Hélène Aji (École normale supérieure): "Rothenberg Programmatic"
Jerome Rothenberg
is one of the very few American poets. He has moved from self-engaged inner
poetry to a social poetry in a classic development, until the translation of
any culture in American hemispherical geography can take its place within his
broad praxis. (Mottram 163)
These
are the opening words of Eric Mottram’s contribution to Barry Alpert’s Vort
issue dedicated to David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg in 1975. The piece
entitled “Where the Real Song Begins” is a wild dash across Rothenberg’s work
to date starting with the translation anthology New Young German Poets
(1959) and ending with Esther K. Comes to America Poland 1931 (1974).
The reading method is astonishing as it proceeds through a reorganization and
reactualization of quotations from both the poems and the essays by Rothenberg.
The density of citation leads to a fusion of voices and enacts the processes of
cultural transfer at work in the poet’s poems using them as sources for a new
form of critical apprehension. Indirectly what gets redefined is the very
notion of an American poet, “anti-imperialistic”, “democratic,” “transnational”
and “transtemporal” (164). With extreme conceptual clarity, Mottram transitions
from the inner and outer explorations that lead to the “vision emerging in the poem.”
Playing with the diversity of Rothenberg’s inspirations and influences, Mottram
delineates a poetics that, we now know, informs many a development in American
poetry as “a passage & an act of desperation” (Mottram quoting Rothenberg
in Floating World no. 4, in 1961). For Rothenberg, in Mottram’s view,
the stakes are high and the balance is fragile between deep exploratory images
and the demands of “transmittability” (167). The eclectic sourcing for the
poems and the demand for active erudition on the side of the reader dissolve
the poet’s integrity into what Michael Palmer calls a “non-entity”:
As Keats knew in
looking toward Shakespeare and Milton, the poet in his or her non-entity is
also always double or shadow of another and another. The Whitman of democratic
aspiration and open-form poetics recalls the psalmic rhythms of Blake and his
commitment to spiritual revolution. Rothenberg’s Tristan Tzara/Sami Rosenstock
is at once the Dada poet/performer of the Cabaret Voltaire, chanting the
cultural bankruptcy of a world bent on self-annihilation, and the ecstatic
singer, the singer outside himself, of the Jewish mystical tradition. He is
also without option the Jew in history, witness to diaspora and systematic
mass-murder. When Rothenberg echoes and alters Tzara’s voice (or assumes the
mystic Hugo Ball’s cape and conical hat), he becomes in his turn, this multiple
presence, just as song becomes both Kaddish and dance, mourning and
affirmation, the dark and light of an unrepresentable reality. Here too, deeper
in shadow, appears the shaman, singing in what Robert Duncan interpreted as a
literal psych-osis, a state of psyche or soul where one is double to
one’s self. (iv)
Constructing
the poet into the site of a present reconfiguration of memory is perhaps what
synthesizes these few lines and provides a starting point to any
reconsideration of Jerome Rothenberg’s work. Beyond the idea of “a usable past”
updated to inform the present and help navigate its complexities, the process
entails a radical transformation of the poet as he turns from an individuated
poetic voice into the medium through which a plurality of voices can make
themselves heard. As mystical transmitter, the poet lends himself to what he
calls “othering” both in the sense of becoming other and of making other in a
performative and transformative way. So, my project today is to move through
the different dimensions of Jerome Rothenberg’s work as they come to embody
configurations of memory relevant to the present, and effective poetic operations
designed to respond to the present’s challenges. With reservations of course,
this dynamic is in keeping with some of Ezra Pound’s initial impulse. In Jerome
Rothenberg’s words:
Pound’s paganism,
in that sense, was a prettier, clearly more literary proposition, closer to
Eliot’s classicism, I suppose, though the drift of his politics was more
extreme & dangerous, getting himself bogged down in the Renaissance and so
on, then with Fascism and the perpetuation of the nation-state. But think of
what he contributes even so: the collage composition of the Cantos, the
pivotal breakthroughs in translation, the sense of history as vortex, the
transmission of an actual alternative tradition. (« From A Dialogue on
Oral Poetry with William Spanos » Pre-Faces 27)
These
four components of poetic action that Rothenberg outlines in the Pound heritage
help organize his own activity: the anthologies are tradition-making; the
translations allow for the implementation of what he calls “total translation”;
the sense of history as vortex evolve into a collapse of the past onto the
present and the invention of procedures to reconstruct it; the politics of
poetics are revisited to converge with what Creeley calls Mottram’s
“sociality”. It is from this political
angle that I would like to revisit a few of Jerome Rothenberg’s works as they
keep responding to our individual and collective quandaries.
