{"id":7161,"date":"2011-10-26T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7161"},"modified":"2011-10-25T13:32:07","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T17:32:07","slug":"retrievals-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/retrievals-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrievals Reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This review of JR’s latest book just out in the Jewish Daily Forward<\/a><\/strong><\/em>; first paras below; you can read the whole essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg’s Work<\/strong>
\nAuthor and Translator Made Considerable Contribution to Canon<\/em>
\n<\/span>By\u00a0Jake Marmer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010
\n<\/strong>By Jerome Rothenberg
\n<\/em>Junction Press, 178 pages, $21<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Author and translator of nearly 100 books of poetry as well as editor of numerous groundbreaking anthologies, poet Jerome Rothenberg is turning 80 this year. A retrospective of his work has long been overdue. Yet Rothenberg, who throughout his literary career has dodged conventions and expectations, stays true to the course with his recently published collection, \u201cRetrievals.\u201d Although billed as a retrospective, the book does not have any of his best-known or most anthologized work, but only poems that have fallen between the cracks: unpublished and newly rediscovered material from over the years. As the author himself puts it in the afterword, this is a \u201cbook that charts my life as a poet\u2026 if it were arranged\u00a0without<\/em>\u00a0the poems collected here.\u201d It is his literary trajectory, read through the lens of previously unknown work.<\/p>\n

Rothenberg\u2019s contribution to the canon of American poetry is considerable \u2014 not only in terms of poems but also the poetics: theory, criticism and techniques. Most notable is his involvement with \u201cethnopoetics,\u201d which has grown to become a full-fledged movement and literary field. A term he coined in the 1960s to describe notions of poetry within cultures other than Western, it attempts, for example, to attain wider understanding of the narratives of Native American mythology through the context of its rituals.<\/p>\n

As an anthropologist, translator and folklorist, Rothenberg not only goes to the very roots of poetry, but also follows its hypothetical branchings. His interests in mysticism and linguistics have led Rothenberg to a poetic engagement with\u00a0gematria<\/em>, the ancient Rabbinic hermeneutic device. Using the idea that every Hebrew letter has a numeric value, it offers connections between words and phrases otherwise unrelated. In his book \u201cKabbalah and Criticism,\u201d American literary critic Harold Bloom called it \u201cinterpretive freedom gone mad,\u201d but in Rothenberg\u2019s work,\u00a0gematria<\/em>\u00a0is more about a surprisingly natural or, one could say, casually cosmic connection underlying language\u2019s building blocks. Indeed, \u201cRetrievals\u201d features a group of poems, composed using\u00a0gematria<\/em>, where\u00a0gematria<\/em>becomes a device akin to rhyme \u2014 except in place of the sonic correspondence there is an abstract and mysterious mathematical one.<\/p>\n

… (ctd \u00a0here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This review of JR’s latest book just out in the Jewish Daily Forward; first paras below; you can read the whole essay here. Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg’s Work Author and Translator...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,91],"tags":[433],"class_list":["post-7161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetry","tag-jerome-rothenberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7161"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7170,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7161\/revisions\/7170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}