Jerome Rothenberg's statement for Contemporary Poets (5th edition, 1991, pp. 827-28] is a beautiful summary of his life-work as a poet and global citizen. The enormity of mass destruction and genocide, during Rothenberg's youth, "created a crisis of expression...for which a poetics must be devised if we were to rise, again, beyond the level of a scream or of a silence more terrible than any scream."
Rothenberg will be here in February '08.