Anti-imperialistic
What is most special about Jerome
Rothenberg’s anthologies is that they are active—one might be
tempted to say activist—anthologies. They gather under the generic term of
“poems” a wide variety of documents that are systematically shown as
interrelated. Their characteristics are shown as spanning thousands of years
and roaming a global terrain, reinventing themselves under new conditions in a
continuous, rather than discontinuous and divisive manner. In Technicians of
the Sacred (1968), Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), or America a
Prophecy (1973), the exhibits are reconsidered as much more than detached
artefacts from an irretrievable past since they combine as practical variations
leading to present-day poetic practices. The series entitles “The Pictures” (Technicians
of the Sacred 26-28) thus transitions from cave paintings to cosmogonic
designs and ideogrammic complexes that tie in with early 20th-century
calligrams or later concrete poems. Every document is the opportunity to
propose a possible lineage as well as the occasion to question any notion of
qualitative progress. The modes may change but they do so in response to the
conditions of their production rather than according to some delusion of linear
improvement. From the Easter Islands to the proposals of William Blake (1825),
Hugo Ball (1916), Guillaume Apollinaire (1918), Charles Olson (1953), Augusto
de Campos (1964), Seiichi Niikuni (1965), or Nina Yankowitz (1978), what is
delineated is a common creative repository equally shared rather than mined
through predatory processes of appropriation. With Revolution of the Word, A
Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1914-1945, the issue is
consequently to acknowledge the path to present experimentation and through
this recognition to open the way forward to more comprehensive explorations:
[To] give a sense
of how we found our way to new views of our own immediate pre-history, &
what aspects of those views this anthology is trying to present. For we are
all, in different ways & from our individual perspectives, talking about a
virtual revolution in consciousness, & if we can’t remember how we got here,
we may be talked into denying where we want to go. (Revolution of the Word
xii)
This
“revolution in consciousness” sends directly back to a statement by Mina Loy
quoted on the cover of the volume, which brings together the inward movement of
introspection and the outward movement of awareness. One of the functions of
the anthologies is to clarify the poet’s position in time and space rather than
to compose the solid foundation for some alternative canon. To this extent,
they are provisional records of potentiality in the way that makes Rothenberg
refer to Gertrude Stein’s convoluted formulation in Narration to point
at the writer’s condition:
The exciting thing
about all this is that as it is new it is old and as it is old it is new, but
now really we have come to be in our way which is an entirely different way.
(« On Anthologies » Pre-Faces 139)
The
anthologies open onto a revision of one’s understanding of intertextuality in
terms of hybridization in such a way that they resonate with Edward Said’s 1994
definition of the “new encyclopedic form” of modernism whose necessity derives
from the disruption of ideological universals (Said 1994, 189). However, the
investment, according to him, does not imply the development of alternative
orthodoxies, but rather “a particular sort of nomadic, migratory, and
anti-narrative energy” (Said 1994, 279): “this movement resists the already
charted and controlled narrative lanes, and skirts the systems of theory,
doctrine, and orthodoxy” (Said 2002, 281). The anthologies counter the will to
power of imperialistic methods of citation by being seed compositions,
consistently recognized as other and susceptible to reorganization and
expansion in unpredictable ways.
