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Jerome Rothenberg (December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024) was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and
performance poetry Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a Performance art, performance before an audience. It covers a variety of styles and genres. History The phenomenon of performance poetry, a kind of poetry specifically m ...
. Rothenberg co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Dennis Tedlock in the late 1960s.


Early life and education

Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in
New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, and is a descendant of the
Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...
ist rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. He attended the
City College of New York The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a Public university, public research university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York ...
, graduating in 1952, and in 1953 he received a
Master's Degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...
in Literature from the
University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...
. Rothenberg served in the U.S. Army in
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, Germany, from 1953 to 1955, after which he did further graduate study at
Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
, finishing in 1959. He lived in New York City until 1972, when he moved first to the Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York State, and later to
San Diego, California San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
, where he was living at the time of his death.


Career

In the late 1950s, he published translations of German poets, including the first English translation of poems by Paul Celan and
Günter Grass Günter Wilhelm Grass (; 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gda ...
, among others. He also founded ''Hawk's Well Press'' and the magazines ''Poems from the Floating World'' and ''some/thing'', the latter with David Antin, publishing work by important American
avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
poets, as well as his first collection, ''White Sun Black Sun'' (1960). He wrote works which he described as deep image in the 1950s and early 1960s, during that time publishing eight more collections, and the first of his extensive anthologies of traditional and modern poetry, '' Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poems from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania'' (1968, revised and expanded 1985). By the end of the 1960s, he had also become active in poetry performance, had adapted a play ('' The Deputy'' by Rolf Hochhuth, 1964) for Broadway production and had opened the range of his experimental work well beyond the earlier “deep image” poetry. His works are often read and analyzed in college English classes, such as in the course, ''Poetry From Planet Earth,'' offered at Dawson College.


Ethnopoetics and anthologies

'' Technicians of the Sacred'' (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with George Quasha, named “ethnopoetics”, went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to include visual and sound poetry and the texts and scenarios for ritual events. Some 150 pages of commentaries gave context to the works included and placed them as well in relation to contemporary and experimental work in the industrial and post-industrial West. In 1969 Rothenberg's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication which experimented with language and meaning-making. Over the next ten years, Rothenberg also founded, and with Dennis Tedlock, co-edited ''Alcheringa'', the first magazine of ethnopoetics (1970–73, 1975ff.) and edited further anthologies, including: ''Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas'' (1972, 2014); ''A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present'' (revised and republished as ''Exiled in the Word'', 1977 and 1989); ''America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present'' (1973, 2012), co-edited with George Quasha; and ''Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward An Ethnopoetics'' (1983), co-edited with Diane Rothenberg. Rothenberg’s approach throughout was to treat these large collections as deliberately constructed assemblages or
collages Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...
, on the one hand, and as manifestos promulgating a complex and multiphasic view of poetry on the other. Speaking of their relation to his work as a whole, he later wrote of the
anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors. There are also thematic and g ...
thus conceived as "an assemblage or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in the words of others and in yown words."


1970–1990

In 1970 the first version of Rothenberg's selected poems appeared as ''Poems for the Game of Silence'' (2000), and soon after that he became one of the poets published regularly by New Directions. Provoked by his own ethnopoetic anthologies, he began, as he wrote of it, “to construct an ancestral poetry of my own – in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, & madmen.” The first work to emerge from that, both thematically and formally, was ''Poland/1931'' (1974), described by the poet David Meltzer as Rothenberg's “
surrealist Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
Jewish
vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a drama ...
”. Over the next two decades Rothenberg expanded this theme in works such as ''A Big Jewish Book'' and '' Khurbn & Other Poems'', the latter an approach to
holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
writing, which had otherwise been no more than a subtext in ''Poland/1931''. Rothenberg also re-explored Native American themes in ''A Seneca Journal'' (1978), and the relation of his work to
Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
and Surrealism culminated in a further cycle of poems, ''That Dada Strain'', in 1983. A merger of experimental
sound poetry Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poe ...
and ethnopoetics was the basis in the 1970s and 1980s of works composed by an approach that he was calling “total translation", most notably "The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell" translated from the
Navajo language Navajo or Navaho ( ; Navajo: or ) is a Southern Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dene languages, Na-Dené family, through which it is related to languages spoken across the western areas of North America. Navajo i ...
with a privileging of sonic effect alongside strict or literal meaning. Compositions such as these became centerpieces of Rothenberg's expanding performance repertory and underlie his critical writings on the poetics of performance, many of which were gathered together in ''Pre-Faces & Other Writings'' (1981). During this time and beyond it, he also engaged in a number of collaborations with musicians – Charlie Morrow, Bertram Turetzky, Pauline Oliveros, and George E. Lewis, among others – and took part, sometimes performing, in theatricalizations of his poetry: ''Poland/1931'' for The Living Theater and ''That Dada Strain'' for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany and the Center for Theater Science & Research in San Diego and New York. His ''New Selected Poems 1970-1985'', covering the period since ''Poems for the Game of Silence'', appeared in 1986.


