The Life of the Avant-Garde:From Romanticism to the Present

A talk followed by a poetry reading and conversation with the founder of ethnopoetics and translater of the works of Paul Celan.

Jerome Rothenberg was born in New York to atheist Polish-Jewish immigrants. His translations of Paul Celan, published in the late 1950s, were among the first to appear in English. The first book of his own work, White Black Sun, appeared in 1960, and has been followed by over 50 further books, including Poland 1931 (New Directions, 1974), The Lorca Variations (New Directions, 1993), and Seedings and Other Poems (New Directions 1998). His major anthology of poetries of innovation and renewal, Poems for the Millenium, co-edited with Pierre Joris, was published in two volumes by the University of California Press (1995 and 1998). He is also a founder of Ethnopoetics, a commitment to the study and translation of tribal and pre-modern texts (oral and written) in a context of ethnographic investigation. His two large collections of translations, Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), have been key markers in our understanding of the aliveness and complexity of the verbal art of non-modern societies. He also co-edited Alcheringa, the first journal of ethnopoetics.He has published several books of essays, including The Book of the Book (2000, with Steven Clay), and Prefaces (1981).

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