Pre-Faces and Other Writings

Pre-Faces & Other Writings is the first collection of poetics by one of the most revolutionary literary innovators of our time. In addition to more than twenty volumes of his own poetry Jerome Rothenberg has been active in a wide area of contemporary experimentation: poetry performance, both as "reading" and as "happening"; the assembling of radical anthologies and magazines (such as Technicians of the Sacred and Alcheringa) aimed at the creation of a fresh environment of poetries "freed from the bondage of a monolithic great tradition"; and the exploration of new techniques of translation especially appropriate to tribal/oral poetry. Almost singlehandedly, he founded the interdisciplinary field of "ethnopoetics"--both as the investigation of poetry across the full range of human cultures and its practice in relation to our own. Called an "oral" poet by some, a "post-modernist" by others, Rothenberg's own views--both the theories and their applications--have never before been gathered; the present book is intended to show the continuities in his own evolving poetics. "I see all my work in this regard," he comments, "as a pre-face to something that comes after. If there's still any sense in talking of an avant-garde, then that must be it for me: an insistence that the work deny itself the last word, because the consequences of closure & the closed mind have been and continue to be horrendous in the world we know."