RENOWNED POET

JEROME ROTHENBERG
reads from his new book
THE PRESIDENT

of DESOLATION
& Other Poems

Saturday, April 20^th, 7PM

Jerome Rothenberg, multiple award-winning poet/translator/editor/essayist, is the author of over 80 volumes of published poetry, a dozen important books of translations, and ten groundbreaking anthologies of contemporary and traditional poetry, including Technicians of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey C. Robinson, the Poems for the Millennium series of books.  

 "Jerome Rothenberg is a DNA spaceman exploring the mammal caves of Now."  -Michael McClure.  

"Jerome Rothenberg is one of the truly contemporary American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature...No one writing poetry has dug deeper into the roots of poetry."   -Kenneth Rexroth.

"The significance of Jerome Rothenberg's animating spirit looms larger every year. … [He] is the ultimate 'hyphenated' poet: critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher-translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator's insistence on transforming a given state of affairs."  - Charles Bernstein

"For us, [Jerome Rothenberg] played (and plays) the role Picasso and Braque did for the painters, and Leiris and Bataille later for the French poets: opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges. Kabbalah, cave painting, Iroquois legend, Navajo chant, Hasidic tales, Central Asian epic, German avant-garde, immigrant histories-he summoned us to attend to the deep literature of which the 'literary' is only a sheen … he is a great figure, who stands above and beyond the schools and tendentiousness 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

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Humans have pumped greenhouse gas into the atmosphere which has affected climate change; poisoned the seas with fertilizer runoffs, petroleum, plastics and pharmaceuticals; destabilized fish stocks by industrial scale fishing, and our staple food crops by mono-culturing them; clear-cut whole forests; killed off most large mammals; and waged chemical war with insects and unwanted plants. Our wars with ourselves and with nature have and will continue to have long lasting effects on earth’s delicate ecosystems. Contributors to this ecological anthology address these concerns.