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

The Problem of the Unsympathetic Main Character

Quick!—think of a novel, movie, or play with an unsympathetic main character. It’s not easy, is it? There aren’t many stories that fall into that category. Why? I think humans are hard-wired to identify with characters, and it’s difficult to bond with a protagonist who is fundamentally unlikeable or evil. We have a fascination with evil, which is what makes villains such interesting folks, but as protagonists, villains or unsympathetic characters don’t work very well. 

One example:

 

Even among fans of Charles Dickens, very few have ever read Barnaby Rudge.

This novel includes some of Dickens’ most lyrical writing and a fascinating historical setting, but it’s never been a favorite. I think part of the reason is that the main character, Barnaby, fights with deadly fierceness on the wrong side of a cause. Bad actors manipulate Barnaby to take a leading role in the anti-Catholic riots in London in 1780. Although Barnaby is sympathetic because he is developmentally delayed, he ultimately has a negative impact. His story hasn’t won many readers.

I’m having difficulty finding other examples, because authors are smart enough to realize that unsympathetic main characters aren’t very popular. One of the great things about stories is that they allow us to empathize with another person’s struggles. Empathy is not only a fundamental human trait, it is also a pleasure. When a writer denies a reader that enjoyment, the reader feels thwarted and even neglected.

 

I suppose one could argue that Rodion Raskolnikov of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is an unsympathetic main character. Raskolnikov commits a cruel and unpardonable crime. But Raskolnikov feels great anguish for his sins. He ultimately repents and finds a spiritual love with Sonya. By the novel’s end, Raskolnikov’s suffering and change of heart have earned him some of the reader’s sympathy. The same is true of Dickens’ miser Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

 

But there are certain types of unsympathetic main characters who do manage to evoke a positive response in a reader or audience. Among male characters, a domineering patriarch can sometimes be sympathetic if that person has overcome great obstacles or worked toward admirable goals. In August Wilson’s play Fences, for instance, the main character Troy, a garbage collector, is a cold and judgmental father. He’s also an unfaithful husband who fathers a child out of wedlock, despite having a devoted wife. But Troy is partly sympathetic because he’s fighting for his dignity. Troy has suffered racial discrimination, and we admire his determination to advance out of the role of garbage collector to become the first Black truck driver working for the city.

 

Another somewhat sympathetic dominating male is The General in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. The General is an impossibly violent and corrupt dictator, but the reader has to admire the stubborn strength he shows in defying neocolonial domination. Perhaps the exaggerated proportions of the crimes The General commits allow the reader to overlook some of the faults of this strange protagonist.

 

Among female characters, one type of unsympathetic character who manages to win over the audience is the femme fatale.

Barbara Stanwick’s most famous femme fatale role

A femme fatale often acts in amoral and vicious ways, but a moviegoer has to admire her beauty, her sensuality, and her scheming cleverness. If we never completely like the femme fatale, we still identify with her ability to live a kind of freedom that few achieve, male or female.

 

All in all, I would not recommend building a plot with an unsympathetic main character. If you do head down that curvy and cobblestoned street, I would suggest placing some very sympathetic characters along the way, in order to feed that terribly human impulse to identify.

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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

Delicious Quotes from Middlemarch by George Eliot—Aphorisms and the Novel

Novelists have always told stories, but in the nineteenth century, they also sometimes took a step outside the narrative to make more general observations about human nature and experience. In these aphorisms, the writer commented on the action, but also served up delicious philosophical treats. There’s something very modern about that. A novel was not just an impersonal recounting, but an intimate conversation between the writer and the reader, with engaging side comments.

There’s probably no fiction writer better at these asides than George Eliot.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880)

Eliot displayed that gift at its best in her novel, Middlemarch, the tale of a brilliant young woman in provincial England who marries too early a stuffy clergyman very much her senior. Her husband views his wife’s intellect as a hindrance to her being his unquestioning disciple.

Here are some of my favorites of George Eliot’s aphorisms in her masterpiece, in the order in which they appear. I’ve also included a few lines of dialogue that I particular love:

 

“…very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”

 

“A sense of contributing to form the world’s opinion makes conversation particularly cheerful...”

 

“I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes.”

 

“A man may, from various motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would be gratified that nobody missed him.”

