Learning from Anyone’s Everywhere

When asked about the two sides of becoming the accomplished poet that he is, Jerome Rothenberg offered this astute commentary on blending the “thinking side” with the ability to “let go into the trance of poetry”:

Both aspects came with a certain amount of difficulty and with some insecurity about my ability either to analyze or to take off and fly. If I’ve learned to do any of it, it’s because of diligence. Persistence. Part of the process for me has been to make myself as informed as possible about what others have been doing, either now or in the past, ritual and art both. At first, as a young artist, I was concerned about exposing myself to too much outside influence, too much other art, with the typical fear that it would stifle me. But then I found, at least for me, that that was not the case, the more I came to know, the more in fact I was able to do. In the German language—and in Yiddish, too—the words for knowing and being able are virtually the same. So knowing something is an enhancement of one’s abilities. Ability and knowledge go together. I don’t mind that at all and am not hurt or repressed by knowing more.

Black Widow Press’s new reader of Rothenberg’s writings demonstrates how he has embraced both learning and creating, both art and scholarship, even art and ritual. Eye of Witness combines several serious delights for poets and poetry readers in a compendium of the best of Jerome Rothenberg’s poetry, translations, and poetics statements. His task has included reaching out beyond old boundaries of culture and geography and even time, to find all that poetry can do. He shows us how to learn from any poet anywhere. The poetics statements include letters to fellow poets about key approaches, “commentary” pieces that contextualize translations, pieces written as “pre-faces” for his projects, and pieces articulating the poet’s task more wholly. Heriberto Yépez’s introduction and Rothenberg’s own “Chronology & Memoir” provide a history of the poet’s concerns through the years, all reflected in this “reader” in a nicely contextualized way. We see and sense how his combination of poetry and poetics participates in the on-going progress of poetry while also reaching into the deeper past as well to recover possibilities for writing and thinking.

Readers of any kind, but especially fellow poets, can glean from this book both simple enjoyment and some fresh learning about how poetry works and progresses. For several decades, Rothenberg has expanded our aesthetics with the impact of his “omnipoetics” that “involves an interplay of very new and very old forms of languaging and representation.” This approach became clearly visible in Rothneberg’s influential anthologies (like Technicians of the Sacred [1985], Shaking the Pumpkin [1972], America A Prophecy [1012], or A Big Jewish Book [1978]) that gained impetus from the high energies of the 1960s and 1970s but emphasized a range well beyond the present. He says “the pasts that they represented were heavily colored by a sense of radical transformations of poetry and poetics and were presented with later & very experimental contemporary works.” This also aptly describes Rothenberg’s own books, so artfully selected from for this reader.

Half of its pages carry his own poems; these are balanced informatively with poetics statements on one-third of its pages and translation workings on the remaining one-sixth. Each of these aspects illuminates the others. The poems demonstrate his thinking about poetics and the influence of impulses discovered in the work of translation. The translations show the range of interests raised by Rothenberg’s careful thinking about practice, as well as the simple wish to learn from “other” traditions. Often focusing on how the “old” can “make it new,” the poetics statements justify the selection of old and new materials to translate and clarify the impulses at work in the poetry.

The poems are...