Jerome Rothenberg - Early Life and Work

Early Life and Work

Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New York City, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents and is a descendant of the Talmudist Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. He attended the City College of New York, graduating in 1952, and in 1953 he received a Master's Degree in Literature from the University of Michigan. Rothenberg served in the U.S. Army in Mainz, Germany from 1953 to 1955, after which he did further graduate study at Columbia University, finishing in 1959. He lived in New York City until 1972, when he moved first to the Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York State, and later to San Diego, California, where he lives presently.

In the late 1950s, he published translations of German poets, including the first English translation of poems by Paul Celan and Günter Grass, among others. He also founded Hawk's Well Press and the magazines Poems from the Floating World and some/thing, the latter with David Antin, publishing work by important American avant-garde poets, as well as his first collection, White Sun Black Sun (1960). He wrote works which he described as deep image in the 1950s and early 1960s, during that time publishing eight more collections, and the first of his extensive anthologies of traditional and modern poetry, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poems from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (1968, revised and expanded 1985). By the end of the 1960s he had also became active in poetry performance, had adapted a play (The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, 1964) for Broadway production, and had opened the range of his experimental work well beyond the earlier “deep image” poetry.