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Jerome Rothenberg Quotes

I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic

I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

Jerome Rothenberg
Speech, Dimensions, Poetic
Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg (2016). “Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics”, p.484, Univ of California Press

As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.

Jerome Rothenberg
Sex, Taken, College
Jerome Rothenberg (1981). “Pre-faces & Other Writings”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

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