Jerome Rothenberg: Essays by him and about his work, Selections from his Poems, the topic of Ethnopoetics, selections from SHAKING THE PUMPKIN, and more.

Screen Shot 2020-03-24 at 11.13.48 PM Course Map

    1. Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
    2. Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
    3. The Library
    4. Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
    5. Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video. 
    6. The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
    7. Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
    8. Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry 
    9. Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
    10. Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
    11. Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
    12. Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
    13. Week Eight Materials:  The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
    14. RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE

Screen Shot 2020-03-24 at 11.13.48 PM

February 21, 2020 - some photographs - 1 (1)

Jerome Rothenberg at the Kelly Writers House on September 10, 2015.

We will be sending questions to Jerome Rothenberg, and closing our section on his work, moving on entirely to contemporary poems written in English(es). This page will remain live as a resource for you going forward.

For now, feel free to wander around through this material, especially if there’s something new you are curious about and haven’t yet discussed in the forums. I will mark with a ****** the works that I think you MUST engage.

******Ethnopoetics & (Human) Poetics Author(s)- Jerome Rothenberg Source- Conjunctions, No. 6 (1984) (text)


Rothenberg Biography and Poems  at poetryfoundation.org


******Preface (1971) to SHAKING THE PUMPKIN by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

Ethnopoetics – Companion to 20th C Poetry (text)

OralPoetry. The_Princeton_Encyclopedia_of_Poetry_and_Poetics_F…_—-_(Pg_1017–1020) (text)

EthnopoeticsThe_Princeton_Encyclopedia_of_Poetry_and_Poetics_F…_—-_(Pg_502–503) (text)

And I suggest as a complement to Ethnopoetics and (Human) Poetics that you might want to go to the webpage on Jacket2 assembled from materials gathered when and where the photo above was taken. https://jacket2.org/podcasts/jerome-rothenberg-interviewed. This page contains a link to a lively discussion, described as here: “On September 10, 2015, Jerome Rothenberg re-visited the Kelly Writers House to give an evening reading. A few hours earlier, Ariel Resnikoff and Al Filreis met Rothenberg in the Wexler Studio for an extended interview/conversation that ranged across many epochs, poetic modes, and topics. Among them: the new young German poets of the mid- to late 1950s; the world of Jewish mystics Rothenberg discovered as a young poet; his time as a Masters student studying Dickinson and Whitman with Austin Warren at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s; “the four great Jewish objectivist poets”; Armand Schwerner; somewhat sudden access to major commercial presses for his anthologies in the late 1960s; Robert Duncan’s recommendation of Gershom Scholem; Paul Celan; and Rothenberg’s forays into the problem of representing the unsayable of genocide.”

 

Screen Shot 2020-02-02 at 7.22.29 PM


******Magic Words and More More More Magic Words Inuit (text)

******Rothenberg’s Commentary on Magic Words and More More More Magic Words (text)

(One of us felt that the poems from Rothenberg were labor, lacking in the beauty one finds in poetry. I think that’s a valid point as I did pick mostly the most “disorienting” poems on the page, a decision made by the tranlators of those poems. These following poems are not “Total Translations” but I think they do convey a sense of well-being and a full moon…so here are some poems you might find pleasing, a completely reasonable desire.) from SHAKING THE PUMPKIN, the poems I’ve picked are (in one file the poems, in a second file the notes):

poem to ease birth and other poems (text)|

| NOTES on poem to ease birth and other poems  (text)

1.poem to ease birth (Aztec), 2. Eskimo songs about People & Animals, 3. Conversations in Mayan, 4. Mud Events, 5. Gift Event, 6. Tepehua Thought-Songs, 7. what happened to a young man in a place where he turned into water, 8. four poems by Ray Young Bear,       9. Three Ghost Dance Songs.

*******excerpt -ted-chiang-the-truth-of-fact-the-truth-of-feeling  A fictionalized version of an encounter between a boy from an oral culture who learns writing and reading from a missionary.(text)


THE HORSE SONGS ARE EXTREMELY COMPLEX AND DIFFICULT __ YOU MAY WANT TO SAVE THEM FOR ANOTHER TIME WHEN YOU CAN FULLY FOCUS ON THEM.

