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Cover of The Rothenberg Variations by Pierre Joris 127x210 mm, 20pages, green card cover, hand sewn binding in violet twist. 

Cover illustration: A micrograph of a sample of cyanophyte

ISBN 1903090 41 5 

Ordering Information

This sequence of poems was composed to honor Jerome Rothenberg on his 70th birthday
and was first read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church celebration for that occasion,
held on Wednesday, December 12th, 2001.
They are composed following a détournée +7 method: each poem is based on word materials
(each 7th word) of the first 15 poems in JR’s first and latest books.
The arrangement is the author's own, as are excisions, additions, subtractions and divisions.

Pierre Joris is a poet/translator/professor at the University at Albany.
With Jerome Rothenberg he co-edited the monumental Poems for the Millennium.

 

Click here to go to Pierre Joris' Homad Page

Click here to go to Samizdat 7, a special Joris / Rothenberg issue.

See below for an extract from The Rothenberg Variations.

from The Rothenberg Variations

ROTHENBERG VARIATION # 4:


everything gives as
horses give a language
a town gives tigers
a scarf gives voice 
a church even gives heart things
no, a thunderbolt on a fish
who quakes & raises us
pursuing heart things
a way
even
a language 
out-hinged
but a way



ROTHENBERG VARIATION # 9:

ice hooks
meat hooks
white & black hooks 

the air listens
no one sits burning
we are all
the dancer walks
on air
whose will raised tresses
we have seen domains
he possesses
listen to what’s on
tender hooks dreams
fashioned in meat
licking we sit
face to face beneath a dream
of mercy toward a sea
drowns every  black
hook feeling
a face wandering beneath


ROTHENBERG VARIATION # 12:

what a high hairy hell
both troubled with bigger stein
which wrapped world phantom
iron down now
a silver sky revolving
around narrow bedposts
green dead ones
order out some frailty chaos
a work of squalor princes
says to us
numbers circles
that clock silence once
yet fingers cool