'I found in poetry another way of speaking and thinking': Jerome Rothenberg in Conversation
It's always a good time to stop and see what Jerome Rothenberg has been up to. Lisa Deaderick took a moment to check in with Rothenberg for San Diego's Times-Union. You may know Rothenberg as poet, translator, and anthologist, but the occasion for the interview involved Rothenberg's participation in last night's Poetry Brothel's Masquerade Show in San Diego. Oh, hm. We'll let you head to the Union-Tribune to read up on that aspect of the interview, but we'll delve into the conversation where Rothenberg discusses his first forays into poetry and his initial encounters with poetry that led to editing anthologies like Technicians of the Sacred.
Q: How did you know you wanted to pursue work as a writer and, specifically, as a poet?
A: The fascination with poets and poetry was that they seemed to offer a different language, a different way of thinking and feeling, than what was being force-fed to us in the world at large. The reality of my childhood was marked by war and the threats of repressions and holocausts, carried forward by authoritarian governments, most of it in distant places but with other manifestations much closer to home. And there was a sense that our language was being debased by the lies that were needed to make the killings and the cruelty possible. So, I found in poetry another way of speaking and thinking that allowed me to challenge that debasement.
Q: You’ve done extensive work with translations, anthologies, performing and writing your own books and essays. Talk to us about your work with ethnopoetics. What does the term mean?
A: Ethnopoetics was a word I coined much later on, but it came out of the same search for all the ways of poetry I could discover, so I could better understand what I and others were doing in our own time and place. While I was looking everywhere to fill in the picture, ethnopoetics, to start with, was an attempt to investigate and to show what was being called “primitive” poetry in the cultures of so-called “primitive” people. I didn’t much like the word “primitive” to start with, and as I got further into it, my discovery was that wherever poetry or something like poetry was found, it was a highly developed form of language and ritual. It was always connected with other forms of artistry: music, dance, painting, sculpture, as a kind of total theater with language (a language like poetry) at its center. That led me to discard the word “primitive” and to declare, in my book “Technicians of the Sacred,” that where poetry was concerned, “primitive means complex.”
Q: What appealed to you about ethnopoetics and to anthologize these poems?
A: I would think of that as two-fold: that it expands our idea of what poetry is today and what it has been in other times and places, and that it acts as an antidote to present-day forms of exclusion and racism that are continuing to drive us or keep us apart. In line with this, I’ve expanded my searches into forms of poetry that have been hidden from our view but have much to teach us about the sources and resources of poetry that would allow us to fill out the picture. I also believe that the new forms of poetry developed by our own experimental poets can allow us to see a greater range of poetry in places and cultures distant from us.
Read on at the Union-Tribune.