*****THIS IS NECESSARY TO READ BEFORE TACKLING THE HORSE SONGS: Total Translation: An Experiment in the Translation of American Indian Poetry  by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

THE HORSE SONGS ARE VERY DIFFICULT TO MANAGE IN THEIR COMPLEXITY — ALTHOUGH I MARKED THEM WITH A ****** YOU CAN ALSO SAVE THEM FOR ANOTHER TIME!!!!!

*****Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell Navajo  (text)

*****Horse SongsJerome Rothenberg(1977). Audio recording of vocal performance.  On this tape are multi-track recordings of Rothenberg singing his “total translations” based on some of the 17 “Horse Songs” in the blessingway of Frank Mitchell, a Navajo from Chinle, Arizona who lived from 1881 to 1967

*****The 13th Horse Song of Frank Mitchell (4:53): MP3

*****from The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version (3:30): MP3

Horse Songs (four voices, 1978)

    1. Part One (24:20): MP3
    2. Part Two (13:22): MP3.
    3. Horse Songs & Other Soundings (S Press, 1975)

          1. Horse Songs I (7:47): MP3
          2. Horse Songs X (4:25): MP3
          3. Horse Songs XI (4:09): MP3
          4. Horse Songs XII (5:57): MP3
          5. Horse Songs XIII (5:44): MP3

*****Rothenberg’s Commentary on Horse Songs (text)


from Ceremony of Sending- A Simultaneity for Twenty Choruses Osage Barbara Tedlock’s version, after Francis La Flesche (text)

Rothenberg’s Commentary on Ceremony of Sending (text)


15 Flower World Variations  Yaqui. Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Rothenberg’s Commentary on Five Flower World Variations

https://sinchi-foundation.com/news/inside-the-flower-world-of-the-yaqui-deer-dance-indigenous-and-christian-spirituality-go-hand-in-hand/

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/jar.48.2.3630407http://janestclair.net/enchanted-yaqui-worlds/

https://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lekyyq.htm

http://worldartswest.org/main/discipline.asp?i=25

http://territorymagazine.com/territory/2016/3/26/a-family-tradition-yaqui-easter

https://www.brink.com/wonder/yaqui-easter/


banner-5******Below is the beginning of the 12 Songs to Welcome the Society of Mystic Animals.

Shaking the Pumpkin – The Society of the Mystic Animals. The full text – p. 13 – 37

February 21, 2020 - some photographs - 8 (1)February 21, 2020 - some photographs - 1 (3)February 21, 2020 - some photographs - 2 (1)February 21, 2020 - some photographs - 10 (1)

******Rothenberg’s Commentary on Shaking the Pumpkin – Society of the Mystic Animals  (text)


Below is A Song from Red Ant Way

Screen Shot 2020-01-12 at 12.47.26 AM

Rothenberg’s Commentary on Red Ant Way (text)

SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b-1000x576


The Flight of Quetzalcoatl Aztec. Translated by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

From A Book of Events . edited & arranged by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

Sweat-House Ritual 1 Omaha English Version by Jerome Rothenberg from Alice Fletch and Francis LaFlesche (text)

 

  1. Screen Shot 2020-02-19 at 3.25.14 PM Screen Shot 2020-02-19 at 3.25.25 PM

Link back to our ModPo Group page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/discussions/forums/63bK9W4YEeauRRJJoih4XQ/threads/W-mCBOWFQDipggTlhWA41A?sort=createdAtDesc


I’d like us to not only think about Rothenberg’s “translations” from SHAKING THE PUMPKIN but his own works also. Both his own poems and some of the ethnopoetic work he did with Hebrew, Jewish, and Yiddish tradition.