1990s–2010s

In 1987, Rothenberg received his first
tenure Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United ...
d professorship at the
State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY ) is a system of Public education, public colleges and universities in the New York (state), State of New York. It is one of the List of largest universities and university networks by enrollment, larges ...
in Binghamton, but returned to California in 1989, where he taught for the next ten years as a professor of visual arts and literature at the
University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...
. The works published since 1990 include more than fifteen books of his own poetry as well as four books of poetry in translation – from Schwitters, Lorca,
Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...
, and Nezval – and a book of selected translations, ''Writing Through'', which extends the idea of translation to practices like collage, assemblage, and appropriation. In 1994 he published ''Gematria''. In 1995 and 1998 he published, in collaboration with
Pierre Joris Pierre Joris (July 14, 1946 – February 26, 2025) was a Luxembourgish- American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poet ...
, the two-volume anthology-assemblage ''Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry'', and in 2000, with Steven Clay, ''A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing''. Rothenberg published a new book of selected essays, ''Poetics & Polemics 1980–2005'', in 2008, and volume three of ''Poems for the Millennium'', co-edited with Jeffrey C. Robinson as a nineteenth-century prequel to the first two volumes, in 2009. Numerous translated editions of his writings have appeared in French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, and other languages, and a complete French edition of ''Technicians of the Sacred'' appeared in 2008. An expanded 50th Anniversary Edition of ''Technicians of the Sacred'' appeared in 2017 and received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2018. Charles Bernstein has written of him: “The significance of Jerome Rothenberg's animating spirit looms larger every year. … eis the ultimate 'hyphenated' poet: critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher-translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator's insistence on transforming a given state of affairs." In 2014, work from Rothenberg appeared in the second issue of ''The Literati Quarterly''.


Death

Rothenberg died at his home in Encinitas, California on April 21, 2024, at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife and collaborator of 71 years, Diane.


See also

* Monostich


References


Bibliography

*Sherman Paul, ''Search of the Primitive: Rereading David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder'', Louisiana State University Press, 1986. *Barbara Gitenstein, ''Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry'', State University of New York Press, 1986. *
Eric Mottram Eric Mottram (29 December 1924 – 16 January 1995) was a British teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival. Early life and education Mottram was born in London and educated at Purley Gram ...
, "Where the Real Song Begins: The Poetry of Jerome Rothenberg", in ''Dialectical Anthropology'', vol. 2, nos. 2-4, 1986. *Harry Polkinhorn, ''Jerome Rothenberg: A Descriptive Bibliography'', Jefferson, North Carolina, and London, McFarland Publishing Company and American Poetry Contemporary Bibliography Series, 1988. *Hank Lazer, “Thinking Made in the Mouth: The Cultural Poetics of David Antin & Jerome Rothenberg” (& passim), in H. Lazer, ''Opposing Poetries'', Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1996. *Jed Rasula, “Jerome Rothenberg", in ''Dictionary of Literary Biography 193: American Poets since World War II'', Sixth Series, ed. Joseph Conte, 1998. *Essay by Pierre Joris in ''Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets'', Michael Taub and Joel Shatzky (eds), Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. and London, 1999. *Robert Archambeau, ed., special issue on Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, ''Samizdat'', no. 7, Winter 2001. *Heriberto Yépez, “Jerome Rothenberg, chamán crítico", in H. Yépez, ''Escritos heteróclitos'', Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, 2001. *Christine Meilicke, ''Jerome Rothenberg’s Experimental Poetry and Jewish Tradition'', Lehigh University Press, 2005.


External links


Jerome Rothenberg at the EPCSpecial issue of ''Samizdat'' dedicated to Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
* ttp://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/81/46/ Jerome Rothenberg reads from ''China Notes and the Treasures of Dunhuang'' at Beyond Baroque, December 17 2005 (video)br>''Poems and Poetics'' blog, edited by Jerome Rothenberg''The roots and the energies of poetry'' video, performance by Jerome Rothenberg
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rothenberg, Jerome 1931 births 2024 deaths 21st-century American Jews American Book Award winners American male poets Columbia University alumni Ethnopoetics Jewish American poets PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award winners University of Michigan alumni Writers from New York City American people of Polish-Jewish descent