This racism is scattered, diffused throughout the whole of America, grim, underhanded, hypocritical, arrogant. There is one place where we might hope it would cease, but on the contrary, it is in this place that it reaches its cruelest pitch, intensifying every second, preying on body and soul; it is in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism: in the American prisons, in Soledad Prison, and in its center, the Soledad cells. If, by some oversight, racism were to disappear from the surface of the United States, we could then seek it out, intact and more…
Tag: Jerome Rothenberg
Best Books of 2019
Miyó Vestrini | Grenade in Mouth Those who write are not even of a race. Nor a caste. Nor a class. Nor are they one. They ruin the point of living, like women in a world of science. Behind thick lenses, the court is never dull. They have all privileges: from philosophy up to anger, passing through conjugal relations, and the length of the paragraphs. Between the rights of man it is figured that the writer should write largely for himself first, then for the others, with a purpose well or poorly defined: to flood the window displays,…
Jerome Rothenberg | Revolutionary Propositions & A Personal Manifesto
1) I will change your mind;
2) any means (=methods) to that end;
3) to oppose the “devourers” = bureaucrats, system-makers, priests, etc (W. Blake);
4) “& if thou wdst understand that wch is me, know this: all that I have sd I have uttered playfully—& I was by no means ashamed of it.” (J. C. to disciples, The Acts of St. John)
riots and/or poetics [8/2019]
The exact link is uncertain. But we know the Nazis loved / America; Hitler yearned to paint a twin, // a green room where the dead are everywhere. / Asked Abraham before the flame, to the obedient tribe // What are these statues you cling to? // Why calico, why Spanish moss, why the crickets scream. / Confederates raise the undead everywhere. // In a segregated graveyard, no stone reads / private or public; the local jail is everywhere. // Before another body is buried, a window is broken. / A window was broken. The window is broken. // I look everywhere for Fanon’s knife, waiting for…
Jerome Rothenberg | Autobiography 1977 The First One Hundred
1 Archipelago of the wandering dream 2 A castle with two bodies 3 The figure of Rosa Luxemburg among the animals in cages 4 Midnight forest 5 Trains circling below the icy waters 6 A meeting in the bourse 7 The men come into the small locker room & order drinks 8 Picasso wears a hat with roses 9 He has shoes aglow with little lights 10 Electricity runs along the floor & in between the tables 11 Picasso & Rosa Luxemburg converse 12 Her face is the face of our…