[The following is an
early announcement of a work now in progress: a full-blown anthology/assemblage
of the poetry of all the Americas (“from
origins to present”), co-edited with Heriberto Yépez, that the University of
California Press, has just accepted for publication. As Heriberto & I move into the work, I’m
posting our proposal for the book, below, as an indication of what’s in store
& in the hope, as with other assemblages of mine, that others will come
forward with suggestions for materials relevant as texts & commentaries
that fall along the lines of those in my earlier anthologies. Even more
important for a work of this scope, Heriberto & I are looking for others
who can assist us in the formidable task of translation: Spanish, Portuguese,
French, & the full range of indigenous languages & creoles from the two
great American continents. My email address appears in the right margin of this blog, &
I can also be reached, by those so equipped, through my account on
Facebook. We will try to respond as far as we can to all
suggestions & to acknowledge in print all those that prove pertinent to the
work at hand. (J.R.)]
Proposal
for
POETRY OF THE AMERICAS
A TRANSNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY
Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Heriberto Yépez
“Britain is Los’ Forge; / America North
& South are his baths of living waters.”
William Blake, from Jerusalem
Since
1984 the University of California Press has been the publisher of five large
assemblages of poetry as part of a long-term project in which I together with a
number of other poets and scholars have attempted a radical and globally
decentered revision of American and world poetry. The key works here are Technicians of the Sacred, just republished in a fiftieth
anniversary expanded edition, and four volumes of Poems for the Millennium, along with the critical essays found in Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse
Toward an Ethnopoetics. From the
start I and my various co-authors have seen our project as open to growth and
change over the passing years, with a belief that every successive work is both
a continuation and a new beginning, as changing possibilities present
themselves to our consideration.
What I’m now proposing, along with
my co-editor Heriberto Yépez, is an assemblage/anthology of the poetry of the
Americas, both north and south and drawn from the diversity of languages on the
two great continents. We aim to approach
the project with the same openness that I and my co-authors were able to
exercise in the Millennium series, to see this in some way as a particularized
extension of Poems for the Millennium.
Too often, the idea of America and American poetry and literature is limited to
work written in English within the present boundaries of the United
States. While this has been modified in
several recent anthologies by the inclusion of some poetry translated from
indigenous North American languages, there has never been a full-blown
historical anthology of American poetry or literature viewing north and south
together in a larger transnational vision of what “America” has meant in the
history of our hemisphere and of the world.
Such a vision of another America, deeply rooted in its pre-Conquest past
and in the writings of its early European colonizers, comes to us from poets
such as the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, writing circa 1903 of
“our America, which
has had poets
from the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl
… the America of the great Moctezuma, of the Inca,
our America smelling of Christopher Columbus,
our Catholic America, our Spanish America.”
Or from José Martí, while feeling the oppression of
Cuba’s stronger neighbor to the north, who wrote: “The pressing need of our America is to
show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conquerors of a
suffocating past.” Their Spanish America
constitutes a declaration of independence from the other, English America and
should be taken as such.
For the two of us, one a poet from Mexico and the other from the
United States, the
idea of a still larger America(s), made up of many independent parts, has been
a topic of continuing shared interest.
Since there currently exists no single volume of “American” poetry or
literature that takes such an expansive view of its subject matter, we find
ourselves free to make a new beginning, an experiment through anthologizing to
explore what results might follow from a juxtaposition of poets and poetries
covering all parts of the Americas and the range of languages within them:
European languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, including
creoles and pidgins, as well as a large number of Indigenous languages such as
Mapuche, Quechua, Mayan, Mazatec, and Nahuatl.
While our sense of “America” along
these lines would extend and amplify the European metaphor of the Americas as a
“new world,” we also recognize and
embrace the reality of 2000 years or more of (native) American indigenous
poetry and writing. It is precisely such complexities and
contradictions, even conflicts, that will engage us here.
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