The Technicians of the Sacred to Barbaric Vast & Wild: celebrating the work of Jerome Rothenberg
Monday 17th October, Birkbeck College : Room B34, Malet St Campus, London WC1E 7HX
Free Entrance : 7:30pm
A great privilege to be reading alongside one of the greats of world poetry, Jerome Rothenberg. An enormous influence on countless poets, his impact on how we conceive of poetry since WWII is unbridled. During this reading Rothenberg will present a series of poems termed 'variations' and 'auto-variations' demonstrating the connections between his work as an anthologist and a poet, while I will read from his works and those of my own which his have influenced.
The event is hosted by Steve Willey of the Contemporary Research Poetics Centre, Birkbeck College, and for further details email s.willey@bbk.ac.uk or visit the event facebook page.
Prior to the reading, from 6pm - 7.20pm there will be a seminar presentation and discussion in the same location. Jerome Rothenberg will present a review of his work as an anthologist from Technicians of the Sacred (1968) to his most recent anthology Barbaric Vast & Wild: Poems for the Millennium Volume Five (2015). This will be followed by an open discussion centred around ethnopoetics and what Rothenberg calls 'omnipoetics' with a particular focus on questions of translation. A rare opportunity in London, also free to attend.
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), Exiled in the Word (a.k.a. A Big Jewish Book), and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. He was a founding figure of ethnopoetics as a combination of poetic practice and theory, and he has been a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance. His most recent big books are Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013) and Barbaric Vast & Wild: Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Preset (volume 5 of Poems for the Millennium, 2015). A new book of poems, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000-2015, has just appeared in separate English and French editions. http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.co.uk/