{"id":7408,"date":"2011-12-13T09:17:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T13:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7408"},"modified":"2011-12-13T15:26:18","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T19:26:18","slug":"robert-kellys-homage-for-jerome-rothenberg-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/robert-kellys-homage-for-jerome-rothenberg-80\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Kelly’s Homage for Jerome Rothenberg @ 80"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

PJ, JR & RK (Encinitas, last century)<\/p><\/div>\n

Unable to be present in person for the celebratory gathering<\/a> for Jerome Rothenberg @ 80 at the Graduate Center last Friday, Robert Kelly sent the following homage, which I read as part of the\u00a0introduction\u00a0to Jerome Rothenberg’s\u00a0reading\u00a0(the other part being David Antin’s homage, read by Charles Bernstein & published\u00a0here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\n

“I wish I could be there now to thank and praise and celebrate\u2014bless you all for doing it for me.\u00a0 But my sins (that is, the body) have caught up with me for a season, and I remain rustic.\u00a0 My mind though wanders in such an immense garden of gratitudes to Jerry, and to Diane, for what they\u2019ve done for me and what they\u2019ve done for American poetry.\u00a0 Jerry\u2019s Hawks Well Press published my first book, and in that sense gave me my start\u2014but more important, they gave so many of us a place to start from: the nurturing network spreading out from their amazing apartment way up north off Broadway, a powerhouse of aesthetic scheming, revolutionary anthropology, subversive art history\u2014all the conditions of a community from which art can come.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how I could have thrived without them.\u00a0 Or how we could have thrived:\u00a0 back in that time, the 1950s, American poetry was showing signs of life, after all the dozing between confessional and professional, the couch and the classroom.\u00a0 Rothenberg, through his linguistic gifts, through cooperation (so many years!) with Diane\u2019s energetic ethnology, through his own genius, was the great rouser in those days, catching revived surrealism but adding to it the excitement of the profound Otherness of space and time, the so-called Primitive, the tribal, the magical, the oral.\u00a0 For us, he played (and plays) the role Picasso and Braque did for the painters, and Leiris and Bataille later for the French poets:\u00a0 opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges.\u00a0 Kabbalah, cave painting, Iroquois legend, Navajo chant, Hasidic tales, Central Asian epic, German avant-garde, immigrant histories\u2014he summoned us to attend to the deep literature of which the \u2018literary\u2019 is only a sheen.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t get caught in formalisms, credences, opportunism.\u00a0 He taught me a dislike of slogans, and almost succeeded in teaching me modesty and the Taoist wisdom of hsiao<\/em>, being small.\u00a0 He is a great figure, who stands above and beyond the schools and tendentiousnesses of poetics;\u00a0 he has given us, in his poetry, criticism, translation, anthologies, a body of work that exhibits what I suddenly realize is\u00a0 an ethical purity, a touchstone for the genuine.”<\/p>\n

RK, 8 December 2011<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unable to be present in person for the celebratory gathering for Jerome Rothenberg @ 80 at the Graduate Center last Friday, Robert Kelly sent the following homage, which I read as part of the\u00a0introduction\u00a0to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1114,830,91],"tags":[433,645],"class_list":["post-7408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homage","category-poet","category-poetry","tag-jerome-rothenberg","tag-robert-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408","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=7408"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7420,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7408\/revisions\/7420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}