Jerome Rothenburg
interviewed by Philip Davenport
NYC
October 2011
(First published in THE DARK WOULD language art anthology 2012, reprinted here in memory of Jerome Rothenberg, 1931-2024)
ABOVE
Textwork by Jerome Rothenberg, Storey Gallery Lancaster 2015
PD: Now, somebody very kindly said to me “There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers” which I thought was really sweet…
JR: …you supply the dumb questions and I’ll supply the dumb answers, and we’re even, okay?
PD: So this is very straightforward stuff. One of the things that I’m fascinated by is the pull of outsider work. Why? It seems to me it’s a very complex mesh of things going on there…
JR: Let’s talk about it, because the same here… I’ve got some notion of why, and it seems to me that it also goes back to the first anthologising that I did - the first obvious anthologising that I did - was Technicians of the Sacred. Now that I’ve bought the term outsider into my vocabulary it’s giving some worry to it. It seems to me that Technicians of the Sacred was also a kind of anthology or assemblage of outsider poetry. It was a poetry that was outside the domain of established literature, off into, if you break it into academic fields, anthropology, linguistics and missionary work. So the sources that I was getting at were, by and large, not literary sources, although sometimes whether through the Germans at the end of the 18th century, or through some hunters and gatherers of such works in the 19/20th century. So that was an important characteristic. It was also with an emphasis on the unwritten, the oral performative, and work that, for the most part, had a real insider function within the culture. But from our view, it was outside of literature. And I think I used phrases like ‘outside of literature’ even early in taking about that. So coming to an outsider anthology now I feel a kind of continuity from Technicians of the Sacred to whatever this one is called.
PD: And what is it that’s drawing you in?
JR: Well partly it has to do with, if I can put that, the function of poetry: with where poetry exists within the world. One is the literary function that we’re all familiar with, particularly in our culture, a real literature, a written tradition or series of traditions that are recognised as the history of poetry, the history of creative language; you know whatever literature means for us.
PD: So defining that was part of the draw for you?
JR: To see how it functions outside of that, and particularly in the areas of religion and ritual, you know sort of Technicians of the Sacred it’s full of such contexts.
PD: But why for you? What was it?
JR: Well like many of us, I begin with a sense of poetry as a calling, whether it was the delusions of a sixteen year old, or the feeling that one of us is getting into this and the literary success or failure of it didn’t matter it was beginning to define the way one lived in the world, how one saw the world. You know, it was easy enough to say if no one becomes aware of this, for me it will be a way of living. I mean, as I got to know more I even saw that for others that that was also, that it would at least begin with that, what is kind of driven into poetry or other creative work with that sense that it’s a way of life: central to a way of life.
PD: If we’re talking about starting off, that’s a very curious trajectory. Technicians of the Sacred is an unusual book in that it’s a precursor of a lot of what was to follow, there was a recognition of something which hadn’t previously been recognised. What was it - did you have a sense that a door opened - that made you step forward and into it?
JR: Well I think there was at the moment. But it took some number of years to develop in my mind. The first feeling of recognition was there’s poetry in the world which does not exist in those places where one is accustomed to find poetry existing or evident. The first time I had access to a big university library I had gone for a year of graduate school and draft evasion around 1952, during the Korean War, at the University of Michigan, it was an open stacks situation, unlike where I had done undergraduate work. And so, roaming around and coming into the anthropology area, I mean we were already interested in other cultures and the primitive and the archaic and so forth, and opening those books of myths and texts from which Gary Snyder derives the title of his early book The Syntax. Pages of what to all appearances was poetry, not just the way it looked on the page, the way it was set up on the page, but the kind of illuminations that were coming off the page there. So I began to painstakingly collect stuff - I say painstakingly because there were no photocopy machines.
PD: You transcribed them?
JR: Transcribed them, transferred them to the machine, the typewriter, and put together a pile of such things. So from that point on I knew that poetry existed in those places, and I was doing other things, I was looking for further evidence, and also it seemed to me as I went on with it that that which I was discovering as poetry there was often outside of the definitions of poetry ‘qua verse’ that were really dominant during that new critical, rather conservative, period in the forties and fifties, or at least the end of the fifties when things exploded. So I said, if we took as models for what poetry might be in our own time (visual poetry, sound poetry, conceptual poetry, poetry merging with performance and happenings and things like that) and then went back into the ethnographic stuff then suddenly in my mind an anthology of what we were then calling primitive and archaic poetry would look different from anything that had been previously assembled.
