Poems for the Game of Silence, 1960-1970

"I look for new forms and possibilities," writes Jerome Rothenberg in Poems for the Game of Silence, "but also for ways of presenting in my own language the oldest possibilities of poetry going back to the primitive and archaic cultures that have been opening up to us over the last hundred years." It is this combined sense of mystery and authenticity, in words and new structures that approach archetypal chant, that informs his poetry. First published in 1971, this volume brings together a selection of Rothenberg's early groundbreaking work: a wide range of experimental forms, both written and oral, set beside renderings of Native American, Australian, and other primitive songs, as well as the ancestral poems exploring his own origins that look forward to his later poetry.

Rothenberg has earned a preeminent position in the contemporary American avant-garde: as a poet, essayist, anthologist and performance artist, a founder of the field of ethnopoetics, and a translator of such diverse poets as Federico Garcia Lorca and Kurt Schwitters. In all his work, he has continued to aim at the creation of a fresh environment of poetries, "freed from the bondage of a monolithic 'great tradition,'" and the exploration of new techniques of translation and transformation, from the written word to oral/tribal improvisation to dada and kabbala.