Jerome Rothenberg

This exciting news comes to us from Charlie Morrow:

ROTHENBERG CELEBRATION: On December 11, 2013, www.Misterbowlerradio.com celebrates poet Jerry Rothenberg's 82nd birthday with an online broadcast from producer Bent-Erik Rasmussen’s ICMM studios in Svinø, Denmark.  Danny Snelson will celebrate by launching the digital version of Jerry's New Wilderness Letter poetry journal.

New at PennSound (site link for these recordings)

a series of talks I curated in 1988 at The New School (New York) and collected in The Politics of Poetic Form, Roof Books (1990)

 The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly
Steve McCaffery
6 x 9 · 256 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5733-7 · $34.95 $24.47 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8642-9 · $34.95 $24.47 ebook

“This book raises important ethical/political issues for the practice of art in the twentieth century. The Darkness of the Present calls them to rigorous attention in a series of critical studies. It finishes in a deliberate move to stand back, in order to reflect on the issues from a cool critical vantage, like Tennyson’s poet at the end of The Palace of Art.”—Jerome McGann, author of Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web and Are the Humanities Inconsequent?: Interpreting Marx’s Riddle of the Dog
Google boosk preview here.

Jerome Rothenberg & the Burning Babe

Jerry and Diane come to our place for dinner. He had Susan had just collaborated on their fabulous Granary Book. The Burning Babe, so I asked Jerry about the central figure in the poem.

February 24, 2008
(mp4, 1 min. 36 sec., 18.2 mb)

Diane Rothenberg: Marshall Parkway & Other Figments of the Imagination

Diane grew up around Marshall Parkway in the Bronx. She talks about what's the same, what's different, and what is imagined.
February 24, 2008

We at Jacket2 are pleased to announce that Jerome Rothenberg joins us a commentator. His previous postings to “Poems and Poetics” (heretofore a blogspot site) are all linked to his J2 commentary page, and he is now publishing new commentaries here:
http://jacket2.org/commentary/jerome-rothenberg.

Of Jerry’s many works, there is one that in spite of being just a very small fraction of all his books was key for my own experience as a reader.

 Anthologies are, with different degrees of intensity, the creation of a new field made out of preexisting elements; for the most part they define anew what was there before. Only once in a while an anthology can change not only what we know about poetry but the way we read beyond its own selection. Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Europe & Asia is that occurrence, a turning point that made visible what wasn’t before. Even more than an anthology it’s the blue print for a strategy, one that works his complexity up from multiple poetics to present at the same time, and without ever taking them apart, the particular and the whole.

photos © Lawrence Schwartzwald. with thanks!

full web issue and pdf link here

launch at Accola Griefen Gallery on Dec. 16, 2011

I met Jerome in the Spring of 1950 at a small party given by a Francophil professor, where seven or eight of us sat around with wine glasses under a modest collection of School of Paris paintings, making awkward conversation about modern art and poetry, when I noticed a short noble -browed guy in a green suit sitting across from me, his green eyes blazing  with the kind of disapproval I was feeling myself. This was not what we were looking for in modern art and poetry.  Some time in the fall we met again, realizing we were both trying  to become poets, and we started to hang out together, searching for signs of a living experimental scene, listening to folk music and jazz, and  checking out modern dance and music in a culture that believed artistic experiment and exploration were over. And it wasn’t till the late 50s that we caught up with cool jazz, Abstract Expressionism, John Cage, Wittgenstein, Fluxus and Pop.