PD: But it completely speaks to all of those categories that you’ve just been talking about…
JR: Well I found that these things were specifically and highly developed within the cultures that one was looking at. This was, there was nothing primitive, nothing unformed about it, and it’s something that had gone through a development over centuries and millennia. So there was a lot to see and a lot to learn from in that.
PD: Did you find that you had encounters with people, as well as with the page?
JR: First I was doing it and it was from books, it was an extension of the first library revelations circa 1962. Others were interested in this as well, it was not just me, so it was something that we could share and talk about and suggestions came from various other poets, but I had not gone directly, as Olson would say, to see for one’s self. I had not gone into. Not at that point. But some time around 65 or 66, I did a series of performances of “primitive and archaic” poetry with David Anton, Jackson MacLow and Rochelle Owens, a reading of that, and it came to the attention of Moses Ash, who did Folkways Records, and we put out a two disc poetry reading of that material, which then came through Paul Blackburn’s wife at that time, Sarah Blackburn, it was bought to the attention of a woman called Anne Freedgood who was top editor at Doubleday. And this was in the 1960s when publishers like Doubleday thought, you know, there might be some commercial value in poetry… You know, a rare occasion!
PD: Yep, humbug and bah.
JR: And I went to meet Anne Freedgood and told her what I had in mind, to do an assemblage of this kind, and there was an immediate contract – it’s not like working with a university publisher where it has to go through a whole process. Anne Freedgood said, “It sounds very good, I’ll draw up a contact”, and she did. And I was given a totally free hand. At that point there were certain models I had in mind. There was an early French anthology by Roger Calorie and Jean-Claus Rembert called The Treasury of Universal Poetry, which covered a lot of that ground but without commentaries, without any specific reference to contemporary work. And there was Donald Allen’s Great New American Poetry anthology; you know which, rightly or wrongly, divided the poems and the poets into certain categories. But then followed also with a section of poetics and biographies, or whatever, of the poets. So I thought, that’s an interesting format, that’s not just an anthology there is something more involved in that. So I thought, well I can also do both thematic and geographical divisions and I could do a section on commentaries in the back which would serve a double function of giving some context to the work that was being anthologised, and make those comparisons to contemporary work that I thought would be of use now.
PD: So you had two templates there?
JR: Yeah. So all of that was pretty much complete around 1967, say, I may be off by a year or so but I think the hard cover edition of Technicians of the Sacred appeared in 68. So I was just about finished with the book, and I had led Gary Snyder and he was very excited for the work of the anthropologist Stanley Diamond. Diamond was living in New York, and he hooked me up with Diamond, and Stanley said to me, “you’re doing all of this library work, but you know, you should go out into the field!” So he sent us up mid-winter to Santica Reservation in western New York State, where I very quickly made contact with singers and song-makers, among the Seneca’s. Richard Grosenger introduced me to the ethnic musicologist David McAllester, who, you know, was doing a lot of ethnic musicological work including the words from Navajo. David set me up with a lot of Navajo material before I even began to do these experimental translations. And then, you know, there were contacts that developed with a contemporary native-American, American-Indian writers, principally Simon Ortiz, who was very helpful, Acoma-Indian, and a native speaker of that language.