 

“...our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.”

 

“...the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

 

“...we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.”

 

“...what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

 

“…it is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing one’s self better than others and never to have it noticed…”

 

“…it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.”

[That impractical scheme] “…was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.”

 

“But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors.”

 

“‘I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things. Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion.’”

 

“Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.”

 

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

 

“…to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?”

 

“…we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.”

 

“It’s no use being wise for other people.”

 

“It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find out how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.”

 

“A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow.”

 

“I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone else so well, and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

 

“…husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

 

One of my very favorite George Eliot aphorism is the closing sentence of Middlemarch. I won’t spoil the surprise by quoting it.

 

It’s interesting that novelists, for the most part, no longer break away from the story to make these parenthetical, general comments. For a writer to tell us these days what to conclude from the events of the plot would feel too directive, almost manipulative—not to mention quaint. In some ways, that’s a loss, because those asides were more than just generalizations, they were a chance for an author to let another facet of their talent shine, the ability to sum up human nature and life beyond the specifics of one individual story.

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

Interview with Molly Giles about Her Memoir, Life Span

Molly Giles is the award-winning author of five collections of short stories, including Rough Translations, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her first novel, Iron Shoes, was released in 2000, and twenty-three years later, she published the sequel, The Home for Unwed Husbands. This interview is about her engaging and moving memoir, Life Span.

Molly Giles, photo by Ralph Brott

Zack Rogow: As someone with a long and celebrated career as a fiction writer, what motivated you to switch to nonfiction for your memoir Life Span?

Molly Giles: I had jotted down a few childhood memories with the intention of developing them into short stories, but then I got lazy; I thought, why go to all the bother of inventing things? Why not just say what actually happened? So much easier!

 

Q. The structure of this book is not like any other memoir I’ve ever read. How would you describe it?

 

A. Life Span is a memoir composed of flash fictions stitched together year by year, starting in 1945 and ending in 2023. Each short episode happens on, near, or under the Golden Gate Bridge or alludes to the bridge through a memory, allusion, or image of some sort.

 

Q. At what point in your writing process did you decide on that structure?

 

A. Early on. It just seemed right. Assembling the pieces into an actual book did not occur to me for a long time, though—that was a suggestion put forth by a writer friend I trust.

Q. What inspired you to mention the Golden Gate Bridge in each segment of the memoir? Were you at all influenced by Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” or Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”? 

A. Sadly, no—I love Hokusai’s prints. Although I admire Wallace Stevens hugely, I can’t honestly say I understand him. And I’m not sure I was “inspired” by the Golden Gate Bridge. It was always just there. I was born in San Francisco and have lived in the Bay Area all my life. (Although I taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas for fourteen years, I returned to my home in West Marin every summer and Christmas holiday during those years.) The bridge has been my steady beacon, companion, and friend throughout my life; I simply love it.

Q. The sense of humor in this book is winning, but at the same time, it has a dark tinge. Often, terrible things end up being funny. For example, when the author’s second child Rachel is born, the older daughter Gretchen is jealous and absolutely refuses to say her baby sister’s name when her mother prompts her:  

“Can you say Rachel?”

Gretchen plugs her thumb into her mouth and closes her eyes. No. She cannot say Rachel. Will not. Should not be asked to.

Why do you think some of the episodes about the most difficult interactions end up being humorous?

 

A. I’ll probably misquote him, but Bukowski once pointed out that nothing is funnier than the truth.

 

Q. Many of the stories or entries in this book are only a page and a half, but they are extremely moving, such as the one about the wife having a dream where she tells a stranger to kill her husband. How does a writer create deep emotion with few words?

 

A. By cutting. You have to pare and pare to get to the heart. Then you have to be careful not to stab the heart. You have to know when to stop. One of the most frustrating things about trying to teach creative writing, as I did try for 35 years, is that some things, like this, cannot be taught. They have to be learned.

 

Q. There’s a lot of tragedy and betrayal in this book, and yet the tone is mostly light rather than grim. How did you manage that?

 

A. Being a memoir, the book is about me, and my life. And though I don’t take myself too seriously, I do love my life.

 

Q. In the end, what were the gains and losses for you in using such a particular and unusual structure? Did the shortness of each vignette challenge you, or restrict you, or both?

