"On a more specific level, this book analyses Rothenberg's use of postmodern "appropriative strategies," such as collage, assemblage, palimpsest, parody, pastiche, forgery, found poetry, and theft. These strategies illustrate the concept, practice, and problematics of appropriation." "Embracing postmodern experimentation and drawing on heterodox Jewish sources, Rothenberg constructs a contemporary American Jewish identity that does not rely on institutionalized Judaism."--Jacket.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

Wide-ranging poetry anthology by one of America’s most distinguished literary translators.

In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for 'total destruction, ' the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish 'Holocaust' of World War II. This is the author's precisely personal, horrifying, tender, and structurally astute masterpiece, it is the great middle-length poem of our times.

Rothenberg says: Look, hear, weigh, touch, feel, consider, this is where humans have been, this is the signandflesh and signature and shadow of our ancestry and lineage, our past, present and future, this is the trail, the human trail, this is where there is nothing to hide, nothing to fear, only sharing, infinite sharing.

Poetry. A CRUEL NIRVANA both is and is not a new Jerome Rothenberg collection. In other words, almost everything in this collection has been published before. Each of the three major sections (Narratives and Real Theater Pieces, The Notebooks, and Conversations) was originally published individually. A CRUEL NIRVANA brings together these long out-of-print smaller gatherings in a way that illuminates their important place in Rothenberg's crucial contribution to Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century poetics. Returning to these poems, properly contextualized, one finds them communicating in one field of immanence. If we feel exhausted by meaningless violence and marketing, A CRUEL NIRVANA shows us wellsprings of meaning and power we missed or just couldn't see in our exhaustion or disaffection.

A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE A COMPANION TO POETIC GENRE This eagerly awaited Companion features over 40 contributions from leading academics around the world, and offers critical overviews of numerous poetic genres. Covering a range of cultural traditions from Britain, Ireland, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, among others, this valuable collection considers ancient genres such as the elegy, the ode, the ghazal, and the ballad, before moving on to Medieval and Renaissance genres originally invented or codified by the Troubadours or poets who followed in their wake. The book also approaches genres driven by theme, such as the calypso and found poetry. Each chapter begins by defining the genre in its initial stages, charting historical developments and finally assessing its latest mutations, be they structural, thematic, parodic, assimilative, or subversive.

Expanding Authorship collects important essays by Peter Middleton that show the many ways in which, in a world of proliferating communications media, poetry-making is increasingly the work of agencies extending beyond that of a single, identifiable author. In four sections--Sound, Communities, Collaboration, and Complexity--Middleton demonstrates that this changing situation of poetry requires new understandings of the variations of authorship. He explores the internal divisions of lyric subjectivity, the vicissitudes of coauthorship and poetry networks, the creative role of editors and anthologists, and the ways in which the long poem can reveal the outer limits of authorship. Readers and scholars of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rae Armantrout will find much to learn and enjoy in this groundbreaking volume.

The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues, and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years immediately following World War I. "In my own world," he explains in his pre-face to That Dada Strain, "the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on." For Rothenberg, the Dada connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as it does a "strain" that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work, whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling of innovative anthologies. Following the title section is "Imaginal Geographies," a group of poems that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded associations between images for which no key was readily available. In the third and final section, "Altar Pieces," Rothenberg attempts, as he says, "to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the loss of bread & words." Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces & Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.