{"id":3340,"date":"2010-03-16T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-16T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3340"},"modified":"2010-03-16T12:12:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T17:12:00","slug":"kaurab-magazine-rothenberg-interview-millennium-anthology-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/kaurab-magazine-rothenberg-interview-millennium-anthology-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Kaurab Magazine: Rothenberg Interview & Millennium Anthology Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The latest installment of the English edition of the Bengali online literary magazine Kaurab<\/a><\/strong> has an lovely interview<\/a> of Jerome Rothenberg by Mark Weiss as well as an excellent review<\/a> of volume one of Poems for the Millennium<\/strong><\/em> by Tyrone Williams (oh, btw Tyrone, your inklings re Faber & Faber hit the nail on the head). Extracts of these can be read below. Kaurab<\/strong> is generally excellent \u2014 a rare place where you can read up on current Bangla poetry and check out a review<\/a> of Carla Harryman’s latest book!<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM – I<\/strong><\/span>
\nEdited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris <\/span><\/p>\n

Tyrone Williams<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Poems for the Millennium, Volume One: From Fin-de-Si\u00e8cle to Negritude, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (University of California Press, 1995).<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The impossible task of the international anthologist, like that of the encyclopediast, depends, in part, on the objectivity of an idealized scientist and the aesthetic breadth, however subjective, of the cosmopolitan. How to render encyclopedic breadth, even within the delimited parameters of periodization and aesthetic-political movements, when \u201ctaste,\u201d however worldly, must intervene? The traditional response of anthologists has been to acknowledge the inevitable limitations, shortcuts and outright omissions in the introduction. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, as capable internationalists as we have in the United States of America, are eminently qualified to attempt the impossible. Both are renowned translators, anthologists and poets. They tackle the immense problems they faced assembling this anthology head-on, and though Poems of the Millennium: Volume One is indeed exceptional in its breadth and historical contextualizations, one of the very best of its kind, part of the pleasure of reading slowly and carefully through an anthology like this is not only rediscovering old pleasures (Apollinaire, Mallarme, C\u00e9saire, Damas, Trakl, Radnoti, etc.) while discovering new ones (Dario, Huidobro, Benn, Glatshteyn, etc.), but also in weighing the consequences of choices forced upon, or decided by, the editors.<\/p>\n

For example, the decision to include only a brief note on, as opposed to an excerpt from The Waste Land, might strike the casual reader as curious. Even if one agrees that this poem is \u201c[m]uch anthologized\u201d and \u201creadily available\u2026in many representative anthologies of American modernism,\u201d its omission is still problematic in an anthology devoted to international modernism. The introduction makes it clear what is at stake in this anthology: in situating Negritude, \u201calong with the \u2018Objectivist\u2019 line of Williams, Pound and Zukofsky as our culminating movement,\u201d Rothenberg and Joris have consciously tried to correct or balance the Anglo-Saxon biases of the Norton anthology tradition. For those well versed in modern poetry and poetics this particular reorientation of how we imagine or conceive of modernism makes perfect sense. But if we think of this anthology as a way to introduce undergraduate (or, sadly, graduate) students to modern poetry, it is clear that the conscientious pedagogue fares no better with this anthology than she would if she were armed with a more or less comprehensive Norton or other trade market anthology. The resourceful teacher would need to do what she has learned to do well\u2014create a course-pack, though with publishers and heirs enforcing stringent or, in a few cases, non-existent, copyright laws, the course-pack as such may well be an endangered species. More curious, at least initially, is a note regarding the omission of work by the little-known British modernist poet David Jones. The only hint regarding the basis for its exclusion is given in the opening \u201cintroduction\u201d to the commentary on Jones\u2019s work: \u201cThe reader\u2019s attention is called to David Jones\u2019s In Parenthesis (1937) & to his The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (1952), both published by Faber & Faber.\u201d (599) Assuming that \u201cthe works\u2019 difficulty & gnarledness\u201d cannot possibly be the reason for its exclusion from a volume that features a healthy selection of Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist writing and art, one may surmise that the apparently superfluous reference to the publisher is not only a helpful citation but also, perhaps, a hint that Faber & Faber\u2019s copyright fees for republication were prohibitively high. Of course, Rothenberg and Joris acknowledge this problem in general in their introduction when, referring to certain omissions from the anthology, they note that \u201cthe economics of republication have forced the elimination of work to which we can only refer (if at all) by way of commentary.\u201d (13)<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

And here an excerpt from Mark Weiss’ interview with Jerry Rothenberg,<\/p>\n

\n

MW<\/strong> : \u2026 I suppose I’m asking indirectly how you chose to become a poet, if you experienced it as a choice, and the corollary, how that fit into the expectations of parents and community.
\nI think I’ve just invited you to write a bildungsroman. Have at it.<\/em><\/p>\n

JR<\/strong>: It\u2019s only recently that I\u2019ve begun to consider that my parents were not only Jewish \u2013 which they were \u2013 but European, different in that sense from those other parents of other childhood friends, Jews too but born and raised in America. It was in the intimacy of that older European world that we still kissed in greeting and confessed openly to feelings of ennui and dis-ease. Nor did I realize that the foods that we thought of as typically Jewish were shared with a range of eastern European cultures, however modified they were by the demands of dietary laws that were largely in the domain of my mother\u2019s mother, who came to live with us from Poland in the year before my birth. My father\u2019s favorite food was boiled beef served with horseradish, which I took as a sign of dietary indifference, rather than a Polish-Jewish version of pot au feu or Italian bollito misto. At breakfast my grandmother made do, I thought, with bread or a sweet roll, a far cry from the eggs and meat or the cold and hot cereals of the surrounding outside world (myself included). I grew up thinking of that as weirdly Jewish and never associated it with the breakfasts of that other Europe until much later.<\/p>\n

The greater Jewish presence for me was in the language, something I find almost impossible to reconstruct at this distance. My first language was Yiddish \u2013 a monolingual speaker to the age of three or four, and that was probably the duende, in Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s terms, the force of language that I later came to struggle with or through. (Or possibly \u2013 Lorca again \u2013 my angel.) I have that much in common with Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff and others who shared that kind of ancestry. In my case the ambience was a mix of secular \u2013 through my parents \u2013 and religious \u2013 through my grandmother \u2013 with a curious calm and understanding on both sides. My father\u2019s father, whose name I was given, was a hasidic follower of the Radzymin rebbe, but my father had left that well behind him and would rarely set foot in our local synagogue, not out of contempt (he said) but out of respect for that which he no longer shared. My mother \u2013 more uncomplicatedly secular \u2013 had written poetry as a girl, though I can\u2019t remember that she ever showed it to us. My father\u2019s brother Archie (Aaron) had continued with it even later, and once, when he read a poem to us about his long-dead mother (he was then well into his nineties), couldn\u2019t keep from weeping.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh vey<\/em> iz mir<\/em>, but I will cut it off here so that you’ll all go to the Kaurab site & here the whole shmier<\/a> there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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