copyright © 1998 

 

Poems for the Millennium:

The University of California Press Anthology of Modern and Postmodern Poetry

volume 2: From Postwar to Millennium

 

by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Introduction

Thanks and Acknowledgments

 

PRELUDE

In the Dark

Charles Olson
La Préface
 
Paul Celan
A Death Fugue
 
Anna Akhmatova
from Poem without a Hero: Epilogue
 
Toge Sankichi
from Poems of the Atomic Bomb: Dying
 
René Depestre
Season of Anger
 
Ingeborg Bachmann
The Time Allotted
 
Antonin Artaud
from To Have Done with the Judgment of God

 

CONTINUITIES

Gertrude Stein
from The Mother of Us All
 
Wallace Stevens
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
 
James Joyce
from Finnegans Wake
 
William Carlos Williams
from Paterson, Book Three
 
Ezra Pound
Canto 116
 
H.D.
from Hermetic Definition: Red Rose and a Beggar (1-9)
 
Hugh MacDiarmid
The Glass of Pure Water
 
André Breton
from Ode to Charles Fourier
 
Henri Michaux
from Saisir
 
Louis Zukofsky
from A "12"
 
Pablo Neruda
from The Heights of Macchu Picchu
 
Gunnar Ekelöf
from Mölna Elegy
 
Muriel Rukeyser
The Speed of Darkness
 
Aimé Césaire
from I, Laminaria

 

A FIRST GALLERY

Marie Luise Kaschnitz
My Ground
Who Would Have Thought It
 
Vladimir Holan
from A Night with Hamlet
 
Samuel Beckett
Imagination Dead Imagine
 
George Oppen
Psalm
Myth of the Blaze
 
Yannis Ritsos
The Meaning of Simplicity
Naked Face
Erotica XII
from 3 x 111 Tristychs
 
Charles Olson
"my memory is ..."
"Peloria ..."
The Moon Is the Number 18
Maximus from Dogtown - II
"Added to ..."
 
Edmond Jabès
from The Book of Questions
"The Jew answers every question"
The Book of the Living
"Have you seen how a word is born and dies?"
 
John Cage
[Epigraph] "If there were a part of life dark enough"
from Song Books: Solo for Voice 17 Song with Electronics (Relevant)
Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham
from Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make
Matters Worse 1965)

 

 

Nicanor Parra
The Individual's Solliloquy
 
Octavio Paz
from Blanco
 
Bert Schierbeek
The Sun: Day
The Animal Has Drawn a Human
 
Robert Duncan
Often I Am Permited to Return to a Meadow
At the Loom Passages 2
In Blood's Domaine
 
Yoshioka Minoru
Pilgrimage
 
Paul Celan
Breathcrystal
 
Mohammed Dib
from Formulaires
 
Amos Tutuola
from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: Television-handed Ghostess
 
Helmut Heissenbüttel
Didactic Poem on the Nature of History, A.D. 1954
Combination II
from Textbook 10
 
Jackson Mac Low
Asymmetry 205
from The Pronouns - A Collection of 40 Dances - for the Dancers
3rd Light Poem: For Spencer, Beate, & Sebastian Holst - 12June 1962
Pieces o' Six - II
 
Pier Paolo Pasolini
from A Desperate Vitality
 
Vasko Popa
Burning Shewolf

 

THE TAMMUZI POETS
 
Yusuf al-Khal
Cain the Immortal
The Wayfarers
 
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
The River and Death
 
Adonis
A Desire Moving through the Maps of the Material
 
Muhammad al-Maghut
Executioner of Flowers
 
Unsi al-Hajj
The Charlatan

 

Denise Levertov
The Jacob's Ladder
Age of Terror
 
Yehuda Amichai
National Thoughts
Elegy
Near the Wall of a House
 
Friederike Mayröcker
"the spirit of '76"
 
Emmett Williams
from The Red Chair (for Three Voices)
from The Ultimate Poem
 
Robin Blaser
Image-Nation 22 (In Memoriam
 
Ernesto Cardenal
In xóchitl in cuícatl
 
Rosario Castellanos
Two Meditations
Two Poems
 
Claude Gauvreau
Trustful Fatigue and Reality
Leg of Mutton Créateur

 

 

 

Ian Hamilton Finlay
from Heroic Emblems (with Ron Costley & Stephen Bann)
Images from the Arcadian Dream Garden
The Garden Temple
 
Ingeborg Bachmann
Curriculum Vitae
 
Paul Blackburn
Phone Call to Rutherford
At the Well
The Net of Place
 
Robert Creeley
The Whip
Anger
 
René Depestre
from A Rainbow for the Christian West: Three Loas
Cap'tain Zombi
Baron Samedi
Chango
 
Allen Ginsberg
[Epigraph] "I saw the best minds ..."
Mescaline
Kral Majales
 
Robert Filliou, per George Brecht
from 14 Songs and 1 Riddle
 
Frank O'Hara
The Day Lady Died
Homosexuality
Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets
 
John Ashbery
from Flow Chart
 
Larry Eigner
explanation / tangent things
Winter (January / February 1978)
"ah, so, yes"
[Three Poems 1989]

