Jerome Rothenberg was a legendary poet, translator and anthologist. His work on various poetry anthologies, including Poems for the Millennium were an inspiration for our Cascadian Zen series. He died on April 21, 2024 and we’re presenting this archive audio of the interview conducted in November 2001 as our latest Cascadian Prophets podcast. R.I.P. Jerome! Our introduction from 2001:

Read the introduction of a typical poetry anthology and you get something like this from William Harmon in the top 500 poems:

The 19th Century seems to have been a golden age for poetry, from first to last. I do not believe the 20th will ever look so good. I am not the first to remark that the greatest writers of the 20th Century work in prose.

I guess it depends where you look from. From Jerome Rothenberg’s perspective, based on his own work, inspirations and his anthology of 20th Century verse, it looks amazing. Describing his poetry career as an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present, Jerome is a performance poet pioneer, anthologist, translator and author of over 50 books of poetry. The man who helped found the branch of Ethnopoetics, Jerome was the visiting poet for Fall 2001 at the Northwest Spoken Word Lab in Auburn, Washington, and is our special guest today on the program.