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Poetic Profile
Jerome Rothenberg
General Questions
1) Where were you Born and what was your Formation?
I was born in New York but I’m not sure what you mean by my “Formation.” If it’s a question of lineage, that would clearly be Jewish, by way of my parents who came as immigrants from Poland, though Poland as such was never the point of reference, while towns & cities in Poland were often mentioned by way of recollection. Until I was three years old we lived in Brooklyn & the language at that time was Yiddish, something that cooled off quickly when we moved to the Bronx, & it was only much later that I came to see the elegance that that language sometimes had – by then too late to really come to terms with it. My education was through the New York public schools – from kindergarten through college – & there was an impact too from others who were there with me from college on: poets like Antin & Kelly, but Diane Brodatz also, who would become my lifelong companion & dearest friend. I can’t imagine anything like Formation unless I speak of them & many others.
2) What are your Poetic Influences?
The influences are multiple & have kept shifting over the years – a matter of some anxiety in the beginning, as for most of us I think, but by the middle or late 50s I began to shake that off & to open myself to other voices with a growing assurance that I wasn’t lost in the process but found & self-invented as a poet. Robert Duncan gave me some help with that – his cocky declaration of himself as a derivative poet, in response, I believe, to a review of his first book that tagged him with that word. I can remember anyway when Whitman came into my life, & before that Stein & Joyce & e.e. cummings, & how I began way back in my teens to learn something by way of imitation. Lorca, I think, was the first of the foreign poets to reach me (I’m limiting myself here to twentieth-century poets) & soon thereafter the nineteenth-century French – Rimbaud in particular & Baudelaire a close second. (I didn’t get to Mallarmé in earnest till some years after.) I don’t remember when Williams & Pound came in, except that they did, & by the time I was moving into college, Dylan Thomas & Auden had to be factored in, & Eliot, to be perfectly honest, was a poet that many of us knew almost by heart. (I remember an evening at our place, a little later on, when LeRoi Jones engaged us with a memorized recitation of Prufrock.) Also, in the years when I was teaching myself poetry, I wasn’t beyond deliberate imitation & paraphrase of old poems into contemporary idiom, in line with which I made my first stumbling attempts at translation. Then, at some later point I figured that if I left myself open to so many poets’ voices – & the ethnopoetic ones were yet to come – I was less likely to become a prisoner to any one of them. (It took still more time to understand poetry – like language itself – as a collective enterprise, even when carried forward by highly individualized poets.)
3) When did you realize you wanted to be a poet?
For me the realization came very early & for reasons that I’m not too clear about. The story I now like to tell is that it was a response to the war at mid-century, which began when I was nearly eight & ended when I was nearly fourteen. It seems to me in retrospect that what I was looking for – along with others like me – was a language different from the language of war & privilege & that poetry became the field in which that language could be explored. Along with that came the designation of poet, to which I aspired when I was fifteen or sixteen, with a sense even then that it marked some separation, the assumption of a calling that would separate us from the way things were or from another series of expectations that we weren’t willing to assume. That was nearly taken away from me in the retrenchment of the early 1950s, but I managed to persist.
4) Ethnopoetics has proven interesting but it seems that today we have moved toward a Ghettoization and Specialization in poetics what do you think about this?
I can’t say that the time before our own was lacking in ghettoization, as you seem to mean it or as I understand it, though coming likely from another direction. For myself what I was looking for, along with others, was a global poetics that broke down boundaries of culture & language, sex & gender, time & space, though it consisted in any instance of poetries that were specific to one or more of those particulars. In what I called ethnopoetics & Duncan set forth as a “symposium of the whole,” the attempt was to include all that could possibly be included, even those practitioners who entered as unwilling or recalcitrant participants. Along those same lines, when I experimented for several years with the construction of something that I named “the Jewish poem,” my attempt (in Poland/1931, A Big Jewish Book, & so on) was not to set up barriers but to write for or address an audience beyond the narrow ethnic one. The push in other words was intercultural rather than intracultural, with ethnopoetics as our desire to know the many possibilities of poetry, language by language & idiolect by idiolect. My hope is that this goes on into the future, although I doubt that that future as we really want it ever will arrive.
5) Favorite Team or Sport?
I was all for baseball as a kid, played it badly (as softball) but followed it day by day & two or three times a week (in summer) at Polo Grounds & Yankee Stadium. My disillusionment came when the Giants & Dodgers left New York – in pursuit of money – & I never recovered. In the aftermath of that the thrill diminished, although I maintain an interest in statistics & standings – of the New York teams in particular & in whatever sport, or more recently the Padres & the Chargers in deference to where I live in California. The thrust however has been increasingly textual.
6) Food?
As with poetry my appetite for food has been global & transcultural – omnivorous in short. In the footsteps of my wife Diane – an anthropologist with an early interest in the sociology & lore of food & cooking – I have been open to a staggering range of flora & fauna &, on the meat side, to the best parts of the pig, so to speak, both the outside & the inside. I otherwise have no one food that I would class as favorite, but my favorite context for eating has always been social & mixed with conversation – never solitary – or what my friend Steve Fagin calls, approvingly, “talkin’ with your mouth full.”
7) Vacation Spot?
I don’t go on vacations as such although I’m addicted to traveling & take every chance I get for readings & performances that bring me into far-off places. When working at a regular job, I used vacation time to write without interference or to travel – sometimes, if lucky, to do both at once. From where I live now, in southern California, the spots I head to most often are Paris & New York, though my present day home town, Encinitas, is more of a vacation spot in the usual sense of the word than most of the places I visit.
8) Swear Word?