 

 

 

Armand Schwerner
from The Tablets
 
Anne Sexton
from The Jesus Papers
 
Bernard Heidsieck
from Derviche / Le Robert: The Letter "K"
 
Joyce Mansour
In the Gloom on the Left
Going and Coming of Sequins
 
Nathaniel Tarn
from Lyrics for the Bride of God
 
Hannah Weiner
Two Code Poems from the International Code of Signals
from Clairvoyant Journal
sand
 
Edward Dorn
from Gunslinger I
 
Adrienne Rich
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message
The Phenomenology of Anger
 
Chinua Achebe
Bull and Egret
We Laughed at Him

 

SOME "BEAT" POETS
 
William S. Burroughs
Fear and the Monkey
 
Jack Kerouac
from Mexico City Blues: 211th Chorus
 
Bob Kaufman
I AM A CAMERA
"All Those Ships That Never Sailed"
January 30, 1976: Message to Myself
 
Allen Ginsberg
America
 
Gregory Corso
The Mad Yak
Transformation & Escape
 
Michael McClure
from Ghost Tantras
A Small Secret Book
 
Diane di Prima
Prophetissa
Studies in Light

 

 

Kamau Brathwaite
Stone
 
Michel Deguy
"O great apposition of the world"
"You will be astonished"
"This lady and her beautiful window"
To Forget the Image
 
Amelia Rosselli
Letter to Her Brother
from Martial Variations
Dialogue with the Dead
 
Gary Snyder
What You Should Know to Be a Poet
from Myths & Texts
first Shaman Song
this Poem Is for Bear
The Hump-Backed Flute Player

 

THE ART OF THE MANIFESTO

 

Paul Celan
from The Meridian Speech
 
Charles Olson
Three Statements
from The Present Is Prologue
A Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul
The Resistance
 
John Cage
from Lecture on Nothing
 
Edouard Glissant
from Earth
 
Situationist International (Guy Debord, et al.)
from All the King's Men
 
Amiri Baraka
Black Dada Nihilismus
 
Adrienne Rich
from When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
 
Nicanor Parra
Test
 
George Maciunas
A Manifesto for Fluxus
 
Henri Chopin
from Poésie Sonore
 
Bob Cobbing
A Statement on Sound Poetry 1969
 
Steve McCaffery
from Text-Sound, Energy and Performance
 
Dick Higgins
Intermedia Chart
 
Denis Roche
from Le Mécrit: Struggle and Erasure
 
Edward Sanders
from Investigative Poetry
 
Julian Beck
the state will be served even by poets
 
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
from Otherhow
 
Carolee Schneemann
Interior Scroll
 
Ishmael Reed
from Neo-HooDoo Manifesto
 
Adonis
from Preface
 
Sujata Bhatt
from Search for My Tongue
 
Charles Bernstein
from Artifice of Absorption
 
Diane di Prima
from Rant
 
Preamble & Statement for a Council on Counterpoetics

 

A SECOND GALLERY

 

Tchicaya U Tam'si
The Treasure
 
Jerome Rothenberg
That Dada Strain
from Khurbn
The Lorca Variations (XXVIII)
 
Paavo Haavikko
from The Winter Palace
The First Poem
The Second Poem
 
Tomas Tranströmer
The Gallery
 
Ece Ayhan
To Trace from Hebrew
The Nigger in a Photograph
Geranium and the Child

 

 

Jacques Roubaud
Some Thing Black: Section V
 
David Antin
Endangered Nouns
 
Andrei Voznesensky
Look Back into the Future
On the Metamorphoses Brought about by Emotion: The Rebellion of the Eyes
The Genealogy of Crosses
 
Amiri Baraka
Numbers, Letters
Das Kapital
 
Ted Berrigan
People of the Future
from The Sonnets
 
Inger Christensen
Alphabet 9, 10
 
Sarah Kirsch
"The Wels a Fish that Lives on the Bottom"
"In an Airplane I'm Supposed to"
Pandora's Box
From Kite-Flying
Mornings
Call
Renting a Room

 

POSTWAR JAPANESE POETRY
The Arechi & After
 
Tamura Ryuichi
My Imperialism
 
Tanikawa Shuntaro
from With Silence My Companion
Cycle of Months (Menstruation)
 
Ooka Makoto
Marilyn
 
Shiraishi Kazuko
The Man Root
 
Yoshimasu Gozo
Pulling in the Reins
Osiris, the God of Stone
 
Fujii Sadakazu
from Where Is Japanese Poetry?
Wolf
Small Dream
 
Ito Hiromi
Near Kitami Station on the Odakyu Line

 

 

Clayton Eshleman
Our Lady of the Three-Pronged Devil
 
Robert Kelly
Ode to Language
The Man Who Loved White Chocolate
 
Rosmarie Waldrop
Feverish Propositions
from A Key into the Language of America
 
Alejandra Pizarnik
Paths of the Mirror
 
Jayne Cortez
Nighttrains
 
Kenneth Irby
Four Poems
"I met the Angel Sus on the Skin Bridge"
"slowly the old stone building walls downtown dissolve"
[trash]
from [three sets of three]
 
