Jerome Rothenberg

Visual Arts and Literature

Jerome Rothenberg was a member of both the Visual Arts and Literature faculties. He served as Chair of the Visual Arts Department and as director of the Literature Department's creative writing program.

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally renowned poet, performance artist, critic and scholar, whose work reverberates well beyond the conventional and somewhat arbitrary categories that have often proved useful to define academic disciplines. He published over eighty books, booklets and pamphlets of poetry, several of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, German, Polish, Swedish and Portuguese. In addition, he assembled, edited, and annotated ten enormously germinal anthologies of experimental and traditional poetry and performance, beginning with Technicians of the Sacred in 1968, and was a leading voice in the approach to creative work and mind that he named "ethnopoetics." He also acted as editor and co-editor of several notably influential magazines including Some/Thing, Alcheringa, and New Wilderness Letter, and appeared as a performance poet and artist at many of the most distinguished venues in North and South America and Europe.

Rothenberg's poetic work, Poland/1931, has been staged by the Living Theater in New York, and several of his soundplays have been produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany. His more recent works included a translation of "poems performance pieces proses plays poetics" by Kurt Schwitters (for which he won a PEN Center USA West award for translation), Poems for the Millennium, a two-volume global anthology of the twentieth-century avant-garde, A Book of the Book, a gathering of artworks and essays on the poetics and ethnopoetics of the book and writing, Writing Through, his selected translations and related writings (winner of a PEN American Center award for poetry in translation), and a first-time translation of Picasso’s collected poetry, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, & Other Poems. Both Poems for the Millennium and The Lorca Variations won PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Awards for poetry, and his book Triptych, was published in 2007. Publications for 2009 included Poetics & Polemics, a selection of his essays and interviews from 1985 to 2005, and a third volume of Poems for the Millennium, an attempt to bring nineteenth-century Romantic and Postromantic poetry into the present. His two most recent books of poetry, both published in 2010, were Gematria Complete and Concealments & Caprichos.

Official Campus Notice

April 22, 2024 

I write with the sad news of Jerry Rothenberg's passing.  He was an emeritus professor in Visual Arts, but had many, many connections on Literature as well. 

Jerry was an accomplished poet, translator, and anthologist, of such books as Technicians of the Sacred. He was a kind man, a community builder, and a good friend. 

I extend my condolences to his family and friends. He will be missed. 

Kazim Ali
Chair, Department of Literature

• M.A. in English Language and Literature, University of Michigan
• B.A. in English, City College of New York