PD: That’s the first time you’ve used the word experimental. You were saying that it became an experiment, so there’s a sense that I have that it’s shifting from something that’s occurred almost in theory and on paper to…
JR: Well the experimental side before that was to see the relation of the traditional Indian or African work to what was happening in our time. Often there was what seemed to be extremely interesting material but the translations were very pedestrian. They were scholars’ translations, they weren’t poets’ translations. So I used the term in Technicians of the Sacred: ‘working’, you know my working after a translation by so and so and so and so. And retrospectively I don’t know how much working! It varied from poem to poem to poem. I also, I think this was experimental by its very nature, following a conversation with Dick Higgins, coming back from a reading in Philadelphia. We began talking about poetry and near-poetry; I think he used the term ‘near-poetry’. And somehow I got the idea that if, instead of separating the words from a more complicated ritual totality, what if one separated the ritual, the actions and did small scenarios of them after the manner of the scenarios for happenings and events and so forth that Dick was already doing with Something Else Press. So I went back to the books and set up a number of those in his Great Bear Pamphlet Series, he published a little book called Rituals, a book of Primitive Rights and Events, and then I incorporated that into Technicians of the Sacred. There was a section of the book called ‘A Book of Events’ which came out of that. But with the Seneca and then with the Navajo, even I couldn’t get back to the original languages on my own, but with the Navajo, McAllester led me into it, showing me not only the words but the word distortions … untranslatable syllables. And I wanted to incorporate all of that and finally do something to translate the music into something I can handle in performance. And with the Seneca I worked principally with a song-maker and sometime ritualist named Richard Johnny-John, Dick Johnny-John, and did that series of translations the opens ‘Shaking the Pumpkin’ that I translated as a type of concrete poetry, although it was not concrete poetry, it had no visual form it was a lot of oral tradition. But, oral tradition of songs with very few words, often very few words and other sounds, and I wanted a quick way to show the sophistication of that kind of minimal poetry and so what I chose was concrete poetry. And at that point I was in very close touch with Ian Hamilton-Findlay, who recently I’ve had a chance to go over letters that we were exchanging…
PD: Oh really? I’ve just been photographing a Finlay letter to Robert Lax and vice versa.
JR: So that was important. Also I had met, well it was Higgins, and McWilliams had become a good friend. Another thing I did for Higgins was to translate a book of selections from Gomringer, which is something I got a real kick out of because again there’s a sort of minimalism about it. How do you translate minimal work? Well you go ahead and find ways of doing it! And so that was my involvement in the area of concrete poetry.
PD: It’s a nice use of the material that’s around you, as a means of translation, so you bring yourself to what it is that you’re exploring.
JR: Yeah, a further thing with the Seneca, well a little within Navajo also, but particularly with the Seneca, was that over in England I had become very friendly and begun to do work with Ian Tyson, who was then, oh at first he was publishing with something called Circle Press, and then Tetrad Press was his own, and he took my minimal concrete poems from Seneca and worked them into a more elaborate but still concrete forms, so there was a further step taken.
PD: Again it’s a dumb question: what it is that outsiders bring to the table?
JR: Well, there’s the persistence of the work. It’s work that’s done under uncomfortable circumstances. And that’s why there’s always the temptation to just bring in everything in contemporary circumstances, most everything done as poetry is done under uncomfortable circumstances, but there are degrees of…discomfort… So, also getting back to contacts that one had later on, when we went around 1979, I think, to visit the Mazatec, Mexican Mazatec shamaness Maria Sabina in Wahaka. She was a woman living in very humble circumstances, practicing with language as a healer, I meant the context was healing. One may give oneself airs about the poetry that we do having a healing function - I’m a little sceptical about that - but in her case, one could not speak of poetry; it was not the display of the art that was important but the functionality of what she was doing. And something up to a point that she was doing without recognition. In the curious way that these things happen, she became for a while an internationally-known figure, she was kind of aware of that, but that was not important thing for her. So, very often there is a kind of, if it’s the right word, a kind of heroic function, people will persist with their vision of language and poetry and you know…the most difficult of circumstances. But you don’t give that up, you work with it, and you develop it.
PD: Do you think that changes your sense of poetic experience?
JR: I think sometimes it’s a usefully humbling experience, but usefully. And it’s very easy to lose track of that, you know how essential to a life all of that can be. And under certain circumstances how essential to the life of the community it can be, but we’re very far away from that.
PD: I once asked Lawrence Weiner at a big discussion: “Why do we do this”? And he said, “Art helps you to live”. And do you perhaps think that this works because it has the display function taken away from it?
JR: It’s interesting, it’s art that does not call itself art. It’s poetry that does not call itsself poetry. So, partly, there’s an imposition of those terms by us because it looks so much like what we do as poetry, particularly when you’ve opened up the definition of poetry to include more than was poetry 100 years ago.
PD: Do you think that that’s actually a function of making the anthologies that you’ve made, that not only have you made something, but you have also broken something that has preceded it?
