberg-Rissman: From the pre-Face to 'Barbaric Vast & Wild' ('Poems for the Millennium, Volume 5')

[What follows is a draft of what will be part of the pre-face to Barbaric Vast & Wild, the assemblage of “outside & subterranean poetry” to be published later this year by Black Widow Press the de-facto fifth volume of Poems for the Millennium & the culmination for the moment of a project that began nearly fifty years ago with the original publication of Technicians of the Sacred.  I’m posting it now on Poems and Poetics before I head off for six or seven weeks on the road, to engage in readings & pe

Jake Marmer: Nigun poems & poetics

[Originally published in Current Musicology's recent issue on “experimental writing about music.”]

 

PREFACE

 

This set of poems grew out of my experiences of listening and finding myself inside nigunim(pl; singular nigun or nign), Chassidic chants — mystical, usually wordless songs used as accompaniment for rituals — weddings, prayers, candle-lightings — collective beckoning of transcendence. The nigun experience is fraught with what Amiri Baraka called, referring to blues, the “re/feeling” — proximity and shape of personal history of encounters with unfathomable.