New Selected Poems, 1970-1985
New Selected Poems, 1970-1985

Author: Jerome Rothenberg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9780811209977

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Acclaimed poet and translator, editor of such ground-breaking journals and anthologies as Alcheringa and Technicians of the Sacred, pioneer in the fields of performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg is a literary radical and a major force in American poetry. Gathered here in his New Selected Poems 1970-1985 are pivotal poems from four previous New Directions collections, Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca Journal (1978), Vienna Blood (1980), and That Dada Strain (1983). Rothenberg describes his new selection as "an attempt to isolate in the work of the last fifteen years (and a little more) the thread of a single long poem or sequence [in which] figures and voice's without context in the earlier books...find a location and a shape." Open-ended, explorative, and exuberantly and irreverently epic, the sequence ends with two new and previously uncollected poems, "15 Flower World Variations" and "Visions of Jesus."

Vienna Blood & Other Poems
Vienna Blood & Other Poems

Author: Jerome Rothenberg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780811207591

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Vienna Blood & Other Poems is in some ways the most synthesizing of Jerome Rothenberg's recent collections, pulling together work from the 1970s that stands apart from Poland/1931 (1974) and A Seneca Journal (1978) yet at the same time continuing the enactment of past and present begun in those books. But where before he chose to restrict his exploration to ancestral Jewish and Amerindian poetries, Rothenberg now takes us on a series of broader journeys through the collapsed landscape of what he calls the 'new wilderness," evoked as place, as structure, as mind. Written both to be read quietly on the printed page and aloud in performance, the poems in Vienna Blood, though experimental and language-centered, are nevertheless the work of a poet who, by his own admission, is "crazy for content, make no mistake about it." As if to underscore this point, he has appended brief comments to most of the major sections of the book, in order, as he says, "to give it some context in the way of 'oral tradition' usually reserved for poetry readings, etc., a little of which I now commit to writing."

A Paradise of Poets
A Paradise of Poets

Author: Jerome Rothenberg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780811214278

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A Paradise of Poets is Jerome Rothenberg's tenth book of poetry to be published by New Directions, beginning with his Poland/1931(1974). In considering the title of his newest collection, he says: "Writing poetry for me has always included an involvement with the life of poetry--& through that life an intensification, when it happened, of my involvement with the other life around me. In an earlier poem I spoke of this creating a paradise of poets ... I do not of course believe that such a paradise exists in any supernatural or mystical sense, but I have sometimes felt it come to life among my fellow poets and, even more, in writing--in the body of the poem." In Rothenberg's hands, the body of the poem is an extraordinarily malleable object. Collage, translation, even visual improvisation serve to open up his latest book to the presence of poets and artists he has known and to others, past and present, who he feels have somehow touched him, among them Nakahara Chuya, Jackson Mac Low, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kurt Schwitters, and Vitezslav Nezval. Kenneth Rexroth once commented: "Jerome Rothenberg is one of our truly great American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. No one has dug deeper into the roots of poetry." With A Paradise of Poets, it is clear that this evaluation is as fresh today as it was twenty-five years ago.

Fear of Dreaming
Fear of Dreaming

Author: Jim Carroll

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1993-11-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0140586954

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Carroll, a diarist and rock performer, is best known for his coming-of-age memoir The Basketball Diaries, which became an instant classic when it was first published in 1978 and then a national bestseller when a film version of the book was released in 1995. Carroll initially made his reputation as a poet, and has won acclaim and comparisons to everyone from Rimbaud to Frank O’Hara for his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery. This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies, which was published in 1973 when he was twenty-two, and The Book of Nods, released in 1986. Fear of Dreaming also includes pieces previously unpublished in book form, including “Curtis’s Charm,” a vignette set in New York City’s Central Park about a man convinced he is a victim of black magic, and poetic tributes to Robert Mapplethorpe and Ted Berrigan. “His poems’ urgent, obsessive metaphors pose tensely against their cool, streetwise surface voice, charging them with an electricity that’s at once disturbing, sexual, religious, and psychological.”—Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

The Lorca Variations
The Lorca Variations

Author: Jerome Rothenberg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780811212533

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As poet and experimental translator, pioneer in performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg for over three decades has been a literary radical and prominent influence in the American avant-garde. Among his own earliest sources was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose "composition through images ... opened my mind to the contemporary poetry of Europe & of something possibly older & deeper that would surface for us in America as well." Having recently returned to translating Lorca, Rothenberg began to appropriate and rearrange items of Lorca's vocabulary and to compose a series of poems of his own that "both are & aren't mine, both are & aren't Lorca." As an original work, The Lorca Variations are, as he describes them, "a way of coming full circle into a discovery that began with Lorca & for which he has stood with certain others as a guide & constant fellow-traveler."

Selected Poems
Selected Poems

Author: Octavio Paz

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9780811208994

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Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country's ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968; and to various universities in the United States throughout the 1970s. A great synthesizer, the rich diversity of Paz's thought is shown here in all its astonishing complexity. Among the sixty-seven selections in this volume, a gathering in English of his most essential poems drawn from nearly fifty years' work, are Muriel Rukeyser's now classic version of "Sun Stone" and new translations by editor Weinberger of "Blanco" and "Maithuna." And since for Paz, forever in motion, there can be no such thing as a "definitive text," all the poems have been revised to conform to the poet's most recent changes in the original Spanish. Besides those by Rukeyser and Weinberger, the translations in the Selected Poems are by G. Aroul, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, William Carlos Williams, and Monique Fong Wust.

That Dada Strain
That Dada Strain

Author: Jerome Rothenberg

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9780811208604

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The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues, and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years immediately following World War I. "In my own world," he explains in his pre-face to That Dada Strain, "the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on." For Rothenberg, the Dada connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as it does a "strain" that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work, whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling of innovative anthologies. Following the title section is "Imaginal Geographies," a group of poems that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded associations between images for which no key was readily available. In the third and final section, "Altar Pieces," Rothenberg attempts, as he says, "to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the loss of bread & words." Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces & Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.

Selected Poems of Rita Dove
Selected Poems of Rita Dove

Author: Rita Dove

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1993-09-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0679750800

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Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives. Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.