Seedings and Other Poems

Jerome Rothenberg holds a premier place in the American avant-garde. The poems in Seedings, his newest collection, leap across history. Past and future become entwined, and the intricate paths reaching from one century and one millennium into another double back into timelessness (“as the twentieth century winds down/the nineteenth century begins/again”). The long title poem that opens this fin-de-siecle gathering is, appropriately, a celebration of poets and friends––such as Robert Duncan, George Oppen, and Paul Blackburn––who have entered what Rothenberg calls “a Paradise of Poets.” “Seedings” is followed by four other sections, “Improvisations” is a series of high-energy poems in a mode of open writing characteristic of much of the poet’s experimental work, while “Twentieth Century Unlimited” is an assemblage of travel poems and personal observations. “An Oracle for Delfi” revisits and sees anew a classical landscape long the inheritance of Western poets. A final sequence, “14 Stations,” joins the concise verbal techniques of gematria (traditional Hebrew numerology) with the stark agonies of the Holocaust last explored by Rothenberg in Khurbn & Other Poems (1989).

Rothenberg's first collection since his 1993 The Lorca Variations is a mixed gathering of stylistic and thematic concerns that featured prominently in many of his other collections. Most of the poems mark a return to what may be his least interesting style?a heavily Dada-influenced avant-garde poetics best seen in his 1983 That Dada Strain. A section of "Improvisations" seems forced and mannered ("Look, the girl in white cries out, the sun has grown a moustache"). Another section, "An Oracle for Delfi," doesn't quite achieve its self-proclaimed "classical" goal, "to make a poem of seedings/ like poems & photographs of hands/ all of us share." Rothenberg is far more successful in "Seedings," the long opening poem on life and death. Its plain style displays the influence of the primitive oral and tribal poetics that have been the focus of much of his recent work ("...it is better that the dead/ stay dead their confusion would only alarm us/ who remain alive & sometimes have to think/ about the dead & what to say to them/ to set things straight"). The closing section, "14 Stations"?written to accompany a series of drawings of Nazi concentration camps?is a powerful and sad meditation on the Holocaust, the subject of his 1989 collection, Khurbn & Other Poems.
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Rothenberg evokes the dream in, of, and through language more effectively than any other contemporary poet. In the strangely aphoristic set of "Improvisations" included here are such sentences as "The first of May is like the early half of dreaming: it is cut in two between two monkeys" and "There was a magic that our fathers made for us in sleep: a language rhyming clocks with death." If the syntax is conventional, the images are the intensely personal stuff of dreams. Yet there is a subject that unifies the apparently disparate pieces of such utterances, and that is approaching death, prefigured in the deaths of friends who become the "seedings" of the title poem. Rothenberg's words on this subject are piercingly emotional: "I wonder sometimes what the last word will be / spoken and heard before I die, / & I feel a great sadness not to know it / in advance, or ever know it." His work is simultaneously emotionally complex and linguistically experimental. Patricia Monaghan

Rothenberg (Poems for the Millennium, LJ 10/1/95), perhaps the finest American visionary poet alive, finds the perfect vehicle as he sets his sights on the approaching millennium. The "seedings" of the title are not only the seeds of new life but "the seeds of war." And a few pages later: "I write this in a dream passage between worlds.../ Now is the time to make your peace with earth/ now is the time to overcome forgetting." Visions aside, this collection extends other aspects of his 40-year career. In brief, hard-hitting, single-image poems recalling his earlier "Sightings," he takes heart by examining and offering up the skewed imagery of gods, saints, and martyrs that artists have depicted. Recalling Vienna Blood (New Directions, 1980), this volume closes with a memorable sequence based on 14 railroad "stations" of the Holocaust. Here he relies upon chance numerology as both a distancing and a drawing closer, but, unlike chance sequences by other writers, these poems are honed to perfection.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
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