Richard Kostelanetz
Jerome Rothenberg (1978)
[As a Jewish writer who wasn’t customarily identified as a “Jewish writer,” I identified with those likewise situated in American literature, among them Jerry Rothenberg, Gertrude Stein, and Irvin Faust.]
Jerome Rothenberg is indisputably a master anthologist, who compiles collections not to exploit established tastes—that is the business of textbook-makers—but, first, to resurrect neglected literature and, then, to show how initially miscellaneous examples form a coherent cultural entity. He has produced seven anthologies, two of which are coedited, and each of them contains, in addition to Rothenberg’s selections, his own considered commentaries on the material.
His first, Technicians of the Sacred (1968), has a subtitle, “A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania,” that is actually incomplete. Inaddition to poetries from so-called primitive peoples, the book also contains imaginative works by contemporaries, both American and European, whose works resemble in crucial respects this primitive poetry. Intellectually, Technicians echoes that strain of art criticism that shows how modem abstraction resembles primitive art. From its polemical introduction to its elaborate commentaries, Technicians is not just a radical reinterpretation of the nature of poetry; it also attempts to define for present-day English-language poetry a “tradition” that differs considerably from that, say, of British verse.
To define this expanded view of the cultural past, over a decade ago Rothenberg coined a term, ethno-poetics, that has since been widely accepted. More recently, he wrote me of a desire “to create a broadly human poetics, to explore poetic process (poesis) by expanding the range of instances at hand; to challenge the literary-civilized framework by articulating a larger-than-literary/primitive/visionary tradition that shows up again in contemporary experiments with language & structure-in other words, a polemical approach to the past that reflects the present.”
As a fellow anthologist, I am perhaps in the best position to envy the influence that Technicians has had—not only in total sales, but in the numbers of readers (and writers) who treasure it among the most important books they have ever read. Indeed, there is good reason to consider it perhaps the single most influential literary anthology of the past decade. Its successor in Rothenberg’s own history is Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), which is devoted exclusively, as its subtitle says, to “‘Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas.”
Revolution of the Word (1974), subtitled “A New Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945,” collects not the staples of the textbooks but other, more eccentric kinds of poetry from this period—visual poems, minimal poems, hysterical prose poetry and even sound poems, by such neglected American writers as Charles Henri Ford, Bob Brown, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, Kenneth Patchen, and Abraham Lincoln Gillespie. This is the native between-the-wars poetry that the “New Critics” and their post-World War II academic epigones neglected, and seeing it gathered together should be a revelation to any student of American literature. Rothenberg’s brilliant introduction complements the selections both in revealing a hidden history and in providing a rationale for current experimental poetries. Its companion, America a Prophecy (1973), is a less concise and less coherent anthology.
The implicit purpose of Rothenberg’s newest major anthology, A Big Jewish Book (1978), is a reinterpretation of our sense of “Jewish literature.” In contrast to those who would emphasize fiction about the social and psychological condition of Jewish people, Rothenberg resurrects a more prophetic, more formally inventive, and more mystical literature, concerned less with psychology and society (and thus less with self-pity and/or nostalgia) than with the individual’s relation to nature and the unknown. Moreover, instead of just a German-Russian-American Jewish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, A Big Jewish Book contains earlier writings, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, from all over the Diaspora. Among its surprising inclusions are the visual poems of Abraham Abulafia (thirteenth century), sound poems from the first and second centuries, “Sayings of the Lord” by the eighteenth century false messiah Jacob Frank, and Judeo-Arabic poetry, in addition, typically, to such contemporaries as Armand Schwerner, Jackson Mac Low, Allen Ginsberg, Rochelle Owens, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff.
