A Cruel Nirvana

Jerome Rothenberg

2012

Paperback, 121 p.

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A CRUEL NIRVANA both is and is not a new Jerome Rothenberg collection. In other words, almost everything in this collection has been published before. Each of the three major sections (Narratives and Real Theater Pieces, The Notebooks, and Conversations) was originally published individually. A CRUEL NIRVANA brings together these long out-of-print smaller gatherings in a way that illuminates their important place in Rothenberg's crucial contribution to Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century poetics. Returning to these poems, properly contextualized, one finds them communicating in one field of immanence. If we feel exhausted by meaningless violence and marketing, A CRUEL NIRVANA shows us wellsprings of meaning and power we missed or just couldn't see in our exhaustion or disaffection.

Jerome Rothenberg is the winner of numerous awards, among them two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Awards in Literature, two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards, the Alfonso el Sabio Award for Translation, and two American Book Awards. He is the author of over eighty collections of poetry, twelve from New Directions and the most recent, Concealments and Caprichos, from Black Widow Press (2010); two collections of essays; ten books of translations from Spanish, German, French, and Czech; and editor or co-editor of nine anthologies, among them the seminal Technicians of the Sacred (Doubleday & Co., 1968, and University of California Press, 1985) and the recent three-volume Poems for the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995, 1998, and 2009). He was editor/publisher of Hawks Well Press in the 1960s and co-editor (with Dennis Tedlock) of the journal Alcheringa (1970-1977), which inaugurated the ethnopoetics movement. He is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Visual Arts at the University of California in San Diego, where he lives with his wife Diane.

Poems and Poetics
Jerome Rothenberg at Penn Sound