Transnational
The migratory dimension stressed by
Said is a major component of the impulse to translate and reflect on
alternative methods of translation that underpins Rothenberg’s
practice of translation as transmission and transfer. In the preface to Shaking
the Pumpkin (Pre-Faces 97), he emphasizes the emergence of the translated
text as a new poem in the target language rather than an attempt at strictly
conveying its meaning. This meaning remains putative, intrinsically linked as
it is to the translator’s personal perception of the original text. The
interference and intervention of the translator as co-creator at least are not
seen as unavoidable downsides: they are part and parcel of a whole theory of
translation whereby the resulting poem works as a response to the source poem,
inscribes itself within the context of present poetics and exposes itself to
the test of its relevance to the preoccupations of that new context.
I don’t want to set
English words to Indian music, but to respond poem-for-poem in the attempt to
work out a « total » translation—not only of the words but of all
sounds connected with the poem, including finally the music itself.
(« Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian
Poetry » Pre-Faces 78)
As
one might infer, the process is in part indebted to Ezra Pound’s practice of
translation as it focused on the overall effect of the original text, and its
interpretation in the time and place of translation. The insistence on the
“music” of the poem implies further constraints than the demands of lexicon and
syntax as the translation moves beyond replication into the more uncertain
grounds of recontextualization and reactualization. The gift of the poem maybe
is what translation centers upon and aims to activate, thus defining
Rothenberg’s idea of “total translation”:
One way or another
translation makes a poem in this place that’s analogous in whole or in part to
a poem in that place. The more the translator can perceive of the original—not
only the language but, more basically perhaps, the living situation from which
it comes &, very much so, the living voice of the singer—the more of it he
should be able to deliver. In the same process he will be presenting
something—i.e., making something present, or making something as a present—for
his own time & place. (« Total Translation : An Experiment in the
Presentation of American Indian Poetry » Pre-Faces 92)
The
notion of “presentation” is then more complex than it seems at first, since it
does not limit itself to the introduction of lesser-known texts to a wider
readership. Supplemented by the reference to analogy, and the inscription of
the poem in the live conditions of its production, the idea of presentation
turns into a polysemic reference that includes “presentification” and a gift in
the Derridean sense of the term, liberated from the economy of gift and
counter-gift that cancels it and restored to its mystical experience of
presence. The translation performs this
renewal of presence for a text that might otherwise get lost in the flow of
time and motion of displacement.
There are many examples of this
ethics of translation as Rothenberg implements it with a wide range of texts.
One of them is The Lorca Variations
that are first introduced as alternative modes of reading. The postface to the
volume reminds the reader that the poems also work as a form of homage and as a
recognition of indebtedness. Yet, they are radicalizing Rothenberg’s
translation theory by dealing with the original texts as “vocabulary”, a
repository of words from which one will draw the words of new poems. This
extension of the translation act into procedural composition is what makes the
translation total, in the sense of complete:
I felt a
frustration in not being able to publish my own translations independently,
thus diluting whatever sense I had of doing a Lorca homage, etc. With that in
mind, I began to compose a series of poems of my own (“variations”) that draw
on vocabulary, especially nouns & adjectives, from my translations of the
Suites (later from Poet in New York as well) but rearrange them in a
variety of ways. [...] these poems both are & aren’t mine, both are &
aren’t Lorca. The methods used resemble chance operations but with a margin of
flexibility, with total freedom in the case of verbs & adverbs, with
occasional addresses to Lorca himself embedded in them. The result isn’t
translation or imitation in any narrow sense, but yet another way of making
poetry—& for me at least, a way of coming full circle into a discovery that
began with Lorca and for which he has stood with certain others as a guide and
constant fellow-traveler. (« A Postface » The Lorca Variations
90)
Performing
more conventional translations of the poems turns out to be but one step on a
longer journey to transfer the Spanish poems into world poems. The return of
the text as “itself and not itself” signals the double-bind of
presentification: it simultaneously revives the past text and seals its loss,
as in the last poem of the volume, « Coda : The Final Lorca
Variation ».
