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Fifty years in the making, Eye of Witness is the culminating work of Jerome Rothenberg's lifelong project, to construct a grand collage that brings together a wide range of poems and other language works and in the process speaks to and of a larger humanity with which and to which the poet acts as conduit and witness. In his own words in summation: "Two final points: first, my pursuit of a kind of transcultural or global poetics: a poetry rooted in its place but capable of crossing borders and languages to become a virtual omni - poetics. And secondly that that move in its later stages explores a multivocal poetry of witness- the ubiquity of an I-as-speaking-subject that we all share-personal and transpersonal at once."

"Jerome Rothenberg is one of the truly contemporary American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature, 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." --Kenneth Rexroth

 "He is a great figure, who stands above and beyond the schools and tendentiousnesses of poetics; he has given us, in his poetry, criticism, translation, anthologies, a body of work that exhibits what I suddenly realize is an ethical purity, a touchstone for the genuine." --Robert Kelly

Jerome Rothenberg, UCSD Professor Emeritus of Literature and Visual Arts, has published over eighty books, booklets and pamphlets of poetry, several of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, German, Polish, Swedish and Portuguese. In addition, he has assembled, edited, and annotated ten enormously germinal anthologies of experimental and traditional poetry and performance, beginning with Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, and has been a leading voice in the approach to creative work and mind that he named "ethnopoetics." He has also acted as editor and co-editor of several notably influential magazines including Some/Thing, Alcheringa, and New Wilderness Letter, and has appeared as a performance poet and artist at many of the most distinguished venues in North and South America and Europe. Rothenberg's poetic work, Poland/1931, has been staged by the Living Theater in New York, and several of his soundplays have been produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany. His recent works include a translation of PPPPPP: Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters; and Poems for the Millennium, a two-volume global anthology of the twentieth-century avant-garde.