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 Prompt: Surrealist Proverbs

I’ve been leafing through John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations: Poetry, part of a monumental two-volume series of Ashbery’s translation work edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie. One of my favorite sections is called “The Original Judgment,” (as opposed to the Last Judgment?) a collection of sentences that I can only call surrealist proverbs. These wild aphorisms were a collaboration by André Breton and Paul Eluard, the French surrealist poets. 

Paul Eluard and André Breton, photographed by Man Ray

Here are a few of my favorites from Breton and Eluard’s text:

Put order in its place, disturb the stones of the road.

Form your eyes by closing them.

Sing the vast pity of monsters.

Speak according to the madness that has seduced you.

When they ask to see the inside of your hand, show them the undiscovered planets in the sky.

Do me the favor of entering and leaving on tiptoe.

Adjust your gait to that of the storms.

Perform miracles so as to deny them.

Write the imperishable in sand.

Never wait for yourself.

[translations © 2014 by John Ashbery]

I’ve been trying to think of what these remarkable sentences have in common. In other words, how do you create a surrealist proverb? First of all, the verbs are almost all imperatives or commands: put, write, sing, speak, etc. Proverbs often take this form: “Waste not, want not,” for instance. Breton and Eluard’s sentences frequently involve a jagged juxtaposition of opposites, as in “Adjust your gait to that of the storms.” Clearly, storms don’t really have a gait, so the authors have fused together two terms that normally aren’t combined, one of the key techniques of surrealism. The authors also assume a tone as if they are speaking the obvious—pure common sense—but what they say is only meaningful in the most Daffy Duck way: “Never wait for yourself.” Literally, we can’t wait for ourselves, but figuratively, we do that all the time, afraid to keep pace with our desires and impulses.

So, how would you go about writing a surrealist proverb? Some of these statements begin with a phrase that is perfectly logical: “Never wait for…” or “Sing…” or “Write the…” Start off with a phrase or structure that could have a rational outcome, but then twist the sentence into a Moebius strip that ends up somewhere completely unexpected.

Don’t think too much about how the sentence is going to turn out. Allow the surrealist spontaneity of your fingers to outpace your rational mind. Make a fanning generalization about something incredibly pinpoint.

Begin with what seems like a rational structure, something a “wise” elder would tell a young whippersnapper, and then suddenly flip it the way a flying saucer moves after take off, right as it hits warp speed. 

Here are a couple of my own takes on this form:

Be the writer your fingers want to be.

Take no chances, and you will taste no clouds.

Promote asymmetry in all that you touch.

I think you could also alter this form slightly and make the sentence a question. Instead of a surrealist proverb, a surrealist koan:

What role will you play in the inevitable fireworks?

If you'd like to leave your own surrealist proverb here, please add it as a comment. 

For a comprehensive guide to surrealist techniques in the visual arts, see Angela Latchkey’s website.

Zack Rogow is the cotranslator of André Breton’s Earthlight, selected poems from the first half of his career, reprinted in a bilingual edition by Black Widow Press. He also translated Breton’s Arcanum 17. 

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

Other recent posts on writing topics:

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