[What follows is the first part of
Peter Quartermain’s response to Eye of
Witness, an in-depth view that leads me into & beyond areas of my work
that needed & still need (for me at least) viewing & addenda from the
outside. Quartermain’s essay is
scheduled to appear early in 2015 in Lou Rowan’s Golden Handcuff’s
Review (GHR 20), so this is an opportunity to put it into circulation
closer to the publication late last year of Eye
of Witness & to turn attention to Golden Handcuffs as well. The second half of
Quartermain’s piece will appear here shortly. (J.R.)]
“My own choice has been to write
from the side of a modernism that sees itself as challenging limits and
changing ways of speaking / thinking / doing that have too long robbed us of
the freedom to be human to the full extent of our powers and yearnings. The
struggle is immediate and the objects and attitudes to be destroyed or
transformed appear on every side of us.” (Symposium
of the Whole, p. xiv.)[1]
What I list doesn’t even begin to cover the territory, and he has not of course worked alone: collaboration is not simply for him a means of making works, it is a means by which to listen, to learn, and to question. And all this is never-ending: “The work is in no way complete,” he said in the Pre-Face to Symposium of the Whole (xiv). The definitive, with its intolerant authority, is anathema: Eye of Witness more than once quotes Richard Huelsenbeck’s Dadaist call for the “liberation of the creative forces from the tutelage of the advocates of power.” The notion of failure seems never to enter Rothenberg’s head, any more than might caution and timidity: with his deeply entrenched opposition to the idea of completeness at the very heart of his poetics, questions of failure or success are irrelevant. “What I come to do,” says a Creeley poem, “is partial, partially kept” – you can’t neglect the pun there. What counts is the doing, and one’s partiality gets in the way.
That, perhaps, accounts a bit for his great economy of energy, for the drive that produced and still produces (Rothenberg’s in his eighties) these thousands of pages of work. Even the most cursory of readers, casting an eye through the nearly 600 pages of Eye of Witness, will be struck by the sheer urgency of Rothenberg’s thought, and the profound sadness that stirs necessity and informs his affirmation. The first thing you see, on the book’s cover, is Goya’s Asmodea (Goya surely kin to Rothenberg); and one of the first things you might read, the epigraph to the first section of the book (29), is from William Blake, also kin, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. As Rothenberg says in “Je est un autre,” his short talk-piece of 1989 titled after Rimbaud, “there is a politics in this & yet there is no politics” (162). And the politics is impassioned. In 1987, on his first visit to Poland, he went to Treblinka, site of the Nazi extermination and forced labour camps at which close to a million were killed, now “only an empty field & . . . thousands of large stones,” a graveyard of voices, a site of khurbn. Khurbn, a Yiddish-Hebrew word for disaster pure & simple -- what Christians call The Holocaust (implying sacrifice), and Jews call Shoah (a Hebrew word for catastrophe) – is what Rothenberg names “the word as prelude to the scream” (310), the word for the unspeakable, for that which is beyond witness – no sacrifice, no false ennoblement, nothing left to say beyond the word and perhaps not even that, but emptiness. To our dismay, there are other forms and occasions of the unspeakable, other empties, other roots of that “impasse in the soul” (59) Rothenberg faced at around the time he was writing Poland / 1931, in 1961: the sheer impossibility of witness, of bringing to speech, and the inescapable urgent necessity to give the dead their voice. “The poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka,” he reports, “are the clearest message I have ever gotten about why I write poetry” (306).
The second volume of Poems for the Millennium, edited with Pierre Joris, closes with these lines from 1996 (they are also in Eye of Witness, 387); it all – anthologies, collaborations, essays, poems, talks, everything – makes but one work:
A woman’s breast &
honey.
She in whose mouth the
murderers stuffed gravel
who will no longer
speak.
The poet is the only
witness to that death,
writes every line
as though the only
witness.
