Rothenberg’s Early Anthologies

Abstract

How was it that Jerome Rothenberg managed to produce poetry anthologies that stood out from a crowded field as essential? I discuss these questions by looking at his remarkable early trivium of anthologies, Technicians of the Sacred (1967), America a Prophecy (1973), and Revolution of the Word (1974). In these ground-breaking collections he began working out a strategy for retraining poetry readers, for showing how to activate the potentials of both modernist experimental poems, and oral poems from outside the western canon. I show how he constructed his anthologies to bring the reader face to face with the existential demands of the poem, rather than leading them to a passive reception based around the cues of conventional literary criticism. To make this argument I draw briefly on philosophical accounts of visual aesthetics. In conclusion I show how over the course of the remainder of his long career as an editor he refined the strategies he developed in these early anthologies, culminating in the Poems for the Millennium series.