The product of prodigious, premeditated research, often in original sources (with translating assistance from Harris Lenowitz and Charles Doria), A Big Jewish Book aims to expand our sense of Jewish literature both geographically and chronologically, which is to say both stylistically and linguistically as well; and it resembles Gershom Scholem’s legendary scholarship in Jewish mysticism in resurrecting cultural materials previously regarded as disreputable, if they were acknowledged at all.Another way to understand how different A Big Jewish Book is would be to compare it with Saul Bellow’s anthology of Great Jewish Short Stories (1963) or Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s three treasuries of Yiddish literature (1954, 1969, 1972), and in that contrast is also epitomized the difference between Saul Bellow’s or Philip Roth’s fiction on one hand and the poetry of, say, Allen Ginsberg or Rothenberg himself on the other.
He has produced eighteen separate books of his own poetry, with nearly as many publishers (mostly alternative, rather than commercial). Once gathered together, it can be seen that, their stylistic variety notwithstanding, these books have certain common characteristics. The key concept is that his poems tend to be derived from the kinds of literature that went into his anthologies. That is, although Rothenberg has been an advocate of oral poetry and of writings and writers previously regarded as nonliterary, he is, in his own practice, a poet very much inspired by his readings. Out of both the materials he collected in Technicians of the Sacred and the experience of living near an Amerindian reservation (a move also inspired by his readings) comes not only A Seneca Journal (1978), but also the marvelous audiotapes of Amerindian “Horse Songs” whose “total translations” rank, in my judgment, among his most extraordinary creations.
Out of the interest in experimental literature comes the work initially collected in Poems 1964-1967 (1968) and then subsequently reprinted and extended in Poems for the Game of Silence (1971), which collects Rothenberg’s poetry of the sixties and, in its paperback edition (1975), remains the most convenient introduction to his own writing. Out of his research into the Jewish past came both a book-length poem of “ancestral explorations,” Poland/1931 (1974) and The Notebooks (1977), in addition to an engaging collection of cards of Hebrew translations done with Harris Lenowitz, Gematria 27 (1977).
The opening of “Cokboy,” a long poem included in Poland /1931, brings both the Amerindian and Jewish traditions together:
saddlesore I came a jew among
the indians
vot em I do ink in dis strange place mit deez pipple mit strange eyes could be it’s trouble
could be could be
***
vot em I doink here
how vass I lost tzu get here am a hundred men
a hundred fifty different shadows
And the poem itself tells of a Jew dreaming himself a cowboy (“a cokboy”) and then a cocksman among the Indians.
Born December 11, 1931, Jerome Dennis Rothenberg grew up in the Bronx, speaking Yiddish before English. He attended public schools and then City College, graduating with a B.A. in 1952. After a year at the University of Michigan, where he took his M.A., he served in the U.S. Army in Germany for two years. Returning to New York, he worked on his writing while his wife Diane taught school. In 1961, he landed a job as a part-time lecturer in English at the Mannes College of Music, where he taught until 1970. Meanwhile, from his home in Washington Heights, he became an active contributor to the New York poetry scene, making many loyal professional friends, performing his work in public as frequently as anyone, discussing literature and things over food and drinks in to the wee hours, editing and publishing the magazines Poems from the Floating World (1959-62), Some/Thing (1966-69) and Alcheringa (1970-76), founding the Hawk’s Well Press (1958-65) to publish books of his own poetry along with the works of others—contributing to a local literary community distinct from the academic poets on one hand and the New York school on the other. Always industrious, he also produced many translations from the German, including the anthology New Young German Poets (1959) and the “American Playing Version [Broadway]” of Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play, The Deputy (1965).
In his quiet and yet persistent way, Rothenberg has had a professional career as avant-garde as, say, Allen Ginsberg’s. He produced a poetry so different from the post-Eliot and post-post-Eliot establishments that his professional elders thought it unacceptable. I can remember a prominent literary editor telling me over lunch, as late as 1965, that “Jerry has never written a wholly successful poem.” Rather than beat his head against closed doors, Rothenberg created his own channels of cultural communication—his own magazines, his own small press, his own anthologies—that eventually won support from his contemporaries and juniors, in addition to lecture invitations and guest professorships. Thanks to the bulk and force of his professional presence, he is by now a major force on the American literary scene—not only as a poet but as a collector of literature that will surely inform the creation of subsequent poetry.