NEWS & EVENTS • NEW TITLES • CATALOG • ABOUT US • CONTACT • PROFESSORS • LINKS • NEWSLETTER

Triptych, by Jerome Rothenberg

Poland/1931, Khurbn, Burning Babe; Introduction by Charles Bernstein

The key book by the internationally celebrated poet with the only "Polish ghetto-hassidic-cowboy  and Indian American comic voice" (Robert  Duncan) in history.

"Jerome Rothenberg wields a unique, personal language,  one unfolding line by line with strength and integrity." --Los Angeles Times 

"Rothenberg creates a singular voice in American poetry." --Bloomsbury Review  

if only our eyes were wild enough  
to see them our hearts to know their terror 
--Jerome Rothenberg  

For the last half of the twentieth century into the new millennium, no other American poet has been as deeply  engaged in the opening of the poem (its boundaries and its possibilities) as Jerome Rothenberg. As editor, translator, essayist, performer,  groundbreaking anthologist, one of the founding figures of enthnopoetics, and most significantly, as poet, Rothenberg has remapped the art against the grain of a single "great tradition."  

Reminiscent of H.D.'s Trilogy, Triptych assembles three long serial poems into one multilayered sacred text. Like Kafka's America, Calvino's Euphemia, and Babel's Odessa, Rothenberg's Poland in Poland/1931, first published in 1974, is a "poland stuffed with poland / brought in the imagination." Fifteen years later, Poland materializes into Khurbn (a Yiddish word meaning destruction, holocaust, human disaster), a poem  summoned from the author's visit to his ancestral town, Ostrow-Mazowiecka, and the confrontation with his  family's annihilation -- including an uncle who killed himself -- during World War II. "Allowing my uncle's khurbn to speak through me..." the author writes, "the poems are the clearest message I have ever gotten  about why I write poetry." And now in 2006, The Burning Babe rises out of the furnace of khurbn, "reaching  through the ruins / for a place to soar"....    

JEROME ROTHENBERG was born in New York City in 1931. New Directions publishes ten books of his poetry and essays. His anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and the two-volume Poems for the Millennium.Rothenberg has been the recipient of many honors, including an American Book Award, two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Awards, and two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards. In 2001 he was elected to the World Academy of Poetry (UNESCO).  

Date of publication: June 2007