Silence: the blank subtext which has ever since
suffused our lives, which we attempt to pass over, to cover as best we can with
noise and empty chatter. The very first entry for “attend” in the OED is “to
turn one’s ear to, to listen”; the
word also means to heed, as well as
to serve. In the graveyard of voices
(the phrase is from page 38) which is the world, the eye of witness is also an
ear, perhaps an ear most of all; an eye and an ear of attendance, and of retrieval; by that it is an eye and ear of
discovery, revealing that which is to be found. “The poems that I first began
to hear at Treblinka” were carried by the wind, by the stones, by the grass. By
memory, and by imagining. So the task of the poem is to conjure, to conjure the
absent, the silent, the forgotten and the lost. One early meaning of “conjure”
is to swear together, to conspire –
Wycliffe used it that way in his translation of the Bible – and in his time as
in ours it also meant to call forth angelic
or demonic spirits into one’s presence, to
invoke and body forth powers of the invisible world. It would take some
three or four hundred years, suggests the OED, for it to mean beseech. Eye of Witness constitutes
Rothenberg’s pact with the reader, and that pact demands conjuration in
all the senses I just proposed. There can be no idle reading of this book.
That’s
where the energy comes from, then; not only Rothenberg’s astonishingly
productive energy that drives these multitudes of pages, but the very energy in
the writing itself. The sheer urgency of the task is assuredly source, and that
urgency burdens the poem with its task the way a groundswell of rhythm and
tonality might carry an undersong across and through the wordless silence of
the abeyant gap between stanza and stanza, like the unvoiced silent beat
between the lines of nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock” or “Mary had a
Little Lamb.” That urgency is dire:
it carries through the writing and carries the writing through; when the Muse has to say something, that gist may be inescapable. But at the same time and
perhaps by the same token it may not be voicable nor even tellable; then
language fails; it cannot be sufficient.
“Take the legacy of “Write carelessly,” Williams said in Book Three of
But despite its rich diversity, Eye of Witness at first glance can be a bit frustrating. For one thing, the book necessarily prints extracts as well as whole poems and essays, but it does not always give their source. If you want to follow something up, or restore a passage to its context, you can’t do that at all easily. But it is, after all, “A Jerome Rothenberg Reader,” and like any other such it makes no claim to completeness. If, like me, you want to know what book a particular poem or prose piece might be from (perhaps because you do want to follow it up), or want to know when it was written, the book frequently doesn’t tell you; the relationship of one work to another in the Rothenberg canon (which work came first, say) is often not at all clear. A chronology, sketchily implicit as a substratum to the book, is scrambled in deference to thematic considerations. The seventy pages of “Gallery One: Prolegomena to a Poetics,” for instance, are followed by sixty-five pages of “A Book of Otherings” which are followed by forty pages of “Poetry and Polemics 1: Toward an Ethnopoetics” which in turn are followed by more than a hundred pages of “Gallery Two: The World Turned Upside Down.” Work in any given section may be from the 1960s or the early 2000s, you can’t necessarily tell which, and it is hard to find your way around the book even though there’s an analytic Table of Contents constructed along the lines of those in the three volumes of Poems For the Millennium. There is no index of titles and first lines, there is no bibliography, not even a checklist of the books the works come from. Overall, this lends the book a kind of slapdash homogeneity – write carelessly, perhaps -- but the careful organisation along other than chronological or conventionally canonical lines suggests that Rothenberg’s work here has been carefully groomed into a unity, and that very unity draws the reader – this reader at any rate – to read straight through, a sequential reading of the whole book. That grooming obeys Rothenberg’s recognition, some time around the mid-1960s, that ethnopoetics, a word he coined “circa 1967” (171), is “a necessary part of a poetics (an idea of poetry),” and his discovery, not made by him alone, that “ethnopoetics, once it had entered our work, altered the nature of that work in all its aspects” (Symposium, xv).
TO BE CONTINUED
[note. Peter Quartermain is the editor of The Collected Poetry and Plays of Robert Duncan (two volumes, 2012 & 2013, from
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