JR: Oh, I think there is always an impulse to break something that preceded! An unpublished statement by William Carlos Williams, when I was an undergraduate in City College in New York, Williams came to give a poetry reading. And even back then the custom was you rounded up a few undergraduates, a few students, and let them have lunch with Williams. And I think we wanted to do an interview with Williams, I mean we didn’t know how to do an interview, we had a little wire, not a tape, a wire recorder, and recorded him answering questions and it was very nice. Williams, who was partly of immigrant stock himself, you know on the mothers’ side. He was coming to City College which was then a university filled with immigrants or the children of immigrants, and Williams was of course about the American language and really creating a new American language. And so speaking of the language he said to us, “Take hold of the language, smash it to hell, you have a right to it!” And that’s all I remember from the interview! Him saying “Smash it to hell! You have a right to it!” And so it was a question of having been given permission to break something apart, and even though in the 20th century there had already been movements before the 1950s-60s, the earlier experimental avant gardist movements, there was still a sense of the oppressiveness of an older view of literature. Then later on it seemed you can also remake the past as you are remaking the present. And for me maybe the culmination of that was the third volume of Poems for the Millennium with the assistance of Jeffrey Robinson, a true romanticist. He took hold of romanticism as much on the global scale as we could and… broke up it a little.
PD: Ka-pow! It’s a wonderful book, I believe, and a very important book. The anthology that I’m putting together now, the idea of it is that it’s something that I would have wanted to encounter when I was in my twenties. That there’s a gathering of folk who, particularly in the UK, would not be see-able. But also what I very much want to do is have a sense of the tradition that this work comes out of. So it’s different from the Emmet Williams. I’m coming up to 50, and my parents have just turned 80, and we had an extraordinary birthday party where I saw the grandkids and great-grandkids actually echoing the movements and the faces of the older people in the room, so we had the succession of generations. For me, that’s very much stayed with me this year, that’s been one of the big events of my year. I have the sense that I’ve come from somewhere and I’m heading somewhere. Do you feel in some ways you’ve guarded a tradition, as well as broken - that you’ve also been a custodian?
JR: I think so. Also, in terms of where it all comes from, I’ve felt a little, you know, the need to stress the newness or the originality of what my generation was doing, but also with a sense that it comes from somewhere. That - was it Harold Rosenberg that had a book called The Tradition of the New? - at a certain point the new takes on a singular importance, and in some ways you can push back and back and see that it’s always taken on a singular importance. But really the sense of the new, the avant-garde, the revolutionary, the experimental, to my mind really gets touched off with Romanticism. And that was the idea of doing a book of reinterpreted romanticism after the first two volumes of the Poems for the Millennium.
PD: You just talked about remaking the past. It was such a leap into difference after the first two volumes; I would have anticipated it would be a volume of very young practitioners or something…
JR: I could have gone that way; well it’s something I back away from. At this point to take on the work of people much younger than myself, it seems impertinent. I mean, it think that has to be done from within that generation. I can be very interested in it, I love to spend time with people, but it comes to much of seen from an elder position to be picking and choosing and you know, so definitely decided not to go that way. And even one of the uncomfortable things, the second volume of Poems for the Millennium gets into my own generation… that’s tricky. It’s easier to work on the first volume, poets of my father’s generation, or older, going back into the late 19th century.
PD: People you wouldn’t be on the phone to.
JR: Right, or people who wouldn’t be on the phone to me! Even with another short-lived anthology American Philosophy, it was not intended as a contemporary anthology or contemporary work although there was a lot in it but, to map various possibilities that have come up in American poetry from pre-Columbian times to the present. But some contemporary poets were in it, and some were not in it and were hurt about that.
PD: What is it about the act of anthologising, what drives you to do it?
JR: Well, I found a vehicle to reorganise one’s sense of past and present: to explore the extent of poetry as it has existed, as it may exist. So that was part of it, I began to sense it as a kind of large form that I could work in, in a form that, what would be the right term, a kind of appropriative form. Not working with my own material but working with a whole range of poetry for a range of people.
PD: You’ve talked about assembling a few times…
JR: Yeah, anthology when I came to it, and probably even more so now, I mean anthology can be a pretty dirty word. I started out not really liking anthologies very much, because it does become a way of freezing poetry, freezing literature. So one doesn’t want to add to that, and it’s been pointed out how anthologies feed on previous anthologies and thus a canon is formed of it and so forth. And the idea is, I mean it was to promote certain kids of poetry, even certain poets, but not to avoid the canonical, to avoid that quality that fixes things, or pretends to fix things, forever.
PD: You chose certain people. How did you decide?
JR: Well with Technicians of the Sacred I was looking for types of poetry. And then in writing about then what came to mind in relation to a certain kind of Navajo horse song, what is it? ‘Free Union’. As the Navajo poet or generation of poets breaks down the body of the horse into a series of metaphors, similes, Rethondes does that in ‘Free Union’, so if the Navajo horse song of that kind is in the front part of the book in the commentary.
