Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg by Michael Palmer

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg, poet, translator, performance artist, and anthologist passed away at the age of 92 on April 21, 2024. He wrote ninety books of poetry and essays. Jerry’s groundbreaking anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium. He created the field of ethnopoetics, the study and celebration of non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. 

Jerome “Jerry” Rothenberg (1931–2024)

At a celebration of Rothenberg’s life and work at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, poet Michael Palmer delivered a beautiful tribute to Jerry that I’m posting here in full:

Well, for Jerry, for Jerry and always for his wife, Diane Brodatz Rothenberg, where do we begin? When asked, Gertrude Stein once famously said, “We begin at the beginning, go on until the end, then stop,” or something close to that. Unfortunately, our limited time does not allow for such an approach, but I’ll try to briefly celebrate Jerry’s meaning to me personally across the years.

 

I remember that it was in the winter of 1963–64 that LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) and I went one evening to the Half Note on Spring Street in New York City to hear John Coltrane and his magnificent quartet during that period that Coltrane was first making his extended explorations on soprano sax. Two long sessions with one break, ending somewhere around 1:30 or 2 in the morning. Coltrane performing solos that went on forever but never too long. In an interview around that time, when asked about these solos, Coltrane said that he was “looking for the door.” It struck me that this was exactly what I was searching for, in an effort to find my way to an alternative life to that which had been proposed for me, a life in the company of poets and like-minded folk, a “new life” maybe such as Dante had once proposed in La Vita Nuova. And now I realize that LeRoi was searching as well, for a life beyond downtown bohemia that the Black Arts Movement would soon help make possible.

 

Which brings me to the many doors that Jerry opened for us in our effort to find a way toward something vital and new, some path not yet taken or even known. Jerry as neo-Dada performer, taking on the persona of Tristan Tzara, or Samy Rosenstock as he had been known before he too took an alternate path. Jerry as translator,  bringing parallel worlds into view, forging a dialogue between self and other, and self as other. Foregrounding cultures heretofore excluded by the usual institutional orthodoxies. Contact and multiple conversations, innovative and esoteric strains of song sounding across time. The project then continuing with his many groundbreaking and visionary anthologies that did no less than reconfigure the cultural map, redraw its vectors, and celebrate a range of poetic accomplishment that was at once atemporal and international, defying boundaries or limits or proscriptions, and erasing the conventional Anglo-American cultural timelines. These works by Jerry served and serve now as guides for those of us interested in erasing borders and eliminating border guards, and in coming to understand a visionary tradition in defiance of the warmongers and culture-mongers and profiteers.

 

And then I cannot help but emphasize the immediate, intense humanity that Jerry and Diane offered in their everyday lives, their generosity in countless matters and their commitment to deep fellow-feeling, what the arts fully committed to will bring to our sense of that company I mention above. A shared Cabaret Voltaire in the various ways we always try to reimagine it, ecstatic singers on the stage, good food and wine shared at table, yet never forgetful of the darker forces pulling us toward division and hatred of the other, that bigotry that never seems to wane throughout history, that war against the universal life of the imagination and creative growth.

 

Countless doors opened, no admission fee.

 

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. Palmer has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in 2021. In 2023, Nightboat Books brought out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook.

Michael Palmer

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writing Fiction about Real Historical Characters: Interview with Wesley Brown

This post features an interview with fiction writer Wesley Brown about his latest book, a dynamic novella about the jazz musician Miles Davis. See the end of this blog for Wesley’s full bio.

Author Wesley Brown. Photo by Brian Cornelius

Question: Your new book, Blue in Green, takes place during one day in the life of Miles Davis and his wife, the dancer Frances Taylor. How did you pick that particular time frame for the setting?

Wesley Brown: I wanted to focus on the assault on Miles Davis by police in front of the New York nightclub Birdland on the evening of August 25, 1959. Limiting the action within that time frame was indicative of the compression of Miles’s approach to playing.

 

Q. The period of the novella, the late 1950s, was a sort of high point for jazz and popular culture in the USA, with such music greats as Miles, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne, who all make cameo appearances in your book; and dancers like Katherine Dunham, Fred Astaire, and Cyd Charisse, who also figure in Blue in Green. What about that period attracted you as a setting for the book?

 

WB: The late 1950s were a transitional moment in jazz. Miles had taken the modal expression within jazz as far as he could take and was about to move on to his next musical challenge. And this period ushered in the emergence of figures like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Q. When you have a work of fiction with a very tight timeframe, like this one, what types of moments lend themselves to adding some backstory? For example, there are some fascinating stories in your book about the life of Miles’ wife, Frances Taylor, who was a renowned dancer in her own right. How did you decide where to insert material that takes place earlier in time?

WB: Since the novella focuses on memory, I was interested in the events triggered by Miles’ beating, which were related to his beginnings and the pivotal experiences in his evolution as a musician. It is much the same for Frances. The difference is that she looks back on the trajectory of her artistry as a dancer that she gave up to be with Miles.

 

Q. What were the challenges of writing fiction about actual historical personages whose life stories are known to many readers?

