Jerome Rothenberg (2) (1931–)

Yes, after decades of having this bk laying around unread, I finally finished it yesterday. As soon as I started reading it again I cd barely wait to finish it so that I cd write: THIS BK IS THE POETRY COMPILATION EQUIVALENT OF THE HISTORY BK ENTITLED "A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES" (by Howard Zinn). For that matter, it's quite possible that the earlier comps edited by Jerome Rothenberg entitled "Technicians of the Sacred" & "Shaking the Pumpkin" also qualify.

I tend to mainly collect poetry collections that I think embody remarkable scholarliness & this one takes the cake & runs w/ it thru the wildflowers (or something). The apparent diversity of the comp really just highlights the unifying visonary nature of the poetry presented. The title is taken from a William Blake poem & the editors do a very, very impressive job of choosing material that takes Blake to the inner & outer limits (& absence thereof).

There's even a Pittsburgh poet that I've never heard of called Haniel Long. & there's a Clayton Eshleman "Ode to Reich" (as in Wilhelm Reich) that references André´Breton's "Ode to Fourier" wch I've mentioned elsewhere.

The bk has an introduction followed by a section called "RE BEGINNINGS"; followed by another called "MAP ONE: ORIGINS"; then "A BOOK OF RITES & NAMINGS" wch is subdivided into "Definitions & Namings", "Rites & Events", & "Sound Poems & Incantations"; then: "MAP TWO: LOSSES"; "A BOOK OF HISTORIES"; "MAP THREE: VISIONS" subdivided into "Magic & Vision" & "Sacred Plants"; "A BOOK OF MUSIC"; "MAP FOUR: RENEWALS" subdivided into "Image-Making" & "Symposium of the Whole"; ending w/ "A BOOK OF CHANGES".

Interspersed are scholarly editorial notes putting things in historical context, giving critical commentary that helps tie the poems together into the theme of the section they're in, etc.. The overall FEEL of this bk is of humans trying to work it all out & to transcend, TRANSCEND thru a variety of inspired means.

… (més)

Prefaced by Mallarmé’s famous dictum that ‘everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book,’ this spirited collection demonstrates the reverse as well: everything in the book exists in order to end up in the world. Edited in 1982 by Jerome Rothenberg, the greatest American anthologist of the postwar years, and his associate, anthropologist and translator David Guss, The Book, Spiritual Instrument pushes the envelope not only on what books contain but also on what they are. Rothenberg and company read the book as metaphor for aesthetic framing devices, but they also read frames as metaphoric books. In a series of exemplary essays on, and demonstrations of, what might be called the ethnopoetics of the book, books from a wide range of cultural traditions are portrayed as radical extenders of form rather than neutral vessels of content. The result is a vision of books as laboratories for the invention and performance of perceptual systems: new worlds carved out of the wilderness of human thought and language.”
–Charles Bernstein… (més)