"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 transforming a given state of affairs." - Charles Bernsteinthe Kelly Writers House Fellows program
presents
Jerome Rothenberg
Monday evening, April 28, 6:30 PM: reading/performance
Tuesday morning, April 29, 10 AM: brunch & interview/discussion
at the Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia
Seating is limited. RSVP: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 573-9749.
Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry including Poland/1931 (1974), That Dada Strain (1983), New Selected Poems 1970-1985 (1986), Khurbn (1989), and most recently, The Case for Memory (2001) and A Book of Witness (2003) and Triptych, a book that takes the poet back to the issue of the Holocaust. Describing his poetry career as "an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present," he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry, including Technicians of the Sacred (1985), comprised of tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, Revolution of the Word (1974), a collection of American experimental poetry between the two world wars and two volumes of Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998), which won the Josephine Miles Award in 1996. In 1999 and again in 2001 he was a co-organizer of the People's Poetry Gathering, a three-day festival, under joint sponsorship by City Lore and Poet's House in New York City. Rothenberg was elected to the World Academy of Poetry (UNESCO) in 2001.
For more about Writers House Fellows: http://writing.upenn.edu/~whfellow/.
Kelly Writers House Fellows is made possible by a generous grant from Paul Kelly.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