 

A. Neither. I never felt challenged or restricted by the brevity of the pieces—I felt freed. It helped me zero in on what I wanted to say. I like to overwrite and then cut back. I was constricted by my decision to only include incidents relating to the Golden Gate Bridge, however—I had to leave out the entire East Bay!

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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

Tim Hunt Guest Blog: What the Poem Gives Us Through Writing It

The following blog is a wonderful guest post from poet and Professor Emeritus Tim Hunt.

Poet Tim Hunt

Poetry readings often end with the host inviting questions, and after an awkward pause, someone asks the reader or readers about their writing process. Some of us, it turns out, revise diligently, others less so or not at all. And some of us write at a set time in a specific place like reciting morning prayers or punching a time clock, while others wait for the lightning strike of inspiration, then scribble the gift to paper as the thunder fades away. Well, as my uncles in the California hill country would advise when I was a boy: There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and it seems that poetry can, just like that figurative cat, be skinned more ways than one.

Looking back, I realize I should have thought to ask my uncles: Why skin a cat? And with poetry, too, there’s a prior question: Why write it? Maybe we skip this question because we believe we already know the answer. We write to express ourselves. Or because we have something to say. These responses share an assumption. In both, the writer has something prior to the poem and gives it to the poem—crafting, encoding, and decorating the gift—then offering it to the reader. The trick, it seems, is to have something worthwhile enough to justify shaping it into a poem. But maybe there’s another answer. Perhaps we write to discover through the writing of the poem. Perhaps we write for the gift the poem might give us through the writing of it. As a corollary, we also write for the gift the poem might give the reader through the reading of it.

In William Stafford’s often anthologized poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” the poem’s speaker comes around a blind curve on a mountain road where he stops to roll a dead deer into a canyon because “that road is narrow: to swerve might make more dead.” He then discovers that the dead doe is carrying a still living, unborn fawn:

 

Beside that mountain road I hesitated. 

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

 

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—

then pushed her over the edge into the river. 

William Stafford, “Traveling through the Dark” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by William Stafford.  

 

I don’t think Stafford wrote this poem to express himself by revealing his conflicted state as he confronted the necessity of killing the fawn he couldn’t save. Nor do I think he wrote it to tell us that we should act and not hesitate when confronted with difficult choices. I do think, actually I believe, that Stafford wrote this poem to probe the situation and explore his responses to it. And through the writing of the poem as a mode of attention and process of engagement—through the process of writing it—Stafford not only reenters his experience but expands his awareness of it. One aspect of this is the way the poem leads him to hear the wilderness as a being, rather than simply as a setting. For Stafford, this in turns meant thinking “hard for all of us,” with the “us” implicitly including nature’s being, even as this moment of thinking, this hesitation to act, is a kind of “swerving.”

And it is precisely here that the poem offers its gift to Stafford in the writing of it—and to us, in the reading of it. Through writing the poem, Stafford both hears the wilderness and accepts that this requires thinking from within its being. Yet this moment of thinking, this hesitation, even the temptation to evade, is where his humane desire to preserve life threatens to overwrite his heightened awareness of—and acceptance of—necessity, and thus threatens to become a kind of sentimentality. In the poem, the opposite of “swerving” is acceptance. I’d suggest that acceptance is the gift the poem gave Stafford through the writing of it, and the gift it offers us through the engaged experience it enacts as we read it.

Just as there is more than one way to skin that figurative cat, there is more than one way to write a poem—and more than one reason for writing one. We may have a point to make and want to make it as forcefully as we can. Or we may need to work through an emotion. Or we may want to capture an intense moment of perception. Each of these involve taking something known and framing it into evocative language. But we can also write by taking something that has resonance for us—a moment we recall, or an image, or a phrase—and engage that through writing the poem, exploring as we go, and accepting whatever gifts of insight, discovery, or even just intensified awareness the poem might offer us. Writing to express a point or confess an emotion can lead us to treat the poem as a road we travel to reach a destination. Writing to engage through writing is to discover a destination—one that often takes us beyond the map.

Tim Hunt’s six poetry collections include Western Where and Voice to Voice in the Dark (both Broadstone Books) and Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award). Originally from the hill country of Northern California, he and his wife Susan live in Normal, Illinois. 

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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