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43-463: Jerome Rothenberg (December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024) was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry . Rothenberg co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Dennis Tedlock in the late 1960s. Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New York City , the son of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, and is a descendant of

86-582: A certain dilution) when it achieved widespread recognition. In this model, which derives from Chinese tradition, the object of compiling an anthology was to preserve the best of a form, and cull the rest. In Malaysia , an anthology (or antologi in Malay ) is a collection of syair , sajak (or modern prose), proses , drama scripts, and pantuns . Notable anthologies that are used in secondary schools include Sehijau Warna Daun , Seuntai Kata Untuk Dirasa , Anak Bumi Tercinta , Anak Laut and Kerusi . In

129-418: A dedicated anthropological folklorist and linguist, Dell Hymes, dedicated a good part of his life to resuscitating a dry, written text collected . . . by a long-dead anthropologist [i.e., Franz Boas] and stored away in a dusty volume” (2003, 122). When Hymes retranslated “The Sun’s Myth,” he recovered the poetic and stylistic devices that were used in the original recorded performance, but which had been lost in

172-429: A more flexible medium than the collection of a single poet's work, and indeed rang innumerable changes on the idea as a way of marketing poetry, publication in an anthology (in the right company) became at times a sought-after form of recognition for poets. The self-definition of movements, dating back at least to Ezra Pound 's efforts on behalf of Imagism , could be linked on one front to the production of an anthology of

215-663: A nineteenth-century prequel to the first two volumes, in 2009. Numerous translated editions of his writings have appeared in French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, and other languages, and a complete French edition of Technicians of the Sacred appeared in 2008. An expanded 50th Anniversary Edition of Technicians of the Sacred appeared in 2017 and received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2018. Charles Bernstein has written of him: “The significance of Jerome Rothenberg's animating spirit looms larger every year. … [He]

258-600: A textual form. This exercise is not entirely hypothetical: Homer’s Odyssey was, after all, written down at some point in history; otherwise it would not have survived. Anthology In book publishing , an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors. There are also thematic and genre-based anthologies. Complete collections of works are often called " complete works " or " opera omnia " ( Latin equivalent). The word entered

301-507: Is survived by his wife and collaborator of 71 years, Diane. Ethnopoetics Jerome Rothenberg coined the term ethnopoetics in the 1960s. According to Catherine S. Quick, Rothenberg had recognized that “most translations of Native American oral traditions . . . failed to capture the power and beauty of the oral performances on the written page,” especially when “Western poetic styles” were imposed upon these written texts (1999, 96). Rothenberg’s influence has increased public awareness of

344-470: 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." In 2014, work from Rothenberg appeared in the second issue of The Literati Quarterly . Rothenberg died at his home in Encinitas, California on April 21, 2024, at the age of 92. He

387-559: The Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York State , and later to San Diego, California , where he was living at the time of his death. In the late 1950s, he published translations of German poets , including the first English translation of poems by Paul Celan and Günter Grass , among others. He also founded Hawk's Well Press and the magazines Poems from the Floating World and some/thing ,

430-560: The Greek Anthology . Florilegium , a Latin derivative for a collection of flowers, was used in medieval Europe for an anthology of Latin proverbs and textual excerpts. Shortly before anthology had entered the language, English had begun using florilegium as a word for such a collection. The Palatine Anthology , discovered in the Palatine Library , Heidelberg in 1606, is a collection of Greek poems and epigrams that

473-772: The Talmudist rabbi Meir of Rothenburg . He attended the City College of New York , graduating in 1952, and in 1953 he received a Master's Degree in Literature from the University of Michigan . Rothenberg served in the U.S. Army in Mainz , Germany, from 1953 to 1955, after which he did further graduate study at Columbia University , finishing in 1959. He lived in New York City until 1972, when he moved first to

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516-480: The University of California, San Diego . The works published since 1990 include more than fifteen books of his own poetry as well as four books of poetry in translation – from Schwitters , Lorca , Picasso , and Nezval – and a book of selected translations, Writing Through , which extends the idea of translation to practices like collage, assemblage, and appropriation. In 1994 he published Gematria . In 1995 and 1998 he published, in collaboration with Pierre Joris ,

559-713: The Center for Theater Science & Research in San Diego and New York. His New Selected Poems 1970-1985 , covering the period since Poems for the Game of Silence , appeared in 1986. In 1987, Rothenberg received his first tenured professorship at the State University of New York in Binghamton , but returned to California in 1989, where he taught for the next ten years as a professor of visual arts and literature at

602-586: The English language in the 17th century, from the Greek word, ἀνθολογία ( anthologic , literally "a collection of blossoms", from ἄνθος , ánthos , flower), a reference to one of the earliest known anthologies, the Garland ( Στέφανος , stéphanos ), the introduction to which compares each of its anthologized poets to a flower. That Garland by Meléagros of Gadara formed the kernel for what has become known as

645-765: The Indian North Americas (1972, 2014); A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present (revised and republished as Exiled in the Word , 1977 and 1989); America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973, 2012), co-edited with George Quasha; and Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward An Ethnopoetics (1983), co-edited with Diane Rothenberg. Rothenberg’s approach throughout

