Jerome Rothenberg

A noted poet and anthologist, Rothenberg has authored or edited more than 70 books of poetry, including Poland/1931 (New Directions, 1974), That Dada Strain (New Directions, 1983), Khurbn (New Directions, 1989), A Poem of Miracles (Word Palace Press, 2013), Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995), and Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (Station Hill, reprinted 2014). Rothenberg has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His awards include two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Awards, two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards, and the San Diego Public Library Local Author Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of Rothenberg’s books, booklets, and poetry pamphlets have been translated into Spanish, French, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, German, Polish, Swedish, and Portuguese.

Jerome Rothenberg earned his BA in English from the City College of New York and his MA in English language and literature from the University of Michigan. He was born to Polish Jewish parents and raised in New York City. Rothenberg’s publishing career began in the late 1950s as a translator of German poetry, first for TheHudson Review and then for City Lights Books. He founded Hawk’s Well Press in 1959 and published collections by some of the up-and-coming poets of the era, including Diane Wakoski and Robert Kelly. He also published his own first book of poems, White Sun Black Sun (1960), under the Hawk’s Well imprint. For Rothenberg and other writers like him, taking charge of their own publications was the primary means by which they were able to express their voices. That realization led him, in collaboration with David Antin and Diane Rothenberg, to originally found Hawk’s Well Press.

From the beginning, his work embodied experimentation with syntax, image, and form that drew on varied influences and moved in diverse directions. Poetic and artistic forebears such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Salvador Dalí, the Dadaists, Ezra Pound, and Walt Whitman affected the voice and content of his early work. Rothenberg went on to explore ancient and archaic poetry, sound poetry, found poetry, visual poetry, collaborations, further translations, his own Jewish heritage, and much more. He identified with both 20th-century avant garde and a range of aboriginal poetries. His contributions to the practice and language of poetics include theorizing the deep image, ethnopoetics, total translation, and attempts to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present.

Rothenberg has been particularly interested in the poetry of Native North Americans, both verbal and non-verbal, a poetry that can often be expressed, according to Rothenberg, in “music, non-verbal phonetic sounds, dance, gesture and event, game, dream, etc.” It is, he explained, “a high poetry and art, which only a colonialist ideology could have blinded us into labeling ‘primitive’ or ‘savage.’” He wrote, “I have been exploring ancestral sources of my own in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen,” the latter resulting in works such as Poland/1931 and A Big Jewish Book.

In 1999, Rothenberg published A Paradise of Poets: New Poems and Translations (New Directions). As the title indicates, the subject of A Paradise of Poets deals to a large extent with the lives and works of other poets (and artists), some of whom Rothenberg knew. The assemblage is international, including Federico García Lorca, Vitezslav Nezval, Paul Blackburn, Louis Zukofsky, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters. Rochelle Owens noted that “the illuminations and insights [of other poets and artists] . . . are revealed in their marvelous complexity by the poet/translator who renders the body of the poem into a transformational and personal journey of artistic risk and vitality of language.”

Rothenberg is widely and highly respected as a consummate anthologist and poetic theorist as well as a poet. In the massive 1,700-page, two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry edited with Pierre Joris, Rothenberg presents what Hacsi Horvath of Whole Earth considered “a brilliant kaleidoscope of writing unstuck in time, both in English and in fine translation, from numerous archaic/modern/postmodern voices.”

The first volume, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude, covers the period from 1900 through World War II. The second volume, From Postwar to Millennium, encompasses the remainder of the 20th century. Despite the length and worldwide scope of Poems for the Millennium, the anthology makes no attempt to be comprehensive with regard to 20th-century poetry. Instead, it emphasizes what Rothenberg and Joris consider poems that point toward the future both in form and content while passing over more conventional work. Beginning with a discussion of Rimbaud and Whitman, the editors present the poetry of Dadaism, expressionism, surrealism, and numerous other avant-garde movements. 

Reviewing the first volume, a Publishers Weekly critic noted, “This invaluable collection, rather than gathering the most fully realized poetry of this century’s first four decades, maps poetic possibility, thus demonstrating how poetry was literally remade during this period.” Ray Olson of Booklist called it “a book to argue with, which is one of its strengths.” 

Describing the second volume in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer stated, “this collection freely crosses national and aesthetic boundaries to include work by the Scottish concrete poet and garden designer Ian Hamilton Finlay, poems by the famed African novelist Chinua Achebe, and excerpts from Dictée, the only major writing project by the Korean American filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” and went on to conclude “as an introduction to the many avant-gardes of the second half of the century . . . the value of this international gatecrasher cannot be underestimated.”

Writing in Vort, Kenneth Rexroth described Rothenberg and his poetry in the following way: “Jerome Rothenberg is one of the truly contemporary American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. At the same time, he is a true autochthon. Only here and now could have produced him—a swinging orgy of Martin Buber, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Sitting Bull. No one writing poetry today has dug deeper into the roots of poetry.” Introducing Rothenberg at a 1998 reading, Al Filreis stated, “He has become the poet, critic, teacher, anthologist, translator, activist, archivist, assembler, organizer, and editor who has done as much as anyone of his generation to make a radical modernism available to readers.”

He is professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego.