ALTAR PIECES

Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry. Describing his poetry career as “an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present,” he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry: Technicians of the Sacred (tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania), Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), America a Prophecy (a radical revision of the poetries of the North American continent co-edited with George Quasha), Revolution of the Word (American experimental poetry between the two world wars), A Big Jewish Book (subtitled “Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present”), and Poems for the Millennium (three volumes, co-edited with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson). He was elected to the World Academy of Poetry (UNESCO) in 2001.