How to be a conduit: performance, translation and the reflexive poetics of Jerome Rothenberg

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of the difficult ethics and possibilities of Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics/omnipoetics and total translation which includes performance, assemblage and reflexive poetics. I discuss Rothenberg’s performances such as the “gift events,” the Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell as well as the poem “Vienna Blood” and works of poetics. I work through complex ethical terrain in Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics which sometimes re-enact the erasure of source intertext cultures via dehistoricisation. I then show how Rothenberg’s methods of performance, total translation, reflexivity and collaborative poetics create friction and open dialogue. His techniques of performance and approaches to poetics and total translation foreground embodiment and reflexivity thus offering the possibility of an ethics and a “poesis” that must be considered if acting as a “conduit for others.” Using the metaphor of a river and the idea of an embodied friction in the reading and writing process, I think through how Rothenberg’s poesis arrest the flow of transfer. The poet, performer or translator, as well as readers and listeners, encounter a poem through their bodies and contexts, thus they are conduits and mediators themselves.