A prolific poet, translator, editor, and writer who has produced over 80 books, Jerome Rothenberg's work has expanded poetry, poetics, and poetic histories for audiences and practitioners both within the United States and beyond its borders. He is known especially for his promotion of the oral, performative traditions of various indigenous cultures, a pursuit he came to describe as “ethnopoetics” in the 1960s. He brought these global practices into conversation with international avant-garde poetries through a series of innovative anthologies that grew out of a critique of Western canons and imperialist ideals, such as the veneration of the printed page over oral traditions. The aim was to offer, as he says, “the possibility of opening up the full dimension of what it meant to be totally and meaningfully human.” These investigations have continued to evolve and expand, informing his own groundbreaking, exploratory poetry, from his beginnings as “a pioneer Pan-American writer,” as Mexican poet Heriberto Yépez notes, to the present day.
Born in 1931 in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrants, Rothenberg completed his undergraduate degree at City College in 1952. He went on to receive a master’s in literature from the University of Michigan and to do graduate work at Columbia University. After serving in the army in Germany from 1953 to 1955, Rothenberg began to publish translations of German poetry in the Hudson Review. With City Lights, he published the first English-language translations of the poetry of Paul Celan and Günter Grass, among others, in the anthology New Young German Poets, which he also edited. In the late 50s, Rothenberg founded Hawk’s Well Press, which released books by such poets as Robert Kelly and Diane Wakoski, as well as Rothenberg’s own first collection White Sun Black Sun in 1960. He also started two magazines, Poems from the Floating World and some/thing, the latter of which was co-founded with David Antin. In this early period of his literary career, Rothenberg promulgated “deep image” poetry, a term he coined with Kelly, who depicted the mode as “a kind of poetry not necessarily dominated by the images, but in which it is the rhythm of images which forms the dominant movement of the poem.”
Since the mid-1960s, Rothenberg has been developing the field of ethnopoetics, as unveiled in his seminal 1968 anthology Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia & Oceania, which features translations of oral poetry and performance from indigenous cultures, including ritual song, chant, and nonverbal sounds, alongside avant-garde poetry and art. A revised, expanded 50th anniversary third edition was recently released. In 1970, Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock founded the magazine Alcheringa, which was dedicated to ethnopoetic work and included contributions from poets, scholars, and translators. Rothenberg collaboratively produced a number of other ethnopoetic anthologies containing diverse materials and commentaries that he has referred to as “assemblages,” such as Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. With George Quasha, a poet and sculptor, Rothenberg edited the anthology America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present, and with Diane Rothenberg, he edited Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics.
Jewish history and themes are also prominent in Rothenberg’s work and offer another dimension to his transnational inquiries, seen in collections such as Poland/1931 (1974) and the anthology A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present (1977). Of the latter, he has said: “With roots in traditional sources that I could freely re-vision, but with an emphasis throughout on diaspora, my intention here was to smash stereotypes, or sometimes to incorporate them, aiming as far as I could for complexity in its global and temporal reach, and for surprise and puzzlement, both for myself and others.” Poland/1931 would later be gathered with two other works—Khurbn and The Burning Babe—in Triptych (2007).
Rothenberg’s other significant editorial projects include the multi-volume anthology series Poems for the Millennium. The first two volumes (1995, 1998), co-edited with Pierre Joris, trace 20th-century avant-garde poetry worldwide: from Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, Negritude movements, and oral traditions of native cultures through postwar poetry with the Beats, concrete poetry, Language poetry, Chinese Misty Poets, and more. The third volume, edited with Jeffrey C. Robinson, reconsiders Romantic and Post-Romantic poets of the 19th century.
Concurrent to his anthologies, poetry collections, and critical writing, Rothenberg also pursued his longtime interest in theater and performance by transforming his poems into musical and theatrical events. Poetry from Poland/1931 was performed at the Living Theater in New York. He worked with numerous musicians, most notably Charlie Morrow, an experimental sound artist who collaborated with other poets, including Allen Ginsberg.
Jerome Rothenberg continues to tirelessly expand his poetics, recently proposing “omnipoetics,” which operates in opposition to “an upsurge of new nationalisms & racisms” and “tests the range of our threatened humanities wherever found & looks toward an ever greater assemblage of words & thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and diminish us.” Later publications include Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955–2010; Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader; and The President of Desolation and Other Poems. Rothenberg’s contributions—as a poet, performer, translator, writer, and editor—have broadened the notion of poetry on a global scale, offering a multicultural vision of diversity and interconnection that has reshaped American poetry over the past 50 years.
—Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Sarah Ruth Jacobs, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint project with the CUNY Graduate Center.