 

WB: The challenges were not to focus on the facts of their careers that were well known or could be found in books, but to try and get in touch with their emotional lives which I could only discover through imagining them.

Q. One of my favorite passages occurs when we are inside the thoughts of Miles Davis while his band is playing the song, “If I Were a Bell.” How did you go about imagining what Miles Davis might have been experiencing while he was in the middle of playing a number?

 

WB: Of course, I couldn’t know what Miles was actually experiencing by playing, “If I Were a Bell.” So, I attempted to use the lyrics of the song as a way to imagine how he might experience them. 

Frances Taylor and Miles Davis

Q. The novella also deals with the complex relationship between Miles Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor. How did you approach that material, given that it shows a side of Miles that is sometimes extremely negative?

WB: I knew about Miles’s violence against Frances from interviews and books. But again, I tried to get underneath what they didn’t reveal by imagining the effects of his emotional and physical abuse had on both of them.

 

Q. There’s a curious section in the book where Miles Davis sees the film Some Like It Hot, and he reflects on gender, thinking that Tony Curtis in drag is a sexier woman than Marilyn Monroe in the film (some of us might beg to differ about that!). Is that section meant to tell us something about Miles, or was that Wesley Brown riffing?

 

WB: As the character of Miles says in that section, Monroe was a male fantasy of hyper, female sexuality that she enabled. I was riffing on that. But Miles was attracted to the androgyny of figures like Curtis and Elvis.  One need only look at his gravitation toward Prince.

Wesley Brown’s previously published novels are Darktown Strutters, Tragic Magic, and Push Comes to Shove. He also wrote the plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, and Life During Wartime. Brown coedited the multicultural anthologies Visions of America and Imagining America and edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. With Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown co-wrote the screenplay for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 3: Lament as Protest—Sekou Sundiata's "Blink Your Eyes"

In this blog I’d like to talk about the side of lament that overlaps with protest. I’m going to focus on the poem “Blink Your Eyes” by Sekou Sundiata. You can see a video of Sekou Sundiata performing the poem here.

Sekou Sundiata more or less invented the style of reciting that became one of the staples of the poetry slam: a sort of fast-talking, musical delivery where the poet memorizes and performs the poem on stage, saying the words as quickly as possible. Sekou was not only the originator of this form, he was one of the most accomplished practitioners of it. He didn’t just rush through a poem, though. He sped up and slowed down his delivery based on the meaning of the words, and used the microphone in creative ways to achieve certain effects.

Sekou Sundiata (1948–2007)

Sekou Sundiata was born in New York City in 1948 and grew up in housing projects in Harlem. He preferred to record his poems rather than publish them. Sekou often performed with a back-up band. All his life he dealt with serious health issues, ranging from cancer to a kidney transplant to breaking his neck in a car accident. He died in 2007 at the age of 58, a terrible loss for poetry.

Sekou Sundiata wrote “Blink Your Eyes” in the mid-1990s, but the topic is all-too current today—an African American male is stopped by a police officer with no grounds. The poem is strongly resonant in the wake of the police shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati; William Chapman in Portsmouth, Virginia; Akai Gurley in Brooklyn—tragically, the list goes on and on.

The diction and tone of Sekou’s poem are different from pure lamentation. “Blink Your Eyes” is also a protest. The mood is angry, expressing outrage at racial profiling by police officers. Inherent in possibly all lamentation is a note of protest against the way things are. A lament doesn’t have to be a call to action, though. But a lament is a call of some kind, even if it’s just a call to mourn. When does a work of literature become more of a protest and less of a lament? To me, lament focuses on the sense of loss, while protest underlines the urgency to remedy the situation that is creating the loss.

In “Blink Your Eyes,” Sekou uses rhyme, cadence, and techniques of poetry that in other contexts might seem corny, but here they add to the soul of the poem and provide important emphasis.

There is a marked difference between how he recites the poem and how it appears on the page. To see the text of the poem, view this webpage. Sekou doesn’t recite the words in the same order they appear on the page. He repeats words that aren’t repeated on the page. Why? There is a strong element of improvisation in his performance technique, an element drawn from jazz. The written text of a poem for Sekou Sundiata was like a chart for a musician—a guide to performing but not a hardened rule about how each note was meant to be played.

At times in the poem Sekou Sundiata barely seems to pause to take a breath. He used a technique called circular breathing. Australian aborigines developed this method to play sustained notes on the didgeridoo. Sekou studied circular breathing and created a similar technique to recite long sequences of poetry without stopping. He also knew how to pause at the right moment, though, to put weight on the meaning of a particular phrase, for instance, the ironic line, “Somebody had to stop you.”

There’s a beautiful video interview with Sekou Sundiata done by E. Ethelbert Miller that you can watch here where Sekou talks about his influences from Amiri Baraka to the black church, performance and poetry, writing and political activism, and combining poetry and music. One of the most profound moments in the interview is when Sekou Sundiata discusses how to know when a poem is finished, referencing a John Coltrane solo. 

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry