Jerome Rothenberg
April 28–29, 2008
- Reading (Introduction by Matt Abess): Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Discussion: Streaming video, MP3 audio (see below for segments of the discussion)
- Photos from Rothenberg's visit
- Highlight Reel on YouTube
- 2008 Fellows seminar notes
Bio
Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry including Poland/1931 (1974), That Dada Strain (1983), New Selected Poems 1970-1985 (1986), Khurbn (1989), and most recently, The Case for Memory (2001) and A Book of Witness (2003). 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, including Technicians of the Sacred (1985), comprised of tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, Revolution of the Word (1974), a collection of American experimental poetry between the two world wars and two volumes of Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998), which won the Josephine Miles Award in 1996. In 1999 and again in 2001 he was a co-organizer of the People's Poetry Gathering, a three-day festival, under joint sponsorship by City Lore and Poet's House in New York City. Rothenberg was elected to the World Academy of Poetry (UNESCO) in 2001.
Charles Bernstein, Penn's Reagan Professor of English and Kelly Writers House regular, has said, "The significance of Jerome Rothenberg's animating spirit looms larger every year. ... [He] is the ultimate 'hyphenated' poet: critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher- translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator's insistence on transforming a given state of affairs."
Pennsound mp3 files
Discussion, April 29, 2008
Complete discussion (1:14:21)
- introduction by Al Filreis (4:20)
- poetry and Treblinka (6:50)
- Jewish identity (5:01)
- Jewish dream (7:57)
- "Technicians of the Sacred" (5:24)
- Robert Duncan (7:54)
- "The Burning Babe" and Robert Duncan (0:46)
- on travel (3:49)
- travel and elegy (2:42)
- Paul Blackburn (4:25)
- Surrealism, Dada and ethnopoetics (4:01)
- contemporary American avant-poetics (1:48)
- tensions within the avant-garde (4:06)
- Secularism and poetics (4:54)
- poetry in the classroom (2:13)
- Paul Celan (5:52)
- "A Letter to Paul Celan, in Memory, December 1975" (2:21)