How to address a life in poetry & the world of & beyond poetry that lasted for 92 years? I will try to give a quick overview via our personal & professional relationship. I first met Jerry & Diane Rothenberg in NYC in early 1970. Our first exchange was, unsurprisingly, around Paul Celan, as I had just finished translating Celan’s Breathturn as my BA dissertation at Bard College, & had learned via my advisor, Robert Kelly (who had also given me the Rothenbergs’ NY phone number when I moved to the city), that Jerry, for his first book, New Young German Poets (1957, City Lights) had translated a few Celan poems, was Celan’s first American translator. After a glass or two of wine, while waiting for the chicken Diane had in the oven (establishing a pattern that would hold for the next 50-plus years), Jerry told me of his one meeting with Celan, him speaking broken German, Celan broken English—& only upon leaving did Jerry suddenly realize that he should have spoken Yiddish as the one language the two shared, strangely enough, Jerry’s first language, before English, & Celan’s third, after German & Romanian.
Many years later Celan immediately came to mind when I saw the title Jerry had given to his Jerome Rothenberg reader: Eye of Witness. Celan had often written about witnessing, his most memorable statement being that “nobody witnesses for the witness—Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen.” I have written elsewhere about this in detail, proposing that the translator’s contribution is exactly that: a testimony. The translator witnesses for the witness. The eye of the witness, in the case of Jerome, is at least double: that of the poet & that of the translator. The German word “zeugen” does not refer to the notion of “witness” solely—it also means to make, to create, even procreate. The English word “testify” as a translation for the German “zeugen” still preserves this meaning in its root: “testis,” testicle. Testifying equals creating equals writing, and, Jerry & I are certain, also equals translating. This necessity of witnessing imposes itself upon us as a responsibility, a word that Robert Duncan has usefully explained as meaning “the ability to respond,” i.e. not only to respond to, but also, and perhaps above all, to answer for.
By late 1969 I had come across Jerry’s poetry & his first major anthology, Technicians of the Sacred. As you can well imagine, those 60s & 70s were years of apprenticeship for me, the European greenhorn trying to get to know America & especially the new & changing poetries of the Norte Americanos. Jerry’s work as poet, translator & anthologist, as well as his & Diane’s friendship & guidance, were central to my development—may he whom Jerome once called “a genuine Luxembourgian Yankee” be allowed to thank him here for all those gifts of mind & spirit, and even that capital “S” Spirit that claims to have confused our original single language to make us all speak in multiple tongues. As fate would have it, we would, from the late 80s on, collaborate on several translation & anthology projects. I have calculated—& it gave me great pleasure to do so!—that Jerry & I published over 2000 pages under both of our names.
We would however both leave NY soon after those first meetings: I moved to London in late 1971, and Jerry & Diane (with very young Matthew) moved back to the Seneca reservation in western NY in 1972. That summer they were both adopted, Jerry into the Beaver Clan with the Seneca name Haiwano (“Keeper of the High Words”), and Diane into the Blue Heron Clan. During that stay, Diane worked on her doctoral dissertation while Jerry was busy putting together A Big Jewish Book, the 600-page anthology of Jewish poetry. “That seemed like the perfect thing to be doing there,” he joked in the 2005 documentary The Bard of Encinitas. Over the next 20 years, we would meet elsewhere: London, Paris, Luxembourg. The seeds of our collaboration were sown in late 1973 when walking around London I queried the title of the just released America, A Prophecy, a Rothenberg-Quasha anthology, suggesting that “prophecy” was maybe too religiously loaded a word (notwithstanding the Blakean overtone), & suggested I’d like to do a book called “Europe, a Vision”—with “vision” a Rimbaldian term for the new poetries. Jerry immediately proposed that a combination thereof might be a good project for some time in the future. It would take two decades for that seed-thought to develop into the Poems for the Millennium anthologies. Then, in the late 80s, it was Jerry who helped me move back to the US, as we had meanwhile decided to work on a largish translation project, the poetry of Kurt Schwitters, & thus I arrived in Binghamton, NY, welcomed as ever by Jerry & Diane. David Antin managed to get Jerry back to UCSD the next year. As soon as I could I loaded a U-Haul & headed out west.
There would now come 5 years of close, near-daily collaboration, as I lived in Encinitas, within walking distance of Jerry & Diane’s on San Abella. Blessed years, among the most productive of my life, & that is thanks to Jerome. We followed the Schwitters volume with a large gathering of Picasso’s poetry, Jerry taking on the Spanish, & I the French poems. Then came the two volumes of Poems for the Millennium. Long days of wonderful labor, ending in wine & food, & a couple whiskeys, after which he & I would relax back into our mamaloshen, Yiddish for Jerry, Luxembourgish for me, having discovered that those two derived from Platt German, had very similar vocabularies & pronunciations, were sister-languages just as we were brothers in poetry. Nicole & I moved to Albany in 1992 & Jerry’s & my collaborations on the Millennium anthologies continued until volume two came out in 1998. The daily intensity of our collaboration is well remembered in a little anecdote Nicole reminded me of: whenever the phone rang in those days the kids would yell loudly, “Jerry!”