the end for Lorca
comes
only when we let it helpless
with insomnia we
hear him stir we see him
reach for Saturn
rising overhead
no homage can repay
what we have lost (87)
This
might help us better account for the difficulties of, for instance, the seventh
Lorca variation, “Water” dedicated to Charles Bernstein (16-17). One is tempted
to elucidate the dedication and trace the explicit references to Bernstein’s
poetry, that would get reformatted into the language of Lorca. But this might
obliterate the way the poem works as an enactment of Bernstein’s theory about
absorption and the unperceived ideological discourse inscribed in the very
structures of linguistic expression. Despite the Lorcan impulse to free the
poem from the strictures of conventionality and recover the energy of elegy
through lexical sobriety and the simplicity of images, Rothenberg’s text
remains poised on the verge of mystical crystallization and the reader is
prevented from achieving any kind of epiphanic discovery. “Black” rather than
“dark”, the text precludes the transparency that could have allowed for
transcendence and confines its reader to the materiality of words and images.
The “lake” comes with its baggage of pathetic fallacy and meditative topoi,
but the mention will not coalesce into intertextual reference because it is not
sustained. The iteration of these cognitive disruptions generates the “beehive”
effect of a disturbing buzz that imprisons the poetic subject into a “crystal
prison”. From the idea of transnational transfer that translation implied, the
poet extends the corrosive power of his activity to dissolve more than the
boundaries of nation or self, maybe achieving Gayatri Spivak’s “unrestricted
economy of same and other” where no text stands ancillary to another (Postcolonial
Reason 424).
Transtemporal
A
corollary of this dissolution is a type of haunting of the text that ends up
materializing the haunting of the poet himself, and more generally, the
condition of haunting that is a shared human condition. This haunting has no
specific theme but, with Rothenberg, it is tragically mediated through the
internalization of the Holocaust, and a succession of attempts to render the
claustrophobia of impossible mourning. One might believe, as Eric Mottram
suggests it, that the poems of Poland/1931 aim at investigating the
poet’s personal version of primitiveness, and making it mesh with the
collective version that is the make-up of America. From Polish shtetl to New York, hinging
around the year of the poet’s own birth, a series of poems constructs a
narrative whose main feature is their fantasmatic dimension. In his conclusions
about this 1974 collection (the latest at the time of his writing), Eric
Mottram points out the collage pictures that insert the poet’s image among the
crowd of shtetl men, women and children as it paradoxically foregrounds both
the presence and absence of this lost world. With analogous effects, the
exploratory piece “Jews &” that can be found in the Rothenberg archive at
UCSD summons a list of relations that could be a mode of redefinition of a
fluid identity: it does not exist in and per itself but is modelled along its
interactions with otherness. The list is presented in reverse alphabetical
order, from the Z of “zinc” to the A of “arabs” somehow retracing the steps of
a catastrophic migration from the metal roofs of Polish houses to the conflict
and violence of Israel’s creation.
jews & zinc
jews & wounds
jews & willows
jews & weeping
jews & veins
jews & twitches
jews & that
jews & tetanus
jews & teeth
jews & silence
jews & shame
[...]
jews & crosses
jews &
conscience
jews & bulk
jews & baggage
jews & arabs
The poem reads as
some endless litany of unresolved, and potentially insoluble, conjunctions. The
words are spelled out, brought forth to consciousness by their materiality and
the constant reminder of their inscription in a vocabulary of pain that might be
as numerous as the dictionary.
