Jerome Rothenberg

1931–2024

Sacred Technician

by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

In 1968 when I was a freshman in college, I picked up Technicians of the Sacred, Jerome Rothenberg’s groundbreaking anthology of poetry drawn from spiritual sources from around the globe: Native American, African, Polynesian, Asian and even European. Suddenly poetry, which in my young mind was essentially from Europe or European derived, was suddenly opened up to me; poetry, I came to realize, was everywhere and had been everywhere for millennia.

Rothenberg defied classification. Unlike many, who wear a few literary hats, Jerry not only wore them but made them his signature. And also unlike many, he excelled at whatever he put his hand to doing: Poet, translator, essayist, anthologist and the inventor for our era of “ethnopoetics.”

The last time I saw Jerry was in 2012 in Istanbul. My wife Patricia Pruitt and I were living there then and we were able to spend a few days with Jerry and his wife Diane. Yes: we took in the sites but they most enjoyed walking in our neighborhood, going to the vegetable market and one specialty shop after another, their eyes and ears open for the nuances of life. It was a way of being for him and Diane. That curiosity led Jerry as a very young man to collect Navajo horse chants, and for him and Diane, an anthropologist, to live among the Allegany Seneca Nation in western New York during 1960s and ’70s.

That same drive to uncover what had been hidden is also what drives his tremendous poetry collection Poland/1931, a search for his roots, as he put it, in “a world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen.”

Jerry’s three volumes of Poems for the Millennium, coedited (Volumes One & Two) with Pierre Joris (and Volume Three) with Jeffrey Robinson continue that quest to bring readers worlds of poetry, or versions of poems, largely undiscovered by many.

I could go on and on but will stop my comments here. Jerry was such a giant that I only felt it right to bring in the voices of others who have important things to say.

Charles Bernstein

Jerry’s Kids

I took this photo of Jerry in 2006 on one of this many visits to New York. Over the years I helped to organize many Rothenberg tributes and you can find audio and video of them on Jerry’s PennSound page. On that page you will also find the 1996  LINEbreak program: Jerry and me in conversation and a video of our last meeting, a reading and discussion at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in the June before his death. I’ve written two overviews of Jerry’s work: the foreword his collection of translations and the foreword his trilogy (Poland/1931, Khurbn, and Burning Babe), which I collected together in Pitch of Poetry. In 1991, Pierre Joris and Nicole

Peyrafitte put together a 60th birthday tribute to Jerry, for which I wrote “Jerry’s Kids.” The title is a possible reference to Jerry Lewis’s marathons for children with muscular dystrophy. I’m practically French in my admiration of Jerry Lewis; even so, this title is disconcerting, and I don’t understand it, so perhaps I am mistaken about the reference. There’s no analogy between the two Jerrys, even though they are of the same generation, both Jews from the New York area with parents from the Pale (Russia/Poland). Then again, perhaps the title suggests my own skewered lineages. The poem eludes me, which I why I offer it here as an elegy for my friend, companion in poetry, teacher, and sojourner on a path we know not yet, even if it is all we know. The blessing of his memory goes beyond my compression. That is why our shared language is poetry.

Patrick Pritchett

Reconfiguring Romanticism:
Jerry Rothenberg at Harvard, March 2009

Jerry Rothenberg changed how we think about poetry. I’ll leave it to others to speak to his enormous contributions, both through his own work and his unflagging devotion to game-changing anthologies. Instead, I’ll offer here a brief reminiscence of an event I organized at Harvard in the Spring of 2009.

It began when my former professor from the University of Colorado-Boulder, the distinguished Romantics scholar Jeffrey Robinson, contacted me about setting up a reading/panel at Harvard, where I was then teaching, to promote the publication of the third volume in Jerry Rothenberg’s monumental anthology series, Poems for the Millennium. I was reluctant to take it on since I was so busy with teaching, completing my dissertation, and planning my wedding. But Jeffrey was not only a beloved mentor, but a dear friend and the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Jerry and Jeffrey had invited some distinguished poets to read from the anthology: Gerrit Lansing, Keith Waldrop, and Bill Corbett. And as respondents he’d arranged for two brilliant scholars from Tufts, Sonia Hofkosh and Virginia Jackson, to comment on the volume’s aims and ambitions.

In my introduction to the event I described the anthology as an effort to re-position romanticism as the first avant-garde, modernism before modernism. This is an argument that has been made by other scholars as well. But in her response Virginia Jackson pushed back gently against the homogenizing claims the anthology made, saying that it ignored or collapsed historical distinctions and instead compressed formal innovation into something like Pound’s “all ages are contemporaneous.” Yet Jerry’s “deliberate advocacy,” with which he closes his moment, is powerful, eloquent, and persuasive – the kind only a poet could make. Jameson’s famous cry to “Always historicize!” is rebutted by Jerry’s fervid “Always poeticize.”

The Thompson Room, in Barker Center, which is home to the English Department as well History and Literature, where I was teaching at the time, was packed, and the Q&A which followed was vigorous. Unfortunately, we weren’t equipped to set up a mic for it so much of it was muffled in the recording.

Jerry, as one can see in the recording, was warm and at ease, inviting the audience into an intimate conversation. His back-and-forth with Jeffrey provided an amiable exchange that while relaxed made a robust defense of the anthology’s core claims. Some might feel that Jerry’s anthologizing enthusiasm had gone too far, that you can’t plant a modernist flag on romanticist soil – but it’s a debate that’s far from settled.

The best moment, for me personally, came before the panel began. Jerry, Bill, Keith, Gerrit, and myself gathered at the large round back table in Grafton’s on Mass. Ave, my favorite bar and the place where Bill regularly held court each Monday after teaching. The talk that night was lively. I didn’t have much to say in the presence of these elders. I just sat there, happily soaking it all up, grateful to spend that small bit of time with Jerry who was liveliness itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-7CkHoFg4A

Susan Schultz

Teaching Rothenberg, Rothenberg Teaching

I taught the Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium several times during my teaching career. Students here in HI were not always on board with his melange of avant-garde and Indigenous texts, but the book provided so many models to them for their writing! My vision for Tinfish owed a lot to just that mixing, the uneasy gathering of poets from very different traditions who somehow had amazing affinities. It’s a tightrope that’s easy to fall off of, but there were the twin towers and someone needed to be Philippe Petit! Rothenberg was that walker. Thank you for showing how to anthologize as creatively as most artists make art. RIP Jerry Rothenberg.

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