Jerome Rothenberg - Ethnopoetics and Anthologies

Ethnopoetics and Anthologies

Technicians of the Sacred (1968), which signalled the beginning of an approach to poetry that Rothenberg named “ethnopoetics,” went beyond the standard collection of folk songs to include visual and sound poetry and the texts and scenarios for ritual events. Some 150 pages of commentaries gave context to the works included and placed them as well in relation to contemporary and experimental work in the industrial and postindustrial West. Over the next ten years, Rothenberg also founded and with Dennis Tedlock co-edited Alcheringa, the first magazine of ethnopoetics (1970–73, 1975ff.) and edited further anthologies, including:- Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972); A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present (revised and republished as Exiled in the Word, 1977 and 1989); America Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973), co-edited with George Quasha; and Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward An Ethnopoetics (1983), co-edited with Diane Rothenberg. Rothenberg’s approach throughout was to treat these large collections as deliberately constructed assemblages or collages, on the one hand, and as manifestos promulgating a complex and multiphasic view of poetry on the other. Speaking of their relation to his work as a whole, he later wrote of the anthology thus conceived as “an assemblage or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in the words of others and in own words. That imago – that representation of where we've been and what we've lived through – is something in fact that I would stand by – like any poem.”