This
haunting of language can (and does in Jerome Rothenberg’s
work) move into several directions. With Khurbn, the book of disaster,
the poet experiences one extreme instance of “othering” as mythologized in the
figure of the dybbuk. The silenced voices of Holocaust victims roaming the
apparently placid Polish countryside of the 1980s find their channel through
the poet’s body, turning him into the medium for their expression.
The absence of the
living seemed to create a vacuum in which the dead–the dibbiks who had died
before their time–were free to speak. It wasn’t the first time that I thought
of poetry as the language of the dead but never so powerfully as now. [...]
There was a reason for [not wanting Poland/1931 to be a poem about the
Holocaust], as there is now for allowing my uncle’s khurbn to speak through me.
The poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka are the clearest message I
have ever gotten about why I write poetry. (Khurbn 3-4)
Khurbn
is a gesture of testimony to the impossibility of total erasure, the desire for
revenge and rebirth, and the permission given by the living to the dead to
inhabit them.
at night their
voices
carrying across the
fields
to rot your kasha
your barley
stricken beneath
their acid rains
no holocaust
because no sacrifice
no sacrifice to
give the lie
of
meaning & no
meaning after auschwitz
there is only
poetry no hope
no other language
left to heal
no
language & no faces
because no faces
left no names
no sudden recognitions
on the street
only the dead still
swarming only khurbn
(Khurbn
14)
Written “after
Auschwitz”, it is a response to Adorno’s imperative, its subversion as it
begins to envision the new “barbarian” language that is the post-Holocaust
language of the poem. It develops into a literalization of this possession with
the gematria poems. Temporality is cancelled as all layers of historical
experience are shown to cohabit within the very matter of language.
In Gematrias Complete, published in 2009,
Jerome Rothenberg indeed presents as a coherent whole poems composed over more
than fifteen years, and published in installments since 1994. All of the poems
expand from a method consistently used notably to compose the poems of 14
Stations, a series based on the 14 names of 14 Nazi death camps, and their
transcriptions into Yiddish. All of them are written according to a complex
compositional strategy that starts from the Hebraic transcription or
translation of a word, often a name or a noun, that is then processed as a seed
word for further combinations and compositions. The use of the Hebrew alphabet
for transcription, and of Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, as the target language
opens the door to a mystical world of Kabbalah whereby alternative modes of
textual interpretation can be developed using the numerical value of Hebrew
letters and the total value of words as additions of their letters’ value.
Words of identical value can then be hunted through the text of Torah, which
works as a vocabulary or word repository. These words can be used to compose
poems built on the links thus created, so that words are related to one another
that would otherwise have remained unrelated. The numerical logics create a web
of signification that is counter-intuitive, divorced from the free association
of lexical fields or poetic inspiration. In the specific case of the Nazi death
camps, selecting the words of equal value to the name of the camp allows to
build a vocabulary of “related” words of equal value in the Hebrew of the
Biblical text, which once translated into English make up poems that speak to
the original name but do not directly express individual affect or the
subject’s perception of the disaster of Holocaust.
This process of linguistic circulation imprints on the
poems the seal of estrangement, defamiliarization, and alienation in language
as well as in the apocalyptic landscape of post-Holocaust poetics. Yet, when
moving on from the names of death camps to the names of fellow-artists and
poets, or to common nouns, the poet expands the purview of his initial
intuition from a recognizable historical disaster to the conditions of ordinary
living: the complex modes of expression, and linguistic manipulations convey
the difficult day-to-day survival of a consciousness. The potentially infinite
poetic series unfolds texts that constantly remind their reader of the loss of
the source text, and metonymically of the loss of original experience, through
the practices of iterated derivation and interpretation.
As an import from Hebrew, and a practice of reading
and interpreting texts in non-linear, paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic
fashion, gematria upsets conventional modes of approaching texts, as well as
provides hypotheses for post-deconstructive reconstructions. According to
Jerome Rothenberg it is a “poetry of numbers”[1]
based on the numerical value of words, and the relations that can be traced
between words of equal numerical value as they appear in the text of Jewish
Torah. The networks of signification thus outlined can be deemed subliminal,
not so much in the sense of being perceived unconsciously but, quite on the
contrary, in the sense of being imperceptible but through intense deliberate
investigation and calculation.
