Acclaimed poet and translator, editor of such ground-breaking journals
and anthologies as Alcheringa and Technicians of the Sacred, pioneer in
the fields of performance poetry and ethnopoetics, Jerome Rothenberg is
a literary radical and a major force in American poetry. Gathered here
in his New Selected Poems 1970-1985 are pivotal poems from four previous
New Directions collections, Poland/1931 (1974), A Seneca Journal (1978),
Vienna Blood (1980), and That Dada Strain (1983). Rothenberg describes
his new selection as "an attempt to isolate in the work of the last
fifteen years (and a little more) the thread of a single long poem or
sequence [in which] figures and voice's without context in the earlier
books...find a location and a shape." Open-ended, explorative, and
exuberantly and irreverently epic, the sequence ends with two new and
previously uncollected poems, "15 Flower World Variations" and "Visions
of Jesus."