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.

El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), founded in Mexico City in 1962, was an international journal and publisher of books featuring innovative writing and art from North and Latin America, as well as other regions of the world. Offering bilingual editions of its magazine and books, El Corno brought the work of Spanish-language writers to English-language readers and vice versa, including the first translations into Spanish of works by American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the first translations into English of work by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. While other inter-American magazines came into existence during the Mimeo Revolution—such as Miguel Grinberg’s Eco Contemporáneo in Argentina and Richard Greenwell’s Haravec in Peru—none were as successful as El Corno at connecting cultures across borders.

The name El Corno Emplumado was chosen to evoke the dual American and Mexican influences of the enterprise, which began with a quarterly magazine—that is, both the American “jazz horn” and the “plumes of Quetzalcoatl,” the Mayan god of wind and wisdom, as founding editor Margaret Randall notes. As a young American poet, Randall traveled to Mexico City in 1961, where she met an international circle of writers that gathered regularly at Beat poet Philip Lamantia’s apartment; among these were Sergio Mondragón, a Mexican poet whom she would marry. Together Randall and Mondragón started the journal with another American poet, Harvey Wolin, who left shortly after the project began.

Under the guidance of Mondragón and Randall, issues of the quarterly grew to 200 or more pages of poetry, prose, visual art, and letters to the editors from writers and artists around the world. The magazine also featured collections of new writing that focused on a single country. These folios included work from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Guatemala, Finland, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Russia, Venezuela, and other regions.

Beginning in 1962, El Corno began publishing single-author bilingual books, with the original language of the featured poets alternating between Spanish and English. The first of these books was Marsias & Adila, a collection of poetry by the Catalan poet Agustí Bartra. El Corno would release over a dozen book titles altogether, including Robert Kelly’s Her Body Against Time and Jerome Rothenberg’s The Gorky Poems.

The editors of El Corno aspired to a pan-Americanism free of the subjugation of one region or people over another. Contributors were representative of contemporaneous political, social, and literary movements in the United States, Latin America, and beyond. As Mondragón has said, “We were experiencing a new human vibration. The Cuban revolution appeared on the horizon like a hopeful dawn (at a time of ferocious military dictatorships throughout Latin America). The whole world was giving birth. It was the energy of the now mythic, horrendous and golden Sixties, dividing the century and our literatures in two.” Randall describes El Corno as part of an individual quest toward becoming “a more spiritual and egalitarian human being, in touch with his or her imagination, unburdened by consumerism, resistant to solving problems through war or other forms of violence, and opposed to the hypocrisy around us.”

El Corno was monumental in its critical success. Iconic writers such as Thomas Merton, Hermann Hesse, and Henry Miller became fans and submitted their writing. Prominent Spanish-language writers published by the magazine included Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Octavio Paz. El Corno also attracted less-established emerging authors, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Cecilia Vicuña, Diane Wakoski, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In 1964, El Corno hosted the International Gathering of Poets, which welcomed young writers and artists from over a dozen countries for conversations and readings.

El Corno’s success was aided by the ambitious scope of the magazine’s distribution. Copies of the quarterly magazine could be found from New York to San Francisco; across Latin and South America; and beyond. Meanwhile, the editors tried to balance economic sustainability with a fierce independence from institutions and traditional capitalist business models. Randall writes, “We sold copies in each country for what we were told a young poet there could afford to pay. Mostly this meant $1 a copy, sometimes even less.” Though it was later revoked, the magazine initially received funding from Mexican governmental organizations, as well as from subscribers and individual supporters—including Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer—and its distribution was aided by the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing house.

El Corno Emplumado’s support for the 1968 Mexican Student Movement, which rallied against police violence and state repression, forced the enterprise to cease publishing. Clashes between the movement and the government came to a head on October 2nd, 1968: for several hours, army soldiers shot directly into crowds gathered in the plaza of a housing complex in what is now known as the Tlatelolco Massacre. Issue 28, the last issue of El Corno Emplumado that Mondragón and Randall would edit together, was released that same month and featured editors’ notes that asserted their solidarity with the movement. United States poet Robert Cohen replaced Mondragón on the masthead for the next three issues of the magazine. After its defense of the Mexican Student Movement, El Corno lost financial backing, and print shops became afraid to print the journal. Facing militarized intimidation and the prospect of political reprisals, Randall would be forced to go underground. The 31st and final issue of the magazine was released in 1969.

Mondragón went on to publish his own poetry and edit anthologies, and in 2010, he was awarded Mexico’s Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. Randall lived in Cuba for eleven years and in Nicaragua for four, then returned to the United States, where she had to fight to reclaim her citzenship; the U.S. government denied her application for a green card and attempted to deport her. Writers from across the country lobbied on her behalf, and she won her court case in 1989. She has distinguished herself as the author or editor of over 100 books and as a human rights activist and feminist thinker. In 2004, she won the PEN New Mexico Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

El Corno Emplumado continues to hold a distinct place in literary history as a bold, exploratory venture that broke new ground in gathering diverse cultures, languages, and artwork in the pages of its publications and in bringing together concerns for global social justice with experimental writing.

—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.