688-428: The Sacred (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg, in collaboration with George Quasha , named “ethnopoetics”, went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to include visual and sound poetry and the texts and scenarios for ritual events. Some 150 pages of commentaries gave context to the works included and placed them as well in relation to contemporary and experimental work in

731-489: The aesthetic qualities of the performance than uniformly formatted text in prose paragraphs ever could. Tedlock himself defines ethnopoetics as “a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western [poetic] tradition as we know it now." On the other hand, Dell Hymes believes that even previously dictated texts retain significant structural patterns of poetic repetition that “are

774-417: The end of the 1960s, he had also become active in poetry performance, had adapted a play ( The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth , 1964) for Broadway production and had opened the range of his experimental work well beyond the earlier “deep image” poetry. His works are often read and analyzed in college English classes, such as in the course, Poetry From Planet Earth, offered at Dawson College . Technicians of

817-475: The extant Chinookan languages” helped him to “notice stylistic devices that highlighted certain actions and themes and even performance styles that brought scenes into sharp focus” (2003, 122). In other words, without his knowledge of the native language of oral performers, Hymes could not have placed his ethnopoetic translation of “The Sun’s Myth” within its specific Native American cultural context. Various other writers and poets can be said to have contributed to

860-650: The field of ethnopoetics as an aesthetic movement. For example, Tristan Tzara created calligrams and William Bright worked with the Karuk tribe to preserve their native language. However, within the fields of linguistics , folkloristics , and anthropology , ethnopoetics refers to a particular method of analyzing the linguistic features and syntactical structures of oral literature (such as poetry, myths, narratives, folk tales, ceremonial speeches, etc.) in ways that pay attention to poetic patterns within speech. Overall, then, ethnopoetic methods and theories strive to capture on

903-484: The first edition of Arthur Quiller Couch 's Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). In East Asian tradition, an anthology was a recognized form of compilation of a given poetic form . It was assumed that there was a cyclic development: any particular form, say the tanka in Japan , would be introduced at one point in history, be explored by masters during a subsequent time, and finally be subject to popularisation (and

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946-472: The fundamental issues and purposes of ethnopoetics. On the one hand, Dennis Tedlock argues not only that pauses in oral performances indicate where poetic line breaks should occur in the written texts, which he compares to musical scores, but also that words on the page should be formatted to reflect the more subtle qualities of speech used in oral performances. Tedlock explain his perspective in this way, An ethnopoetic score [or text] not only takes account of

989-505: The industrial and post-industrial West. In 1969 Rothenberg's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine , an avant-garde publication which experimented with language and meaning-making. Over the next ten years, Rothenberg also founded, and with Dennis Tedlock, co-edited Alcheringa , the first magazine of ethnopoetics (1970–73, 1975ff.) and edited further anthologies, including: Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of

1032-542: The latter with David Antin , publishing work by important American avant-garde poets, as well as his first collection, White Sun Black Sun (1960). He wrote works which he described as deep image in the 1950s and early 1960s, during that time publishing eight more collections, and the first of his extensive anthologies of traditional and modern poetry, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poems from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (1968, revised and expanded 1985). By

1075-417: The like-minded. Also, whilst not connected with poetry, publishers have produced collective works of fiction and non-fiction from a number of authors and used the term anthology to describe the collective nature of the text. These have been in a number of subjects, including Erotica , edited by Mitzi Szereto , and American Gothic Tales edited by Joyce Carol Oates . The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of

1118-475: The myth’s earlier translation by Franz Boas . Hymes’ ethnopoetics revolves around a conception of narratives as primarily organized in terms of formal and aesthetic —‘poetic’—patterns, not in terms of content or thematic patterns. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a form of action, of performance, and the meanings it generates are effects of performance. Narratives, seen from this perspective, are organized in lines and in groups of lines (verses, stanzas), and

1161-495: The organization of lines in narratives is a kind of implicit patterning that creates narrative effect. . . . Content, in other words, is an effect of the formal organization of a narrative: What there is to be told emerges out of how it is being told. (Blommaert 2007, 216) Also, understanding the native language of oral performers is essential for accurate, ethnopoetic translation of their words into written texts. For example, folklorist Barre Toelken explains that Hymes’s “knowledge of

1204-588: The poetics of performance, many of which were gathered together in Pre-Faces & Other Writings (1981). During this time and beyond it, he also engaged in a number of collaborations with musicians – Charlie Morrow , Bertram Turetzky , Pauline Oliveros , and George E. Lewis , among others – and took part, sometimes performing, in theatricalizations of his poetry: Poland/1931 for The Living Theater and That Dada Strain for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany and

1247-633: The relation of his work to Dada and Surrealism culminated in a further cycle of poems, That Dada Strain , in 1983. A merger of experimental sound poetry and ethnopoetics was the basis in the 1970s and 1980s of works composed by an approach that he was calling “total translation", most notably "The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell" translated from the Navajo language with a privileging of sonic effect alongside strict or literal meaning. Compositions such as these became centerpieces of Rothenberg's expanding performance repertory and underlie his critical writings on

