Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005

by Rothenberg, Jerome; Clay, Steven; Lazer, Hank

• ISBN13: 9780817316273
• ISBN10: 0817316272
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-16
• Publisher: Univ of Alabama Pr

Summary

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenbergrs"s work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenbergrs"s earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenbergrs"s essays address a range of issues with which hers"s become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenbergrs"s lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenbergrs"s unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Pre-Face
Poetics & Polemics
Prelude. The Times Are Never Right (poem)	p. 3
The Poetics of the Sacred: A Range of Topics for a Keynote Speech	p. 5
The Anthology as a Manifesto & as an Epic Including Poetry	p. 14
Symposium of the Whole: A Pre-Face	p. 18
The Poet as Native: An Aspect of Contemporary Poetry & Art	p. 25
Poets & Tricksters: Innovation & Disruption in Ritual & Myth	p. 29
The Poetics & Ethnopoetics of the Book & Writing	p. 45
"Secular Jewish Culture/Radical Poetic Practice"	p. 54
Harold Bloom: The Critic as Exterminating Angel	p. 63
Poems for the Millennium: Two Pre-Faces	p. 82
Three Modernist Movements: Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism	p. 105
The History/Prehistory of the Poetry Project	p. 114
A Secret Location on the Lower East Side	p. 117
How We Came into Performance: A Personal Accounting	p. 122
Ethnopoetics & (Human) Poetics	p. 131
A Gallery of Poets
Prelude. I Come into the New World (poem)	p. 141
A Range of Commentaries (from Poems for the Millennium and Revolution of the Word)	p. 143
William Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic	p. 143
Friedrich Holderlin's Palimpsests	p. 144
Walt Whitman's New Line & Lineage	p. 144
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Inscapes	p. 145
Gertrude Stein's Cubism	p. 146
Rainer Maria Rilke's In-Seeing	p. 147
Marcel Duchamp's Ready-Mades	p. 148
Mina Loy's Futurism	p. 149
Ezra Pound's Vortices	p. 150
William Carlos Williams's New Measure	p. 150
Federico Garcia Lorca's Duende	p. 151
Laura Riding's Breaking of the Spell	p. 152
Edmond Jabes's Return to the Book	p. 153
John Cage's Silence & Nothing	p. 154
Pablo Picasso: A Pre-Face	p. 156
Kurt Schwitters: A Pre-Face	p. 167
Maria Sabina: A Pre-Face	p. 176
Vitezslav Nezval: A Post-Face	p. 183
Louis Zukofsky: A Reminiscence	p. 189
Robert Duncan: A Memorial	p. 196
Reading Celan: 19591 1995	p. 200
Jackson Mac Low: A Pre-Face	p. 208
A Pre-Face for Paul Blackburn	p. 215
Gary Snyder: The Poet Was Always Foremost	p. 220
David Antin: The Works before Talking	p. 223
David Meltzer: A Pre-Face	p. 230
Alison Knowles's Footnotes: A Pre-Face	p. 237
Carolee Schneemann: A Tribute	p. 239
Ian & Me - A Collaboration	p. 241
Dialogues & Interviews
Prelude. In the Way Words Rhyme (poem)	p. 251
Performance Artists Talking: Ritual/Death (with Linda Montano)	p. 253
The Samizdat Interview (with Robert Archambeau)	p. 260
The Medusa Interview (with Rodrigo Garcia Lopes)	p. 271
The Sibila Interview (with Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, Marjorie Perloff Cecilia Vicuna)	p. 285
Index of Names	p. 303
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