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L. Glazier |
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Jerome
Rothenberg is the author of over fifty books of poetry, most
recently The Lorca Variations (all from New Directions). He has
edited five major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry.
He has also been involved, since the late 1950s, with various aspects
of poetry performance, including two radio soundplays written and
performed for Westdeuttscher Rundfunk (Cologne), the last of which
("That Dada Strain" / "Der Dada Ton") was staged in 1985 and 1987
in collaboration with bassist Bertram Turetzky and director Luke
Theodore Morrison in California and New York. A theatrical version
of his book, Poland/1931, by Hanon Reznikov and the Living Theater,
appeared on the NewYork stage in April 1988, and a version of Khurbn
(in collaboration with composer Charlie Morrow and Japanese novelist
Makoto Oda) was produced by the Bread & Puppet Theater in 1995.
Rothenberg was the editor/publisher of Hawk's Well Press in the
early 1960s and of four poetry magazines since then: Poems from
the Floating World, some/thing (with David Antin), Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics
("a first magazine of the world's tribal poetries"), and New Wilderness
Letter (a magazine of poetics across the spectrum of the arts).
In 1968 he received a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant-in-aid for the
experimental translation of American Indian poetry, and he has also
been an active translator from German, with works including New
Young German Poets (City Lights, 1959), the Broadway version of
Rolf Hochhuth's play "The Deputy" (1964), and books of poetry by
Eugen Gomringer and by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. His own selected
poetry, Poems for the Game of Silence, has appeared in French, Swedish
and Flemish editions, and he has been translated extensively into
Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Serbian, Polish, and Finnish. He
received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and a National Endowment
for the Arts grant in 1976, was a University of California Regents
Professor in 1971 and a Visiting Research Professor with the Center
for Twentieth-Century Studies (University of Wisconsin-- Milwaukee),
where he helped to organize "the first international symposium on
ethnopoetics" in 1975. From 1972 to 1974 he lived at the Allegany
Seneca Reservation in western New York State, and from 1976 to 1986
he taught extensively with the Visual Arts and Literature Departments
at the University of California, San Diego. During that time he
also held other visiting professorships, including the Distinguished
Aerol Arnold Chair in Literature at the University of Southern California,
and in 1986 he was appointed as the visiting New York State Writer
in Residence of the New York State Writers Institute in Albany.
From 1986 to 1988 he had a tenured appointment with the State University
of New York in Binghamton. Jerome Rothenberg's first collection
of writings on poetics, Pre-Faces (New Directions, 1982), received
the American Book Award in 1982. Symposium of the Whole, an anthology
of writings on ethnopoetics co- edited with Diane Rothenberg, was
published by the University of California Press in 1983, and revised
editions of Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin appeared
in 1985 and 1986. A condensed version of A Big Jewish Book (entitled
Exiled in the Word) was published recently by Copper Canyon Press,
and his full translation of Federico Garc’a Lorca's previously untranslated
Suites was published as part of Lorca's Collected Poems by Farrar
Straus Giroux. PPPPPP (Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics),
a selection of the poetry and poetics of Kurt Schwitters, co-edited
and translated with Pierre Joris, appeared in 1993 from Temple University
Press, along with two recent collections of poetry, The Lorca Variations
from New Directions and Gematria in early 1994 from Sun & Moon Press.
He is also translating the Czech modernist poet Vitezslav Nezval
and is working with Joris on a two-volume global anthology of twentieth-century
experimental poetry, Poems for the Millennium: The University of
California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, the first volume
of which appeared in late 1995, with the second volume scheduled
for 1997. In 1994 Rothenberg was the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine
Miles Literary Award for The Lorca Variations and the PEN Center
USA West Translation Award for PPPPPP. A second Josephine Miles
Award was given in 1996 for Poems for the Millennium. Two new gatherings
of poems, An Oracle for Delfi and Pictures of the Crucifixion were
recently published by Membrane Press / Light & Dust Books and by
Granary Books respectively, and a longer collection, Seedings &
Other Poems, is scheduled from New Directions in 1996. He is now
a professor of Visual Arts and Literature with the University of
California at San Diego.
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