Poetry Focus: Jerome Rothenberg

Eyewear is thrilled to feature Jerome Rothenberg (pictured) at the start of this week, as he is one of the great figures in American poetry. I've had books of his on my shelves for over thirty years.

He is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. Recent books of poems include Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010, and A Cruel Nirvana (just published by SplitLevel Texts). He is now working on a global anthology of “outsider and subterranean poetry” and, with Heriberto Yépez, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader for Black Widow Press. He has until recently been a professor of visual arts and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

A CRUEL NIRVANA

Half dead

is still alive

& half alive is too.

So keep it rolling

I declare.

The others mingle in a room

atop the city

where a fire burns.

They sing.

I sing among them.

Then I push my way through

with my thumbs.

I eke a living

from a stone.

Hard knocks are bound to follow.

I can hear

a water song

close by my ear

& track it

where it leads me.

It is summer

but the trees

are dead.

They vanish with

our fallen friends.

The eye in torment

brings them down

each mind a little world

a cruel nirvana.

poem by Jerome Rothenberg; reprinted online with permission of the author.

Comments

Alistair Noon said…

I heard Rothenberg read in Berlin yonks ago. It blew me away. It was a single author reading with a fair bit of chat in between, best part of a couple of hours I think, and it was captivating from start to finish. The "total translations" from the Navajo are like nothing else on the planet.

Tue Jan 29, 08:32:00 am 2013

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