Poetry. "The China Notes come from a trip in 2002 that brought us out as far as the Gobi Desert & allowed me to see some of the changes & continuities throughout the country. I was traveling with poet & scholar Wai-lim Yip & had a chance to read poetry in five or six cities & to observe things as part of an ongoing discourse with Wai-lim & others. The ancient beauty of some of what we saw played out against the theme park quality of other simulacra of the past....A sense of beckoning wilderness/wildness in a landscape already cut into to serve the human need for power & control." So Jerome Rothenberg describes the events behind the poems in this small volume--a continuation of his lifelong exploration of poetry and the search for a language to invoke the newness and strangeness both of what we observe and what we can imagine.
Author City: Encinitas, CA USA
Jerome Rothenberg is the winner of numerous awards, among them two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Awards in Literature, two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards, the Alfonso el Sabio Award for Translation, and two American Book Awards. He is the author of over eighty collections of poetry, twelve from New Directions and the most recent, Concealments and Caprichos, from Black Widow Press (2010); two collections of essays; ten books of translations from Spanish, German, French, and Czech; and editor or co-editor of nine anthologies, among them the seminal Technicians of the Sacred (Doubleday & Co., 1968, and University of California Press, 1985) and the recent three-volume Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995, 1998, and 2009). He was editor/publisher of Hawks Well Press in the 1960s and co-editor (with Dennis Tedlock) of the journal Alcheringa (1970-1977), which inaugurated the ethnopoetics movement. He is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Visual Arts at the University of California in San Diego, where he lives with his wife Diane. His books available from SPD include GEMATRIA COMPLETE, THREE POEMS AFTER IMAGES BY NANCY TOBIN, CHINA NOTES & THE TREASURES OF DUNHUANG, 25 CAPRICHOS AFTER GOYA, A BOOK OF CONCEALMENTS, and RETRIEVALS: UNCOLLECTED & NEW POEMS, 1955-2010.
Reviews and Other Links
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2007spring/rothenberg.shtml