While numerical
gematria and coded temura come easily in a language like Hebrew which is
written without vowels, the possibility of similar workings in English
shouldn’t be discounted. Gematria-generated poems can also be composed by
translation from Hebrew [...]. The fact of translation may, in fact, add to the
apparent “distance & power” of the combinations, a direct relationship that
twentieth-century poets like Reverdy saw as the basis of the poetic image.
(« Gematria » Pre-Faces 159)
For myself the
numbers have been a presence beneath speech, but I have known them also, being
Jewish, in the letters of the alphabet I work with. My father drew them with
his finger on the kitchen table. And I have lain awake like him & counted
numbers in sequences that play on mind & body until the rhythm of numbers,
letters, shapes, & forms is inescapable—as still another source of naming.
(« The Poetry of Numbers » Pre-Faces 157)
More
than any other strategy maybe, gematria combines the mechanical techniques of
depersonalization, that cancel personal choice and inspiration, with highly
idiosyncratic formal decisions, that generate tense poems reflecting a verbal
haunting. In this context, the Torah provides for a vocabulary to restore the
un-narrativized, and possibly un-narrativizable complexity of human experience,
while gematria-generated poems produce a potentially infinite array of
alternative discourses to approximate it.
On a level, Rothenberg’s gematrias are memorial poems,
that send the reader back to a tradition, intrinsically linked to a collective
Jewish textual world, to the patriarchal word, and to his personal initiation
into the poetic. On another level though, the poems witness the remanence of a
disappeared object, subject, or event that has lingered in the very letter of
each and every word. The tension is thus figuratively inscribed in language
itself between the autonomy of the single word, and its relational intensity,
as each word is objectively linked to an unexpected, and largely unsuspected
lexical network. This lexical network generates other paradigms and, as
Rothenberg puts it, an alternative way of “naming” or defining. A single word
can radiate and resonate into several possible relational constructs that are
springboards for interpretive variations and alternatives.
THE VOICE (1) THE
VOICE (2)
will answer A voice.
(Gematria
43)
In
the two “voice”-based gematrias, voice is simultaneously defined as existing
only as part of a dialogical communication system, as a singular instance, and
not as a generic abstract notion. Doubly the mathematical links between the
words (or within the word itself as a matter of fact) posit definitory
statements, that can be seen as complementary (1), and divergent (2).
So, it is significant that the first experimentation
with gematria as a compositional mode should have happened with “14 Stations” (Seedings
99-116). The poems occur as part of another series of poetic attempts to
provide some modicum of poetic witnessing for the missing witnesses so
eloquently evoked by Girogio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz. Agamben
reflects with Primo Levi on the witness by proxy that is the defective witness
of the Holocaust: beyond the horror, one must confront the paradox of witnesses
whose reliability is compromised by the very fact that they remain as
witnesses. The “value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks” (34) says
Agamben. The total witness cannot rise from the dead to bear witness; the
testimony of the defective witness is threatened because it is mediate. It is
threatened but not cancelled however, since it falls into the category of
speech acts. According to Agamben following Foucault in The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969), the testimony is valid as a verbal event, an enunciation
that can be studied as a positioning of the subject, beyond the linguistic
modes of text analysis, by focusing on the “taking place” of discourse (145).
With Jerome Rothenberg’s gematrias, the mathematics of language generate the
discourse for the impossible witnessing, by imprinting the horror in the words
themselves, and as a consequence, in all words, so that poems change in their
very nature as they deny consolation, and remain forever bogged in disaster.
The process goes as far as to contaminate the sacred word repository that does
not contain them, since the names of the death camps are not in Torah: they are
out of bounds in that sense, but the text does circulate their numerical
equivalents. The words of the prayer, to extrapolate, are literally reinvested
by death itself which they indirectly state rather than compensate.
