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Reference Number:

TE2/1978/124

Sound & Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry, Jerome Rothenberg 1978

A prodigious poet and translator (Celan, Gunter Grass, Schwitters, Lorca and more), Rothenberg began to push the boundaries of poetry in the fifties and sixties, moving to the Allegany Seneca Reservation in the 1972 and developing what he termed ‘ethnopoetics’, an idea that encompassed poems, folk songs, visual and sound poems and texts for ritual ceremonies. He has also published many broadly inclusive anthologies describing them as “an assemblage or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in the words of others and in [my] own words’.

Date Recorded: 1978

Length: 36 min, 48 sec

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Additional Information

Recording of Jerome Rotheberg performing sound poems. Begins with Rothenberg on stage, explaining how he’s going to structure the readings and talking about his interest in the forms of American Indian poetry. The first performance is of a song-like Seneca Indian poem accompanied with a shaker which lasts until about 8 minutes in. Rothenberg then explains the origins of the 2nd poem, which he co-translated from a series of Navaho horse songs. It again sits somewhere between poem and song, with some of the words recognisable, a narrative that is evident but not necessarily decipherable and a basic refrain of the phrase ‘some are lovely.’ This last until around 15 minutes in, after which Rothenberg introduces the next poem, a live accompaniment to a 4-track recording where he chants along to his own voice. At the end of this the camera zooms out and pans to the audience. The next poem is a celebration of letters, based on the fact that the name of God in (ancient) Greek consists solely of vowels. It starts with coherent poetry, goes into more abstract sounds and then back into poetry, with Rothenberg ringing a small bell at one point. After around 32 minutes the recording cuts straight to the next performance, a duet between Rothenberg and his own manipulated voice on tape. The image quality of the tape is patchy at times, it ends as the final performance finishes.