We want to be sure to be familiar with some of the work from Poland/1931, including

******”The Wedding” and ******”Cokboy”

The Wedding

https://jacket2.org/commentary/jerome-rothenberg-five-translationsversions-poland1931-wedding (text)

Poland1931BroadsideTheWedding1Poland1931BroadsideTheWedding2

from Poland/1931 ‘The Wedding,’ Yiddish translation by Amos Schauss (0:59): MP3from Poland/1931 ‘The Wedding’ (2:27): MP3

Reading at Wake Forest University, NC, March 27, 2018

Reading “Poland / 1931” in Yiddish and English

Video by Herman Rappaport.

from Poland/1931 ‘The Wedding,’ music by Bertram Turetzky (3:05): MP3

******Cokboy by Jerome Rothenberg from his collection POLAND 1931 (text)

Listen to Jerome Rothenberg read “Cokboy #1” and “Cokboy #2”

    1. Cokboy: Part One (7:03): MP3
    2. Cokboy: Part Two (7:08): MP3

Please go, when you have time, to the Rothenberg PennSound page and do a bit of further exploring around on your own. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Rothenberg.php

Of particular significance:

******from Poland/1931 (1974)

    1. the Wedding (Yiddish translation by Amos Schauss) (1:38): MP3
    2. the Wedding (2:16): MP3
    3. the Beadle’s Testimony (2:00): MP3
    4. the Student’s Testimony (6:15): MP3

for “The Wedding” see “Five Translations of “The Wedding” (text)

the Beadle’s Testimony and the Student’s Testimony by Jerome Rothenberg (text) 

from A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present (1977)

3 poems  ( Yiddish, traditional) LULLABY A STORY, (Yiddish, 20th century); THE EVIL EYE (THE GOOD EYE) EINEHORE; (German & Hebrew, 14th century) A POEM TO EASE CHILDBIRTH

Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 6.32.10 AM

A Book of Writings—(Hebrew, 10th century B.c.) THE GEZER CALENDAR; ( Canaanite/Hebrew, before 13th century B.c.) YHVH’S BATTLE WITH THE SERPENT; (Hebrew, Bible, 12th/ 11th century B.c.) THE SONG OF DEBORAH; (Hebrew, Bible, c. 10th century B.c.) From THE SONG OF SONGS; ( Samaritan Arabic, c. 16th century) From MOLAD MOSHER “The Birth of Moses”

Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 7.28.21 AM

Book of Powers—Latin, from Hebrew/Greek, c. 100 A.I>.) THE FIRST’, THE LAST’ “A Poem of Ezra”;(Hebrew, c. 3rd century A..D.); Edmond 1alxs (French, b. 1912) From ELYA;  Moses de Leon (Aramaic, c. 1240-130S) “The Names”; Naftali Bacharach (Hebrew, 17th century) A POEM FOR THE SEFIROT AS A WHEEL OF LIGHT

Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 6.47.00 AM

Song for the Shekinah on the Feast of the Sabbath (by Isaac Luria, trans. Rothenberg) (text)

Song for the Shekinah on the Feast of the Sabbath (by Isaac Luria, trans. Rothenberg) (3:27): MP3

from Poland/1931 (1974)

    1. Esther K. Comes to America: 1931 (4:40): MP3
    2. Esther K Comes to America by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

******from Khurbn & Other Poems (1989)

  1. ******excerpts from Pre-Face and other introductory comments (4:44): MP3
  2. ******In the Dark Word, Khurbn (0:34): MP3
  3. ******Dos Oysleydikn (the Emptying) (2:52): MP3
  4. ******Dos Geshray (the Scream) (2:43): MP3
  5. ******poetry and Treblinka (6:50): MP3
  6. ******Jewish identity (5:01): MP3
  7. ******Jewish dream (7:57): MP3

******Preface to Khurbn by Jerome Rothenberg(1989) by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

******”In the Dark Word, Khurbn” by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

******Dos Oysleydikn (The Emptying) by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

******Dos Gesray – The Scream by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

PoemTalk Podcast #121, Discussing Jerome Rothenberg’s “Galician Nights” and “Poland/1931”, feat. Jake Marmer, Frank London, and Maria Damon Listen to the complete recording and read program notes for the episode at Jacket2.

