THE MYOPIC POETRY SERIES — a weekly series of readings and occasional poets' talks
Myopic Books in Chicago — All readings begin at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 2nd Floor
http://www.myopicbookstore.com/poetry.html
773.862.4882
Contact curator Larry Sawyer for booking information and requests.
E-mail: larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com
This WEDNESDAY at Myopic Books:
Wednesday, April 21 – Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome ROTHENBERG is the author of over seventy books of poetry including Poems for the Game of Silence, Poland/1931, A Seneca Journal, Vienna Blood, That Dada Strain, New Selected Poems 1970-1985, Khurbn, and most recently, A Paradise of Poets and A Book of Witness (all from New Directions). Describing his poetry career as "an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present," he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry: Technicians of the Sacred (tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania), Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), America a Prophecy (a radical revision of the poetries of the North American continent co-edited with George Quasha), Revolution of the Word (American experimental poetry between the two world wars), A Big Jewish Book (subtitled "Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present"), and Poems for the Millennium (two volumes, co-edited with Pierre Joris). He has also been involved, since the late 1950s, with various aspects of poetry performance, including two radio soundplays written and performed for Westdeuttscher Rundfunk (Cologne), the last of which ("That Dada Strain" / "Der Dada Ton") was staged in 1985 and 1987 in collaboration with bassist Bertram Turetzky and director Luke Theodore Morrison in California and New York. A theatrical version of his book, Poland/1931, by Hanon Reznikov and the Living Theater, appeared on the NewYork stage in April 1988, and a version of Khurbn (in collaboration with composer Charlie Morrow and Japanese novelist Makoto Oda) was produced by the Bread & Puppet Theater in 1995. Rothenberg was the editor/publisher of Hawk's Well Press in the early 1960s and of four poetry magazines since then: Poems from the Floating World, some/thing (with David Antin), Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics ("a first magazine of the world's tribal poetries"), and New Wilderness Letter (a magazine of poetics across the spectrum of the arts). In 1968 he received a Wenner-Gren Foundation grant-in-aid for the experimental translation of American Indian poetry, and he has also been an active translator from German, with works including New Young German Poets (City Lights, 1959), the Broadway version of Rolf Hochhuth's play "The Deputy" (1964), and books of poetry by Eugen Gomringer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Kurt Schwitters. His own selected poetry, Poems for the Game of Silence, has appeared in French, Swedish and Flemish editions, and he has been translated extensively into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Japanese, Lithuanian, Chinese, and Finnish.