PD: So you’re making those entries.
JR: So then we can also go back to the biblical Song of Songs, which you know does the same thing in describing the love in both female and male.
PD: You’ve talked about selecting certain people and yet at the same time being uncomfortable with the feeling of freezing people and making a canon. What were the grounds that you used to select people?
JR: Well volume one was largely the predecessors to my generation. A sense of work that broke through in its own time and that still offered the possibility of breakthrough into our time. And coming into our time, there’s something of that because already the poets that are represented are largely poets who emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, maybe a little earlier. But then it did carry into poets who, that volume came out in 1998, were still relatively young. I think even 13 years later, one is relatively young!
PD: Speaking relatively.
JR: When I first became interested in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets they were all in their twenties and thirties, now they’re all well in to their sixties and some have pushed into the seventy year mark. So, that’s curious.
PD: It’s an adjustment isn’t it?
JR: You ain’t seen nothing yet! But it does become personal also in a certain way. You know, these poets have meant something to me; I’ve drawn from their work and I wanted to show that. Then you come across certain limits, the one thing in volume 2 of Poets for the Millennium seems to be the one poet that we most got hit for, not including, was Jack Spicer. The book was inevitably overloaded on Americans, but it’s alright, we said, this is an anthology being done in America.
PD: It’s where you’re sitting.
JR: So we’ll be fairly heavy on Americans. Even so, we were confronted by three very interesting poets from San Francisco, or Berkley, Duncan Lazer and Spicer. For me, and it think for Pierre also, Duncan was an absolute necessity. And might have had by himself represented that moment of San Francisco renaissance. We decided to include Lazer rather than Spicer, and we had already in volume 1 in the commentaries some Spicer … but anyways, Spicer was not a separately designated poet in volume 2 and we heard about that. But it was a worldwide anthology, there were a lot of major and extraordinary figures who didn’t come into it.
PD: An auspicious gathering nonetheless, and it’s become a sort of totemic thing. There are two questions that I’d like to round up with if you’ve still got some energy to talk. One of them is that when I met you first, it was in Manchester and we were having a meal at Tony Trehy’s house.
JR: With his robotic dog!
PD: With his robot dog, exactly, and the extraordinary ice cream. The robotic dog has been replaced with a dog that actually has fur and is not in any way cyber. But I believe robodog’s in a cupboard somewhere, accruing value. It’s apparently a very valuable robot. And Tony, I think, has done an extraordinary thing, in British poetics I would say right now he’s one of the most important people that we have, because he’s woven together these two strands of practice, the artistic and the poetic, and paralleled these two sets of people and made them aware of each other to a greater or lesser degree. And because of his interest he wanted to meet you and he knew you were in town, so he arranged a meal, which is when I met you. You talked about New York State and re-knowing this land as a result of Technicians of the Sacred. And sitting in New York right now, I wonder if you could explain if that book has given you a different sense of where you exist.
JR: I don’t know if I can answer that. I finally recognise that I’m an urban person, I really go toward cities as others go towards mountains …What Technicians did give me, or led to, not so much the new wilderness of New York, but that business of exploring ancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen, to which New York lends itself - obviously a heavy Jewish presence in New York. Again, it’s the deep history, the deep culture, the deep imagery coming out of that, and I think Technicians of the Sacred released me to do that. I think there is a possibility of the trans-cultural, of crossing cultures, and one doesn’t have to be ashamed of that. But, before Technicians of the Sacred that didn’t come to surface. And after, towards the end of Technicians of the Sacred, I began that kind of exploration, and again with the sense of - whatever term you use - breaking apart some older version of that, which I had found unsatisfactory to start with. I didn’t have a mind to get into the writing of what has become known as identity poetry, but I had found that I could do things with that and that forms of writing and performing that I had begun to be involved with otherwise could be transferred to that with unanticipated consequences. And so, a couple of years after Technicians of the Sacred while I was doing Shaking the Pumpkin, through New Directions I published a poem in 1931, and shortly after that tried an assemblage of Jewish poetry and poetics, a big Jewish book later known as Exiled in the Word. Now otherwise with the city, I use the term new wilderness, working with the musician- composer Charlie Marrow, in the city we founded something called the New Wilderness foundation, which was an outlet for ethno-poetics, musicology, experimental music, experimental poetry, concerts, radio broadcasts, tape recording publications – I don’t know if it got finally into CDs or it was gone before CDs came into regular usage. And New Wilderness was with a sense of transferring the area of performance from the old wilderness into the new wilderness of the city. Wilderness is uncultivated, wilderness is desert, you know to make that awesome! Whatever we meant by it, it was a good title!
