Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Outsider poems, a mini-anthology in progress (36): Drukpa Kunley's 'Sutra of Sex' (redux)

Translation from Bhutanese by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

[In the course of a recent conversation with George Quasha & Charles Stein, the idea of “crazy wisdom” came up, as it often does, & led to a consideration of how it might or might not relate to the construction of a book of outside/outsider poetry & its relation to the art brut discourse of an earlier modernism.  The figure on whom we focused was the Tibetan/Buthanese lama & poet Drukpa Kunley (1455 - 1529

Robert Kelly: 'Statement 1968' from 'A Voice Full of Cities'

[The following will appear later this year in A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly (Contra Mundum Press), edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh.  Originally published by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1968.]


STATEMENT

Sam Truitt: From 'Dick: A Vertical Elegy'

Did they do it? At the pump, did Jill hit Jack?  

 But each place is well and each well a hole encircled by hunters on their hams with spears listening between the broken and whole words into the darkness below for the sound of their breathing and the breathing of the hole in the dark for some fall that is after all cause for image projected staring back into them with red eyes. With hard heavy shoulders. With terror.

Milton Resnick, poet — In memory — An essay & a poem

Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof, circa 1970
Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof, circa 1970

[The following coincides with a major exhibition (May 10 to August 1) of Milton Resnick’s work over a six-decade career, sponsored by Mana Contemporary of Jersey City and the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.]

 

From 'An Artist's Life as Told by Eleanora Antinova to Eleanor Antin'

[A BRIEF NOTE FOR THE FOLLOWING.  I spent many years working in a variety of media performance, photography, writing,  film, video, installation, drawing) inventing what i called my alternate selves.  My most complex self was Eleanora Antinova, the black ballerina of Diaghilev's Ballet-Russe. I am now working on her memoir “An Artist's Life as told by Eleanora Antinova to Eleanor Antin”. The following section is from that work in progress. (E.A.)]