J.H. Prynne
from Wound Response
Of Movement Towards a Natural Place
Landing Area
Chromatin
Melanin
An Evening Walk
 
Rochelle Owens
Dedication
I Am the Babe of Joseph Stalin's Daughter
from W. C. Fields in French Light
 
Monique Wittig
from The Lesbian Body
 
Takahashi Mutsuo
Monkey-Eaters
from Self-Portraits
Myself in the Disguise of an Ancient Queen
Myself with a Glory Hole
 
Anne-Marie Albiach
Winter Voyage

 

NEO-AVANGUARDIA
 
Edoardo Sanguineti
The Last Stroll: Homage to Pascoli
 
Giulia Niccolai
From the Novissimi
 
Nanni Balestrini
from The Instinct of Self-Preservation
Tape Mark
 
Antonio Porta
To Open
 
Adriano Spatola
The Risk of Abstraction
The Poem Stalin

 

Susan Howe
from Pythagorean Silence
Scattering as Behavior toward Risk
 
Tom Phillips
from A Humument
from Six of Hearts: Songs for Mary Wiegold
 
David Meltzer
from Hero/Lil: The Third Shell
 
Diane Wakoski
George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth
The Ice Eagle
 
Tom Raworth
Lion Lion
Jungle Book
Bolivia: Another End of Ace
 
Elke Erb
Text and Commentary
 
Malay Roy Choudhury
Stark Electric Jesus
 
Göran Sonnevi
"Demon colors, dark"
A Child Is Not a Knife
 
Clark Coolidge
from The Crystal Text
from Baffling Means (with Philip Guston)

 

SOME "LANGUAGE" POETS
 
Lyn Hejinian
from My Life
 
Ron Silliman
from Ketjak
 
Bob Perelman
China
 
Rae Armantrout
Native
 
Barrett Watten
Complete Thought I-XXV
 
Bruce Andrews
"Zero Tolerance"
AKA
 
Charles Bernstein
Of Time and the Line
Outrigger
 
Carla Harryman
Not-France

 

Pierre Guyotat
from Tales of Samora Machel
 
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Refusal to Inter
Barbarian
 
Simon Ortiz
From an Interview
The Wisconsin Horse
Final Solution: Jobs, Leaving
 
Lyn Hejinian
Oxota, Book 2
 
Mahmoud Darwish
from Memory for Forgetfulness
 
John Taggart
Monk
Slow Song for Mark Rothko
 
Quincy Troupe
Avalanche
 
Nicole Brossard
from The Barbizon
 
Michael Palmer
from Sun
Sun
 
Allen Fisher
Conga
Continental Walk
 
bp Nichol
A Sequence of Poems from The Martyrology 7
 
Charles Stein
A Parmenides Machine
 
Alice Notley
from Désamère
 
Anne Waldman
Iovis XIX: Why That's a Blade Can Float

 

THE MISTY POETS
 
Bei Dao
The Answer
The August Sleepwalker
"He opens wide a third eye ..."
 
Duo Duo
When People Rise from Cheese, Statement #1
North Sea
 
Mang Ke
from ApeHerd
 
Shu Ting
The Mirror
 
Yang Lian
Crocodile 1-15
 
Gu Cheng
A Generation
from The Bulin File

 

Pierre Joris
from Winnetou Old
 
Arkadii Dragomoschenko
A Sentimental Elegy
 
Nathaniel Mackey
Song of the Andoumboulou: 15
 
Habib Tengour
from Empedocles' Sandal
 
Leslie Scalapino
Instead of an Animal
 
Cecilia Vicuña
Five Notebooks for Exit Art
 
Will Alexander
Albania & the Death of Enver Hoxha
 
Victor Hernandez Cruz
Caminando
Mesa Blanca
 
Coral Bracho
On Contact Opens Its Indigo Pit
On the Facets: The Flashing
 
Nina Iskrenko
Isn't She Not a Bird
Polystylistics

 

TOWARD A CYBERPOETICS
The Poem in the Machine
 
First Collage: The Poem in the Machine
 
Marcel Duchamp
Rotary Demi-Sphere (Precision Optics) with Pun
 
Abraham Lincoln Gillespie
from Readie-Soundpiece (for Bob Brown's Reading Machine)
 
Steve McCaffery
from Carnival the First Panel: 1967-70
 
Bernard Heidsieck
from Canal Street
 
Jackson Mac Low
34th Merzgedicht in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters
 
Jim Rosenberg
Two Intergrams
 
John Cayley
from <Reveal Code>: Indra's Net VIII
 
Second Collage: Toward a Cyberpoetics

 

Maggie O'Sullivan
Narrative Charm for Ibbotroyd
from Doubtless: "The Dancer-"
 
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
from Dictée: Elitere Lyric Poetry

 

POSTLUDES

At the Turning

 

Robert Duncan
After a Long Illness
 
Pierre Joris
Fin-de-Siècle Identikit
 
Jerome Rothenberg
Prologomena to a Poetics

 

Credits

Index of Authors