But let me speak to Jerome Rothenberg as a core 20th century avant-gardista, bringing it all home—to the wide world, that is—in this the 21st. To quote him: “I believe that everything is possible in poetry, & that our earlier ‘western’ attempts at definition represent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure.” This was said, relatively early in a career that spanned some seventy years in poetry—a career I see as the single-minded pursuit of expanding & renewing the possibilities of contemporary poetry through the inextricably related actions of writing, performing, translating, & of creating circumstances—a.k.a. anthologies—in which to present those findings & workings. But even as “everything” may be possible in poetry, Jerry privileged specific directions, prefacing a 1979 interview thus: “The only absolutes for poetry are diversity & change (& the freedom to pursue these); & the only purpose, over the long run, is to raise questions, to raise doubts, to put people into alternative, sometimes uncomfortable situations…” The urgency is clear & finds its roots in the need to challenge that most widely held preconception of our culture, namely, “that ‘Western man’ is the culmination of the human evolutionary process.” The thrust is therefore, from the very start, towards a transformational poetics, a poetics of changes (“I will change your mind,” he says in his 1966 “Personal Manifesto” which goes on “any means (=methods) to that end; [in order] to oppose the ‘devourers’ = bureaucrats, system-makers, priests, etc.)”—a manifesto based on the belief that art is fundamentally subversive & has to aim at an open-ended & permanent revolution. Not a revolution in style or taste, but one that affects the deep structures of our imaginings of the world. This vision includes a complex feedback historicity: changes effected in the present, he insists, are significant if they also change our understanding of the past.
These concerns for a visionary poetics of presentation are both old & new: To make his point JR called on many sources such as William Blake & Tristan Tzara; the community of visionary seekers that are the oldest paleolithic shamans; the kabbalistic tradition of Jewish mysticism; the contemporary brujera poetics of healing such as that of the Mazatec shamaness Maria Sabina; on Frederico Garcia Lorca & Paul Celan, among many other European poets & “seers;” on his own American contemporaries & peers such as David Antin, Armand Schwerner, Jackson Mac Low, Diane Wakoski, Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, & that slightly precursor generation of Olson, Creeley & Duncan; on the international practitioners of concrete & visual work as well as the performers of traditional oral & contemporary sound poetries.
Jerome Rothenberg, as Robert Kelly suggested, is the poet as a seeker who is someone “who does not have hobbies who eats / everything” because he is “a scientist of totality… to whom all data whatsoever are of use, world-scholar… explorer of ultimate connection / & connectedness in among & all.” The work of recovery & translation that starts in the early sixties & comes to be known as “ethnopoetics” (Jerry’s term) culminates in a series of brilliant anthologies—books that have to be read as an integral part of his poetic oeuvre—using the collage & constructivist methods of modern avant-garde poetry, they are epic-sized intertextual compositions. The final one, The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present, edited by Jerry in collaboration with Javier Taboada, has just come out this October.
For Jerry’s poetry & thought, as for Pound’s, “all ages are contemporaneous”—but with the major proviso that for Jerry the horrors of history (which Pound elides) are inalterable presences: the Jewish & Native American genocides crystallize as omnipresent black suns churning at the heart of the work. The first full realization of this is Poland/31, a “surrealist yiddish vaudeville” that explores, & recovers, his ancestral sources in the world of “Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.” The work moves from Jewish life in Poland to Jewish life in America, where, in a masterful comic apotheosis, the Jewish exile—in the form of “Cokboy,” the Baal Shem Tov reborn as a beaver (Jerry himself was initiated into the Seneca Beaver clan)—meets a Native American exile high up in the Rockies “on a mountain & kept from / true entry to the west true paradise” (just like Moses was) because “America disaster / America disaster…” Below its humorous garb (that Shtreimel transforms/translates into a cowboy, I mean, a cokboy hat) this meeting is also that of two genocides, that of the Native Americans & that of the Jews. In an interview, Jerry recalled seeing a photo of a thin and gaunt Native man who reminded him of Nazi death camp survivors. This man, when asked his name, responded, “Ishi,” the word for person or man in the language of the Yana people. A linguistic coincidence not lost on the multi-lingual poet-translator-witness: The Hebrew word for man is “ish.” The Yana people, like the Jews, had been exterminated. In these Disunited States, the foreign genocide which the US helped to bring to an end in WWII can be spoken of, but not that other, in fact, first genocide, that of the Native Americans, as I learned when I organized the first Luxembourg International Poetry Festival in 1987. I had, of course, invited Jerry & a few other ‘merican poetas, & when I was called to see the Cultural attaché at the US Embassy about my request for financial help to bring the poets over, I was told all were okay, except for one, namely that Jerome Rothenberg, because he had in writing accused the US Government of having committed genocide & was thus persona non grata, thus no moola. We of course brought him over anyway. So, watch out, the US government does indeed read poetry!
This is Jerry’s most profound wisdom: the Black Sun of History is always already lodged in the heart of the White Sun of Innocence. There are no pure, uncontaminated origins that could somehow be regained by an act of human will. The human condition is always already post-lapsarian. In a poem honoring his son Matthew’s bar mitzvah, reminiscing about the coincidence of Matthew’s birth & the poet’s brother’s death, he writes: “the mystery thus thrust / into our thoughts / —of light & dark / co-equals—.”
In the longer poems’ narrative imagination, this continental drift that somehow assembles Europe & America happens effortlessly & often with high comical effect. But the optimism of this intercultural psycho-topography of Euro-america (Your America?) is no blind faith. In the calmer, more meditative moments its very possibility can be put into question, as does the poem “SALAMANCA A PROPHECY”: