Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful book and an unequivocal delight" and by the LA Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the late 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg's landmark anthology Technicians of the Sacred has educated and inspired generations of poets, artists, musicians, and other readers, exposing them to the multiple possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Juxtaposing "primitive" and archaic works of art from many cultures with each other and with avant-garde and experimental poetry, Jerome Rothenberg contends that literature extends beyond specific temporal and geographic boundaries, while acting as a retort to those who would call that larger humanity into question. A half-century since its original publication, this revised and expanded third edition provides readers with a wealth of newly gathered and translated texts from recently reinvigorated indigenous cultures, bringing the volume into the present and further extending the range and depth of what we recognize and read as poetry.

As we come to the beginning of a new century, we find that the entire vista of modern poetry has dramatically changed. "Poems for the Millennium" captures the essence of that change, and unlike any anthology available today it reveals the revolutionary concepts at the very heart of contemporary poetry. International in its coverage, these volumes bring together the poets and poetry movements that radically altered the ways that art and language express the human condition. "Volume 2" offers a dazzling chronicle of the second "great awakening" of experimental poetry in the twentieth century. Ranging from the period of World War II through the cold war to the onset of the twenty-first century, this volume presents two "galleries" of individual poets such as Holan, Olson, Rukeyser, Jabes, Celan, Mac Low, Pasolini, Bachmann, Finlay, Ginsberg, Adonis, Rich, U Tam'si, Baraka, Takahashi, Waldman, and Bei Dao. There are also samplings of local and international movements: the Beats, the Vienna Group, the Cobra poets and artists, the Arabic-language Tammuzi poets, the creators of a new "Concrete Poetry," the "postwar poets" of Japan, the Italian Novissimi and Avan-Guardia, the Chinese Misty Poets, and the North American Language Poets. In addition, an extended section is devoted to examples of the "art of the manifesto" and two smaller groupings of traditional "oral poets" and of experimenters with machine art and cyberpoetics. Poet-editors Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris provide informative and irreverent commentaries throughout. They challenge old truths and propose alternative directions, in the tradition of the manifestos that have marked the art and poetry of the twentieth century. The result is both an essential resource for experiencing the full range of contemporary poetic possibilities and an arresting statement on the future of poetry in the millennium ahead.

"Maria Sabina's "Selected Works introduces and enhances the understanding of one of the world's most remarkable poets. Mr. Rothenberg frames her work within the larger context of 'ethnopoetics' with no academic reductionism whatsoever, a rare and indispensable service to a 'world poet' such as Maria Sabina. The translation of Maria Sabina, her 'autobiography' and her oral poetry, is exquisite, powerful, rendered with linguistic dignity."--Howard Norman

"This book transmits not only a full and rich experience with one of the most extraordinary personalities and poetic voices of our time, but also a great lesson in our understanding of the relations between religious inspiration and its artistic expression. It enriches our perceptions of the nature and possibilities of oral composition, complementing what we already know of it from the study of the Homeric and other poems in its great tradition."--George Economou

"Maria Sabina is one of the great figures of American shamanism. Her "Chants "is a masterpiece of indigenous visionary poetry. Her "Life "is the account of a woman who transcended her own culture and its material poverty to become one of the great women of the twentieth century. The veneration of her work continues beyond her death. To read her is to embark on a journey to the world of the extrasensorial."--Homero Aridjis

"In the chants of Maria Sabina, we can appreciate the interplay of individual invention and traditional liturgy within the oral creativity of a non-literate society. The recordings of her words that have saved them from oblivion give us the opportunity to glimpse the emergence of a genius from the soil of the communal, religious folk poetry of a nativeMexican campesino people."--Henry Munn

Combining two works written over the same time period Concealments and Caprichos is a two-pronged follow up to Rothenberg's earlier book of poems, A Book of Witness. As Rothenberg states in his preface, the title is based on a Jewish mystical work, Sifra diSeni'uta from which he drew the lines that open this title. Those lines appear sporadically throughout Concealments, not as the mapping of a nonexistent god, but as an intimation, in both Concealments and Caprichos, of an imagined world embedded in the real one.

"The word anthology hardly does justice to Rothenberg and Joris's brilliant reconceptualization of twentieth-century poetry in a global context. This is that rare book that forces us to rethink what the poetic is and can be."--Marjorie Perloff

"This book is destined to become a fundamental resource for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture. Its importance cannot be overstated."--Charles Bernstein

"A much broader, much more intelligent sweep, this anthology, than most."--Amiri Baraka

"A riveting literary achievement of phenomenal scope and generosity. Kudos to Rothenberg and Joris for their passionate, discerning editorship, spanning cultures, sensibilities, and languages. This illuminating compendium displays the best of humanity's bardic inheritance and vision. It should be obligatory reading for all scholars, students, writers and lovers of poetry. May the wisdom in these poems benefit us all."--Anne Waldman, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, The Naropa Institute

"Looking back from this end of the century we can begin to see how partial our views of its literary happenings have been: how time-bound, tongue-bound, often celebrity-bound. In an accurately-titled "Poems for the Millennium we can at last sense the scope of the Revolution of the Word that's been in process since--oh, 1895. There's no other anthology like this one, no other overview so venturesome."--Hugh Kenner

"This is not like any other anthology, not a collection of excellences, no absurd imitations of a canon. It's more like a Handbook of Inventors and Inventions, or of Explorers and Discoveries, that opens up all sorts of pathways for poetry from its past and future to a livingpresent. A truly international book of modern poetry that exceeds its claims to move from the "fin de siecle to the poets of "Negritude, as it crosses frontiers of language and culture and genre. This may be the only collection of modernist poetry that reveals its simultaneous connections to an archaic and ecological past as well as a technological future, as it also wipes out rigid distinctions between poets and painters and sculptors and performers. It is above all a book of possibilities and invitations.--David Antin

"The intermingling circles of poetries and cultures move outward to continents & also open up to all times. True cosmopolitanism loves the specifics of little places and small societies--just the right gesture, the precise quaver of the voice, the exact variety of maize. Rothenberg and Joris's anthology gives us, by virtue of its organic structure and inspired choices, the possibility of a kind of situated internationalism, what "modernism" half wanted to become. This is a presentation of a poetics that is already here, but imperfectly recognized. It is a sourcebook for the future."--Gary Snyder

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled "primitive" and "savage," many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follows the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the "human universe." The book's three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present-in the editors' words, "a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be."

Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful book and an unequivocal delight" and by the LA Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the late 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg's landmark anthology Technicians of the Sacred has educated and inspired generations of poets, artists, musicians, and other readers, exposing them to the multiple possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Juxtaposing "primitive" and archaic works of art from many cultures with each other and with avant-garde and experimental poetry, Jerome Rothenberg contends that literature extends beyond specific temporal and geographic boundaries, while acting as a retort to those who would call that larger humanity into question. A half-century since its original publication, this revised and expanded third edition provides readers with a wealth of newly gathered and translated texts from recently reinvigorated indigenous cultures, bringing the volume into the present and further extending the range and depth of what we recognize and read as poetry.

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.

"Rothenberg's poetics of sacred names and numbers is a 'poetics of the sacred.' It intends to re-empower poetry by taking it back to its (presumed) origins. The 'charming' character of his poetry and his 'poetics of the sacred' questions the validity of deconstructionist assumptions in regard to poetry. Alternatively, Rothenberg presents us with a kind of poetry that does not discount the possibility of finding healing and meaning through language."

One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.

Barbaric Vast & Wild is a continuation and a possible culmination of the project that began with Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 and led to the first four volumes of Poems for the Millennium in the 1990s and 2000s. In this new and equally groundbreaking volume, Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman have assembled a wide-ranging gathering of poems and related language works, whose outside/outsider and subterranean/subversive positions challenge some of the boundaries to where poetry has been or may be practiced, as well as the form and substance of the poetry itself. It also extends the time frame of the preceding volumes in Poems for the Millennium, hoping to show that, in all places and times, what the dominant culture has taken as poetry has only been part of the story.

As poet and experimental translator, pioneer in performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg for over three decades has been a literary radical and prominent influence in the American avant-garde. Among his own earliest sources was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose "composition through images ... opened my mind to the contemporary poetry of Europe & of something possibly older & deeper that would surface for us in America as well." Having recently returned to translating Lorca, Rothenberg began to appropriate and rearrange items of Lorca's vocabulary and to compose a series of poems of his own that "both are & aren't mine, both are & aren't Lorca." As an original work, The Lorca Variations are, as he describes them, "a way of coming full circle into a discovery that began with Lorca & for which he has stood with certain others as a guide & constant fellow-traveler."

Acclaimed poet and translator, editor of such ground-breaking journals and anthologies as Alcheringa and Technicians of the Sacred, pioneer in the fields of performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg is a literary radical and a major force in American poetry. Gathered here in his New Selected Poems 1970-1985 are pivotal poems from four previous New Directions collections, Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca Journal (1978), Vienna Blood (1980), and That Dada Strain (1983). Rothenberg describes his new selection as "an attempt to isolate in the work of the last fifteen years (and a little more) the thread of a single long poem or sequence [in which] figures and voice's without context in the earlier books...find a location and a shape." Open-ended, explorative, and exuberantly and irreverently epic, the sequence ends with two new and previously uncollected poems, "15 Flower World Variations" and "Visions of Jesus."

Pre-Faces & Other Writings is the first collection of poetics by one of the most revolutionary literary innovators of our time. In addition to more than twenty volumes of his own poetry Jerome Rothenberg has been active in a wide area of contemporary experimentation: poetry performance, both as "reading" and as "happening"; the assembling of radical anthologies and magazines (such as Technicians of the Sacred and Alcheringa) aimed at the creation of a fresh environment of poetries "freed from the bondage of a monolithic great tradition"; and the exploration of new techniques of translation especially appropriate to tribal/oral poetry. Almost singlehandedly, he founded the interdisciplinary field of "ethnopoetics"--both as the investigation of poetry across the full range of human cultures and its practice in relation to our own. Called an "oral" poet by some, a "post-modernist" by others, Rothenberg's own views--both the theories and their applications--have never before been gathered; the present book is intended to show the continuities in his own evolving poetics. "I see all my work in this regard," he comments, "as a pre-face to something that comes after. If there's still any sense in talking of an avant-garde, then that must be it for me: an insistence that the work deny itself the last word, because the consequences of closure & the closed mind have been and continue to be horrendous in the world we know."

Vienna Blood & Other Poems is in some ways the most synthesizing of Jerome Rothenberg's recent collections, pulling together work from the 1970s that stands apart from Poland/1931 (1974) and A Seneca Journal (1978) yet at the same time continuing the enactment of past and present begun in those books. But where before he chose to restrict his exploration to ancestral Jewish and Amerindian poetries, Rothenberg now takes us on a series of broader journeys through the collapsed landscape of what he calls the 'new wilderness," evoked as place, as structure, as mind. Written both to be read quietly on the printed page and aloud in performance, the poems in Vienna Blood, though experimental and language-centered, are nevertheless the work of a poet who, by his own admission, is "crazy for content, make no mistake about it." As if to underscore this point, he has appended brief comments to most of the major sections of the book, in order, as he says, "to give it some context in the way of 'oral tradition' usually reserved for poetry readings, etc., a little of which I now commit to writing."

In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for "total destruction," the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish "Holocaust" of World War II. In 1987, thirteen years after the publication of his book of ancestral poems, Poland/1931, Jerome Rothenberg visited Poland and the small town of Ostrow-Mazowiecka, from which his parents had emigrated in 1920. "I hadn't realized," he writes, "that it was only fifteen miles from Treblinka..." Out of the poet's confrontation with his family's annihilation came Khurbn & Other Poems. "The poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka are the clearest message I have ever gotten about why I write poetry. They are an answer also to the proposition that poetry cannot or should not be written after Auschwitz." For decades a leader of the American literary avant-garde, Rothenberg, with Khurbn & Other Poems, adds his voice to those writers, like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, who have sought to name the unnamable at the ruinous heart of the history of our time.