1290-457: The rich narrative and poetic traditions of cultures all over the world. The development of ethnopoetics as a separate subfield of study was largely pioneered from the middle of the 20th century by anthropologists and linguists such as Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes. Both Tedlock and Hymes used ethnopoetic analysis to do justice to the artistic richness of Native American verbal art, and while they have disagreed on some analytic details, they agree on

1333-509: The twentieth century, anthologies became an important part of poetry publishing for a number of reasons. For English poetry , the Georgian poetry series was trend-setting; it showed the potential success of publishing an identifiable group of younger poets marked out as a 'generation'. It was followed by numerous collections from the 'stable' of some literary editor, or collated from a given publication, or labelled in some fashion as 'poems of

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1376-684: The two-volume anthology-assemblage Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry , and in 2000, with Steven Clay, A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing . Rothenberg published a new book of selected essays, Poetics & Polemics 1980–2005 , in 2008, and volume three of Poems for the Millennium , co-edited with Jeffrey C. Robinson as

1419-438: The words but silences, changes in loudness and tone of voice, the production of sound effects, and the use of gestures and props. . . . Ethnopoetics remains open to the creative side of performance, valuing features that may be rare or even unique to a particular artist or occasion. In other words, Tedlock argues that by visually representing oral performance features in the written texts, ethnopoetic methods more accurately convey

1462-486: The words of others and in [my] own words." In 1970 the first version of Rothenberg's selected poems appeared as Poems for the Game of Silence (2000), and soon after that he became one of the poets published regularly by New Directions . Provoked by his own ethnopoetic anthologies, he began, as he wrote of it, “to construct an ancestral poetry of my own – in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, & madmen.” The first work to emerge from that, both thematically and formally,

1505-545: The written page the unique aesthetic elements of individual cultures’ oral poetry and narrative performance traditions, or what folklorists would call their verbal lore. Classicist Steve Reece has attempted to envision how folklorists like Dennis Tedlock or Elizabeth Fine, if transported to an eighth-century BCE social gathering in Ionia where Homer was performing a version of the Odyssey , would transcribe that oral performance into

1548-492: The year'. Academic publishing also followed suit, with the continuing success of the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse encouraging other collections not limited to modern poetry. Not everyone approved. Robert Graves and Laura Riding published their Pamphlet Against Anthologies in 1928, arguing that they were based on commercial rather than artistic interests. The concept of 'modern verse'

1591-411: The ‘reason why’” storytellers use pauses in their oral performances (1999, 97–98). Hymes’s ethnopoetic theories focus on repetitions in the grammar and syntax of transcribed and translated texts that he suggest can still be analyzed and retranslated. For example, accordingly to folklorist Barre Toelken , the poetic beauty and power of Native American texts like “The Sun's Myth” have been restored “because

1634-504: Was Poland/1931 (1974), described by the poet David Meltzer as Rothenberg's “ surrealist Jewish vaudeville ”. Over the next two decades Rothenberg expanded this theme in works such as A Big Jewish Book and Khurbn & Other Poems , the latter an approach to holocaust writing, which had otherwise been no more than a subtext in Poland/1931 . Rothenberg also re-explored Native American themes in A Seneca Journal (1978), and

1677-462: Was based on the lost 10th Century Byzantine collection of Constantinus Cephalas, which in turn was based on older anthologies. In The Middle Ages, European collections of florilegia became popular, bringing together extracts from various Christian and pagan philosophical texts. These evolved into commonplace books and miscellanies , including proverbs, quotes, letters, poems and prayers. Songes and Sonettes , usually called Tottel's Miscellany ,

1720-474: Was fostered by the appearance of the phrase in titles such as the Faber & Faber anthology by Michael Roberts in 1936, and the very different William Butler Yeats Oxford Book of Modern Verse of the same year. In the 1960s The Mersey Sound anthology of Liverpool poets became a bestseller, plugging into the countercultural attitudes of teenagers. Since publishers generally found anthology publication

1763-483: Was the first of the great ballad collections, responsible for the ballad revival in English poetry that became a significant part of the Romantic movement. William Enfield 's The Speaker; Or, Miscellaneous Pieces was published in 1774 and was a mainstay of 18th Century schoolrooms. Important nineteenth century anthologies included Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861), Edward Arber 's Shakespeare Anthology (1899) and

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1806-548: Was the first printed anthology of English poetry. It was published by Richard Tottel in 1557 in London and ran to many editions in the sixteenth century. A widely read series of political anthologies, Poems on Affairs of State , began its publishing run in 1689, finishing in 1707. In Britain, one of the earliest national poetry anthologies to appear was The British Muse (1738), compiled by William Oldys . Thomas Percy 's influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765),

1849-402: Was to treat these large collections as deliberately constructed assemblages or collages , on the one hand, and as manifestos promulgating a complex and multiphasic view of poetry on the other. Speaking of their relation to his work as a whole, he later wrote of the anthology thus conceived as "an assemblage or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in

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