Synopses & Reviews
In his 1978 classic, A Seneca Journal, Jerome Rothenberg continued the journey of his earlier Poland/1931, but under vastly altered circumstances. Those circumstances, no less real for their repositioning in time and space, involved a profound response to two years in Salamanca, a railroad town on the Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York State. Going there as a poet in an ongoing search for the human and particular, Rothenberg in A Seneca Journal remains always aware “of who I am, while being drawn toward and affected by a place as never before.” To the original edition of A Seneca Journal, this Nine Point reissue now adds a final section by Rothenberg and Seneca singer Richard Johnny John of translations from the Senecas Society of the Mystic Animals, a riveting example of what Rothenberg later came to call “total translation.”
Review
“Jerome Rothenberg is a DNA spaceman exploring the mammal caves of Now.”
--Michael McClure
“Jerome Rothenberg is one of the truly contemporary American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. At the same time he is a true auctochthon. Only here and now could have produced him—a swinging orgy of Martin Buber, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Sitting Bull. No one writing poetry today has dug deeper into the roots of poetry.”
--Kenneth Rexroth
About the Author
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. Recent books of poems include Gematria Complete, Concealments and Caprichos, A Cruel Nirvana, A Poem of Miracles, and Retrievals: Uncollected and New Poems 1955-2010. His latest big book is Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, and he is now working on a global and historical anthology of "outsider and subterranean poetry."