When I returned to California from graduate school in England (U of Kent, Canterbury), I discovered the first edition of Jerome Rothenberg’s radical, brilliant anthology: Technicians of the Sacred. He created the term ethnopoetics to recognize the spoken, chanted, and sung works of tribal cultures to be significant contributions to the world of poetry, and not prose into which most were flattened in translation. Rothenberg’s work was central to changing that practice.
Inhis final anthology (he died in May of this year), The Serpent and The Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present, released this month from University of California Press, Rothenberg, with co-editor Javier Taboada, demonstrates the magnificent breadth and spirit of the poetic voice. He evolves ethnopoetics into a spacious embrace, omnipoetics:a gathering of poetry from all parts of the Western Hemisphere drawn from several millennia written in European and Indigenous languages.
My book, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California, was inspired and informed by Jerry’s vision. I am honored to have an excerpt from it included The Serpent and the Fire.
Peace=Love, Susan
Note: Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California is available as an audiobook via your library and Spotify.