PD: Last things: I’d like to loop back to the very first thing that we ever talked about. When I met you in Manchester, Finlay came up in conversation, Hamilton Finlay. I had just curated a show of his work because he had died. And you were talking about the tensions in this person who was both agoraphobic and yet celebrates space and movement and is a gardener, a miniaturist in a way, but also massively angry. There’s a kind of sweetness to the work, but then there’s this very powerful undercurrent of the embattled.
JR: It really struck me with Finlay and Little Sparta bounded by agoraphobia, is also a kind of outsiderdom. The disability that brings about that isolation, it’s not a wilful act, you know, it’s in the nature of and makes it impossible for him to go outside those mental boundaries, as the intelligence is imagination will take him there. But, I broke with Finlay as probably others did at the time of the Fulcrum Press incident when he called on me and others to denounce Stuart Montgomery, who was also a friend. And I wrote back and said, “I can’t do this, aren’t you going over the top a little?’ – You know the wrong thing to say! Then, I felt the fury of Finlay directed at me in such a way that I think something like twenty years or more we were out of contact except that I did publish some of his things in the anthologies. And then, you know, we met again when I was in Glasgow and was taken to Little Sparta and it was a very happy reunion and then I became friendly with Alec, who in many ways resembles his father, although if there’s that kind of fury in Alec I haven’t seen it, he seems different in that way…
PD: There seem to be several differences.
JR: …and the end of the millennium involvement with the University of California Press, after the three anthologies, well really after the first two, Joris and I put together a series of single books called Poets for the Millennium, so, Retaund, Stein, Maria Sabina, Nicole Brossard, a few others. And the last one that we accepted and that will soon come out is an Ian Hamilton Finlay volume edited by his son.
PD: Yes, someone was telling me about that very delightedly two days ago.
JR: And that got me looking at least at the Finlay part of our correspondence, you know including letters denouncing me at a certain point! But see how there was evidence of that bad temper from earlier along in what he’s saying about other people…
PD: I was enchanted that in Little Sparta there’s actually a Huff Lane, you know, where you can go and sulk. There’s a very functional part of the garden which is for pacing up and down and huffing, as we would say over there.
JR: The last time we were in the UK, I guess earlier this year or last year, we met Alec at Little Sparta; very terrible, wet cold day sort of in a way quite marvellous for all that. And that was interesting because the first time we’d been in Little Sparta was a year after Ian started digging the pond.
PD: Oh god, had you not seen it since then?
JR: No, there was one time when I had the reconciliation.
PD: Okay you’d been there again.
JR: This was the third time I had been there.
PD: Interesting to have those three instalments…
You gave me a little thumbnail sketch of Finlay and of the tensions and the kind of things that he was resolving when he embarked upon this poetic life, I wondered if you might do the same of yourself? If you could end with that?
JR: Well, maybe put it this way, Finlay, maybe more than me, is exemplary of what John Cage would speak about as the art-life connection. And I’ve always wondered about art: art has tyrannised over life, now life has tyrannised over art. But I think it’s a question of bringing one’s art and one’s life together. So from time to time we live in, what I’ve spoken about as a ‘condition of poetry’, and at that time the poetry and the life seem in sync. I mean this doesn’t last for too long, but when it does its really quite marvellous. And there’s something, if we’re talking about Finlay, there’s something exemplary in his devotion to that life or how the life of the poetry came together for him almost with disastrous results. Because there would be this unmanageable, unreasonable fury if he felt that life and art under threat from somebody. What would seem from the outside to be a trivial matter… would result in fury…
PD: It was a threat to the life?
JR: It was a threat to the life. I think I’ve managed to steer clear of that, although sometimes with difficulty.
PD: So what has the life led you into?
JR: Well, it has led me into a condition where I can’t imagine life without poetry, poetry as one of its centres, although there are also an affectionate number of relationships with a number of people, some of those not separated from poetry.
ABOVE
Textwork by Jerome Rothenberg, Storey Gallery Lancaster 2015
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