I don’t know that there are swear words as such any longer, or if there are, that they’ve pretty much lost their potency. Fuck or fucking, which is most often used, is an intensifier now, not strikingly different from terribly & awfully, say, & almost as far removed from the original meaning as either of the others. Contrastingly, when I strike out in anger, “go fuck yourself” or the more puzzling “fuck you” still carries something of its original sexual power. “Asshole” & “shmuck” or “prick,” I assume, are also still felt as obscene, though I don’t know how many catch the obscenity in the case of “shmuck” (= “prick” in Yiddish).
9) Are you working on a book?
Several, but the one that takes the most attention is a nineteenth-century prequel to Poems for the Millennium – a 900-pager that I have to finish by January of ’07. This one goes back to the romantics & postromantics & is a collaboration with Jeffrey Robinson, a radical scholar of Romanticism & an afficionado as well of experimental modernism. For me it’s a chance to reclaim a portion of the past that has remained alive for many of us – not only the early nineteenth-century modernists (though those as well) but the core Romantics whom we’re bringing together with a name like experimental romanticism & seeing as the start of a continuum that leads inevitably to what we are. That means Wordsworth as well as Blake, Goethe as well as Hölderlin, Hugo as well as Baudelaire, if you get the drift – & ambition – of what I’m saying.
10) Poems for the Millennium was a seminal book is there anyone you left out who you wish was included?
There is no way of doing a book of this scope without being stuck with regrettable omissions. In the case of Poems for the Millennium, the closer we got to our own time the more questionable the omissions became – at least that there was always someone around to question them (ourselves included). With one or both of the volumes (I can’t remember), Joris & I found ourselves with a first draft that was 200 or 300 pages longer than what the publishers could possibly allow. So poems & poets had to be excised & no two ways about it. We also bypassed a number of poets whom we weren’t sufficiently aware of & have been hoping to catch up with the new series of small books (Poets for the Millennium) that we’re now co-editing. (José Lezama Lima, fourth in the series & absent from the anthologies, is the primary example.) Other factors came in too – that we weren’t doing a collection of U.S. poetry but an international & global book – the Americans only a single part of that – & even so the weighting toward the American poets was unavoidable. Still we couldn’t, for example, put in all the major San Francisco poets or New York School poets, which accounts for some of the omissions to which there were scattered & occasionally painful objections. The main thrust of the books, however, was more to present or represent modes of poetry than to showcase individual poets – to emphasize experimental modernism with a manifesto-like assertiveness – & in that I think we succeeded.
Craft Questions
11) How do you write a poem?
Multiple ways, some of them absolutely ordinary, like the recording of an event in as straightforward a way as possible, & others that involve the creation of a process that allows me to tap into a vocabulary or a structure (variations, gematria, etc., for those who know my work). I’ve also done verbo-visual works, though not too often, that run from something like concrete poetry (for the translation of certain American Indian works) to a collaging with words & manipulated photo images, some on my own & some in collaboration. That’s also the case with performance – collaborative musical & theatrical works, as well as works like the horse-song compositions (“total translations”) that mark an approach, in my own terms, to sound poetry. All of these involve specific forms of writing & performance (where performance is relevant), so no simple answer to your question.
12) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
Organic sounds more natural & therefore more righteous, but of course it’s something of both. Much of that, I think, is covered in the previous answer, & I don’t know what more I can say about it. Probably all poetry shares in these two processes, if I understand the terms correctly, but if synthetic is a question of artifice, then I would imagine that this is more clearly a determinant of poetry than of other forms of writing. I suppose I have a difficulty with acknowledging the kind of either/or situation that the question implies.
13) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
I write most comfortably at home or wherever it is that I’ve settled into & have all I need easily to hand. For the big gatherings like Poems for the Millennium, that also means that I have a small library at my disposal, as well as access to other library resources not far from home. And the internet now comes into play as well, bringing additional resources into the home or studio environment. For my own poetry I also feel best when I’m working on home grounds. though in some sense it shouldn’t really matter. I find when I’m traveling that I can get a start (sometimes more than that) by working in a notebook, & with a laptop now it’s possible to push that even further. But I don’t feel really secure or don’t really feel that the work is finished until I get back home with it & have a chance to work it through from that perspective. I also used to think that traveling – changing the ambience in that sense – wasn’t really important to me, but later on, at some point in the 1980s if I have it right, I found that I was getting a lot out of the distant places, coming back from some of those trips with sketches & nearly completed poems that came directly from what I had seen & heard. In that sense, Poland/1931, was written apart from any first-hand knowledge of the place, but Khurbn, two decades later, would have been impossible for me to write from home. In both cases too, to anticipate the question that follows, I had to research what I was doing – through books & conversations, anything that gave me images & facts to supply whatever density or specificity the poems called for.
14) How do you use sources in your poetry?
Starting with Poland/1931 I found that I didn’t know enough on my own to write what I had to write. My idea was to create an ancestral poetry, something to do with a place & a time that weren’t part of my own experience, though I had heard talk about them from childhood on. I had some idea though of where to get at them – the minute particulars, as Blake called them, that would make the poem real or possibly surreal – & I began to cull from written sources (novels, poems, memoirs, histories & ethnographies) & from renewed conversations with those who could remember. The same was true for much of the poetry that followed after that – A Seneca Journal, where I went, as Olson had it, to see for myself but also to read & research what others had recorded; That Dada Strain, where I drew from artists & poets of that time & from the works about them; Khurbn [Holocaust], where I visited the remnants of the death camps & drew from & incorporated the witnessings of those who had gone through it. Ed Sanders was able to see that phase of my work – Poland/1931 specifically – as an example of what he was calling “investigative poetry,” & clearly the investigation goes full blast in the assemblages like Technicians of the Sacred & Poems for the Millennium. Also, if you want more of my take on sources & related matters, that’s at the core of Writing Through, which starts out as a book of selected translations & takes off into other forms of appropriation, sourcing & othering.