“Galician Nights” by Jerome Rothenberg

Poland / 1931″ by Jerome Rothenberg

Appearing on Cross-Cultural Poetics #13 (hosted by Leonard Schwartz), 2003. Complete program (27:45):MP3

Rothenberg & the Klezmatics, 2002 Galician Nights, 2002 (6:26):  MP3

LINEbreak interview with Charles Bernstein (1996) Complete recording and more info here.

  1. Full program (49:56): MP3RealAudio
  2. Jerome performs two selections from his poem “That Dada Strain” (3:20): RealAudio
  3. Jerome enacts a “total translation” of a Navaho horse blessing from The Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell (3:40): RealAudio
  4. Jerome reads “The Scream” from Khurbn (2:20): RealAudio

“That Dada Strain”by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

Dos Gesray (The Scream) by Jerome Rothenberg (text)

In this program Jerome discusses the relationship between Ethnopoetics and Multiculturalism and talks about the concept of “total translation.” His program was recorded in the Music Department of SUNY Buffalo in 1996.

Lecture on oral performance at the University at Buffalo, April 17, 1980

      • Side A (1:02:32) MP3
      • Side B (37:51) MP3

Courtesy of The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Horse Songs (four voices, 1978)

      1. Part One (24:20): MP3
      2. Part Two (13:22): MP3

Multitrack recording with Jean-Charles Francois, percussion, and Bertram Turetzky, bass, circa 1975, That Dada Strain

Horse Songs & Other Soundings (S Press, 1975)

      1. Horse Songs I (7:47): MP3
      2. Horse Songs X (4:25): MP3
      3. Horse Songs XI (4:09): MP3
      4. Horse Songs XII (5:57): MP3
      5. Horse Songs XIII (5:44): MP3
      6. Salamanca a Prophecy (Seneca Journal) (0:26): MP3
      7. Shaking the Pumpkin – opening songs (13:26): MP3
      8. Shaking the Pumpkin & Seneca Journal (3:08): MP3
      9. Seneca Journal 1 (10:11): MP3

Rothenberg discusses “Horse Songs” and “total translation” at UBUWEB.

Reading Navajo Songs at the University of Warwick, November 4, 1971

Courtesy of University of Warwick.

Complete recording (55:39): MP3

Reading Poland/1931 at the University of Warwick, 1970s (Date Unknown)

Complete recording (36:06): MP3

Courtesy of the University of Warwick.

Private Reading and Translation of Primitive Poetry for Nathaniel Tarn, University at Buffalo, July 4, 1969

Complete recording (50:06): MP3

Link back to our ModPo Group page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/discussions/forums/63bK9W4YEeauRRJJoih4XQ/threads/W-mCBOWFQDipggTlhWA41A?sort=createdAtDesc

THIS COMPLETES THE ROTHENBERG TEXT AND AUDIO PORTION OF THE PAGE.

BELOW ARE SOME SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS THAT MIGHT GIVE YOU FURTHER PERSPECTIVES

What could it mean to mourn? Notes on and towards a radical politics of loss and grieving David K. Langstaff

The Language of Shamans- Jerome Rothenberg’s Contribution to American Indian Literature Author(s)- H. S. McALLISTER]

maxresdefault

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 

LANGUAGE_THOUGHT_and_REALITY_Benjamin Whorf

The Whorf Hypothesis as a Critique of Western Science and Technology Author(s)- Peter C. Rollins

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics

More on Rothenberg

A_Re-Vision_of_Jerome_Rothenbergs_Poetry

Twentieth-Century_Experiments_in_Form

In Vain I Tried to Tell You_ Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics – PDF Free Download

The corn people have a song too. It is very good- On Beauty, Truth, and Goodness Author(s)- J. EDWARD CHAMBERLIN

 

Link back to our ModPo Group page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/discussions/forums/63bK9W4YEeauRRJJoih4XQ/threads/W-mCBOWFQDipggTlhWA41A?sort=createdAtDesc


Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 3.05.24 AM

 Course Map

    1. Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
    2. Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
    3. The Library
    4. Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
    5. Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video. 
    6. The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
    7. Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
    8. Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry 
    9. Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
    10. Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
    11. Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
    12. Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
    13. Week Eight Materials:  The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
    14. RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE

Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 3.05.24 AM