With “14 Stations,” history is collapsed into a textual
projection that imprints the unspeakable past onto all of language, all its
uses and all its users. Once it has happened it may remain enclosed and be lost
in the memory of the deceased, but it will also vividly resurface as it has
stayed imprinted onto every word of a shared language through a system of
linguistic equivalence. The distressing side effect of this procedure is that
the names of the camps do stay out of reach of the analytic voices, as well as
of the poetic voices, but still make themselves heard everywhere: the event,
and the words for it, are erased and activated at the same time, a figuration
of the aporetic witnessing that presents and substracts the event in one and
the same gesture.
the third station: buchenwald
deliver me
from them
your cattle
rising
your assembly
lords of fat
deliver me
from color
(Rothenberg Seedings
103)
Through
the use of the gematria-related modes of composition, Jerome Rothenberg brings
in historicized components, as well as an organization that might temporarily
narrativize them, but he also generates conditions of testimony not unlike
those articulated by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz:
We give the name testimony
to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue,
between the sayable and the unsayable in every language––that is between a
potentiality of speech and its existence, between a possibility and an
impossibility of speech. To think a potentiality in act as potentiality,
to think enunciation on the plane of langue is to inscribe a caesura in
possibility, a caesura that divides into a possibility and an impossibility,
into a potentiality and an impotentiality; and it is to situate a subject in
this very caesura. (Agamben 145
)
Democratic
Thus, the open-ended processes of Rothenberg’s
“othering” outline the paradigmatic potentialities that characterize a
reconfigured rapport to language. They speak against authority for a
consideration of the human in its many guises and disguises. In that sense,
they are powerfully reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s warning against
totalitarianism and its propensity to “invent a system in which all men are
equally superfluous” (433). What Rothenberg’s poetic gestures are consistently
attempting is, in Arendt’s words, “to create––not merely discover––a new
foundation for community as such” (436). One is then impressed by the
clairvoyance of Eric Mottram’s reading of Jerome Rothenberg’s early poetry, and
his use of concepts that have come to full visibility and relevance in the more
recent poems of The President of Desolation & Other Poems: the texts
stand witness to an enduring commitment to the poetic as “inclusive” (168),
“connective” (171), and “intersectional” (179), and as the means to postpone
disaster yet a little longer. But the poems also remind us of the
precariousness of this temporary equilibrium, since we are all sleeping
in a room of mirrors, that is also Hitler’s room “at the Hotel Monopol in
Breslau”:
In the room
Where Hitler slept
Dreams didn’t come
But sounds
Broke from the
walls
(The President
of Desolation 98)
Works cited:
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Daniel Heller- Roazen, trad. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1951.
Mottram, Eric. “Where the Real Song Begins.” Vort
no. 7 (1975) 163–179.
Rothenberg, Jerome. Gematria. Los
Angeles : Sun & Moon, 1994.
Rothenberg, Jerome. Khurbn. New York : New
Directions, 1989.
Rothenberg, Jerome. MSS 10, New Poetry Archive,
Mandeville Special Collections, University of California San Diego.
Rothenberg, Jerome. Poland/1931. New
York : New Directions, 1974.
Rothenberg, Jerome. Pre-Faces and Other Writings.
New York : New Directions, 1981.
Rothenberg, Jerome. Revolution of the Word: A
Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1914-1945. Boston: Exact Change,
1974
Rothenberg, Jerome. Seedings and Other Poems.
New York : New Directions, 1996.
Rothenberg, Jerome. The Lorca Variations. New
York: New Directions, 1993.
Rothenberg, Jerome. The President of Desolation
& Other Poems. Boston: Black Widow Press, 2019.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. 1994.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
[1] Cf. « The Poetry of
Numbers » Pre-Faces 156.
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