The title of Jerome Rothenberg's newest collection suggests jazz, blues,
and above all the Dada movement in European art and poetry in the years
immediately following World War I. In my own world, he explains in his
pre-face to That Dada Strain, the Dada fathers who inhabit the opening
poems of this book are necessary figures, & to summon them up along with
their legends is no more erudite than to summon up Moses or George
Washington or Harpo or Karl Marx, & so on. For Rothenberg, the Dada
connection, his looking back to Dada founders Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball,
Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia, is especially apt, emphasizing as
it does a strain that is echoed and replayed throughout all his work,
whether it be oral poetry, ethnopoetics, translation, or the assembling
of innovative anthologies.
Following the title section is Imaginal Geographies, a group of poems
that draw largely on the poet's private self, his own language and
perceptions, in much the same way that the Dada poets recorded
associations between images for which no key was readily available. In
the third and final section, Altar Pieces, Rothenberg attempts, as he
says, to return to the world in which human beings still suffer both the
loss of bread & words.
Jerome Rothenberg's previous books of poetry with New Directions include
Poland/1931 (1974), Poems for the Game of Silence (1975), A Seneca
Journal (1978), and, most recently, Vienna Blood (1980). Pre-Faces &
Other Writings, his first collection of poetics, was awarded the Before
Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 1982.