First published in 1971, this volume brings together a selection of Rothenberg's early groundbreaking work: a wide range of experimental forms, both written and oral, set beside renderings of Native American, Australian, and other primitive songs, as well as the ancestral poems exploring his own origins that look forward to his later poetry.

A Paradise of Poets is Jerome Rothenberg's tenth book of poetry to be published by New Directions, beginning with his Poland/1931 (1974). In considering the title of his newest collection, he says: "Writing poetry for me has always included an involvement with the life of poetry -- & through that life an intensification, when it happened, of my involvement with the other life around me. In an earlier poem I spoke of this creating a paradise of poets.... I do not of course believe that such a paradise exists in any supernatural or mystical sense, but I have sometimes felt it come to life among my fellow poets and, even more, in writing -- in the body of the poem".

In Rothenberg's hands, the body of the poem is an extraordinarily malleable object. Collage, translation, even visual improvisation serve to open up his newest book to the presence of poets and artists he has known and to others, past and present, who he feels have somehow touched him, among them Nakahara Chuya, Jackson Mac Low, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kurt Schwitters, Vitezslav Nezval. Kenneth Rexroth once commented: "Jerome Rothenberg is one of our truly great American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature.... No one has dug deeper into the roots of poetry". With A Paradise of Poets, it is clear that this evaluation is as fresh today as it was twenty-five years ago.

A landmark collection by one of America's leading avant-gardists. A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris is Jerome Rothenberg's passage from one century--one millennium--to another. Of the one hundred poems that comprise the book, the first half were written in 1999, the second in the two years that followed. But far more than a marker of era-shifting, it is a collection that reestablishes the primacy of the poetic "I, " not in the sense of a confessional, personal voice, but of the grammatical first person as both a singular witness and conduit for others--a kind of prophecy. Often incantatory, the poems in A Book of Witness are a reaffirmation of self in the face of history's darknesses, a shout for life against an indifferent universe. A Book of Witness is Rothenberg's thirteenth book with New Directions, his first since A Paradise of Poets (1999). An internationally celebrated poet, translator, and experimentalist, he is also the editor of several groundbreaking anthologies, most recently, with Pierre Joris, of Poems for the Millennium (University of California, 1995 and 1998). In 2002, he was the recipient, with Milos Sovak, of PEN Center USA's translation prize, for Antilyrik & Other Poems (Green Integer), by the Czech poet Viteslav Nezval

In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for 'total destruction, ' the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish 'Holocaust' of World War II. This is the author's precisely personal, horrifying, tender, and structurally astute masterpiece, it is the great middle-length poem of our times.

Pre-Faces & Other Writings is the first collection of poetics by one of the most revolutionary literary innovators of our time. In addition to more than twenty volumes of his own poetry Jerome Rothenberg has been active in a wide area of contemporary experimentation: poetry performance, both as "reading" and as "happening"; the assembling of radical anthologies and magazines (such as Technicians of the Sacred and Alcheringa) aimed at the creation of a fresh environment of poetries "freed from the bondage of a monolithic great tradition"; and the exploration of new techniques of translation especially appropriate to tribal/oral poetry. Almost singlehandedly, he founded the interdisciplinary field of "ethnopoetics"--both as the investigation of poetry across the full range of human cultures and its practice in relation to our own. Called an "oral" poet by some, a "post-modernist" by others, Rothenberg's own views--both the theories and their applications--have never before been gathered; the present book is intended to show the continuities in his own evolving poetics. "I see all my work in this regard," he comments, "as a pre-face to something that comes after. If there's still any sense in talking of an avant-garde, then that must be it for me: an insistence that the work deny itself the last word, because the consequences of closure & the closed mind have been and continue to be horrendous in the world we know."