Khurbn and Other Poems
Jerome Rothenberg
(Author)
Description
In Yiddish, khurbn is the word for "total destruction," the word for what the English-speaking world calls the Jewish "Holocaust" of World War II. In 1987, thirteen years after the publication of his book of ancestral poems, Poland/1931, Jerome Rothenberg visited Poland and the small town of Ostrow-Mazowiecka, from which his parents had emigrated in 1920. "I hadn't realized," he writes, "that it was only fifteen miles from Treblinka..." Out of the poet's confrontation with his family's annihilation came Khurbn & Other Poems. "The poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka are the clearest message I have ever gotten about why I write poetry. They are an answer also to the proposition that poetry cannot or should not be written after Auschwitz." For decades a leader of the American literary avant-garde, Rothenberg, with Khurbn & Other Poems, adds his voice to those writers, like Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, who have sought to name the unnamable at the ruinous heart of the history of our time.Product Details
Price
$12.95
$12.04
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
October 17, 1989
Pages
113
Dimensions
5.61 X 0.61 X 8.25 inches | 0.5 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780811211086
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of poetry including acclaimed volumes such as Poland/1931, Khurbn, and The Lorca Variations (all from New Directions). Describing his poetry career as "an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present," he has also edited ten major anthologies, including Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium (three volumes, co-edited with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey C. Robinson). His poetry has been translated extensively into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Japanese, Lithuanian, Chinese, and Finnish. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and was awarded an American Book Award, two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Awards and two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards, among other honors. He was elected to the World Academy of Poetry in 2001. His books available from SPD include GEMATRIA COMPLETE, THREE POEMS AFTER IMAGES BY NANCY TOBIN, CHINA NOTES & THE TREASURES OF DUNHUANG, 25 CAPRICHOS AFTER GOYA, and A BOOK OF CONCEALMENTS.
