That Dada Strain/An Homage To Hans Arp

Broadside, [28.5cm/11.25in], orchid colored silk screen on white card stock with deckled lower edge. Signed by Rothenberg on verso. . Rothenberg has continued to be a prolific poet into the present, publishing over seventy books of poetry, translation, and assemblage since 1970. In that year the first version of his selected poems appeared as Poems for the Game of Silence (2000), and soon after that he became one of the poets published regularly by New Directions. Provoked by his own ethnopoetic anthologies, he began, as he wrote of it, "to construct an ancestral poetry of my own – in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, & madmen." The first work to emerge from that, both thematically and formally, was Poland/1931 (1974), described by the poet David Meltzer as Rothenberg's "surrealist Jewish vaudeville." Over the next two decades Rothenberg expanded this theme in works such as A Big Jewish Book and Khurbn & Other Poems, the latter an approach to holocaust writing, which had otherwise been no more than a subtext in Poland/1931. He also reexplored American Indian themes in A Seneca Journal (1978), and the relation of his work to Dada and Surrealism culminated in a further cycle of poems, That Dada Strain, in 1983. A merger of experimental sound poetry and ethnopoetics was the basis in the 1970s and 1980s of works composed by an approach that he was calling "total translation," most notably "The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell" translated from Navajo with a privileging of sonic effect alongside strict or literal meaning. Compositions such as these became centerpieces of Rothenberg's expanding performance repertory and underlay his critical writings on the poetics of performance, many of which were gathered together in Pre-Faces & Other Writings (1981). During this time and beyond it, he also engaged in a number of collaborations with musicians – Charlie Morrow, Bertram Turetzky, Pauline Oliveros, and George Lewis, among others – and took part, sometimes performing, in theatricalizations of his poetry: Poland/1931 for The Living Theater and That Dada Strain for Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany and the Center for Theater Science & Research in San Diego and New York. His New Selected Poems 1970-1985, covering the period since Poems for the Game of Silence, appeared in 1986. In 1987 Rothenberg received his first tenured professorship at the State University of New York in Binghamton, but returned to California in 1989, where he taught for the next ten years as a professor of visual arts and literature at the University of California, San Diego. The works published since 1990 include over fifteen books of his own poetry as well as four books of poetry in translation – from Schwitters, Lorca, Picasso, and Nezval – and a book of selected translations, Writing Through, which extends the idea of translation to practices like collage, assemblage, and appropriation. In 1994 he published Gematria. In 1995 and 1998 he published, in collaboration with Pierre Joris, the two-volume anthology-assemblage, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, and in 2000, with Steven Clay, A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing. Waiting for publication in 2008 is volume three of Poems for the Millennium, co-edited with Jeffrey C. Robinson as a nineteenth-century prequel to the first two volumes, and a new book of selected essays, Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005. Numerous translated editions of his writings have appeared in French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, and other languages, and a complete French edition of Technicians of the Sacred appeared in 2008. Charles Bernstein has written of him: "The significance of Jerome Rothenberg's animating spirit looms larger every year. … [He] is the ultimate ‘hyphenated’ poet: critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher-translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator’s insistence on transf.…