Vienna Blood: Poetry

by Jerome Rothenberg

Vienna Blood & Other Poems  is in some ways the most synthesizing of Jerome Rothenberg’s recent collections, pulling together work from the 1970s that stands apart from  Poland/1931  (1974) and  A Seneca Journal  (1978) yet at the same time continuing the enactment of past and present begun in those books. But where before he chose to restrict his exploration to ancestral Jewish and Amerindian poetries, Rothenberg now takes us on a series of broader journeys through the collapsed landscape of what he calls the ’new wilderness,” evoked as place, as structure, as mind. Written both to be read quietly on the printed page and aloud in performance, the poems in  Vienna Blood , though experimental and language-centered, are nevertheless the work of a poet who, by his own admission, is “crazy for content, make no mistake about it.” As if to underscore this point, he has appended brief comments to most of the major sections of the book, in order, as he says, “to give it some context in the way of ’oral tradition’ usually reserved for poetry readings, etc., a little of which I now commit to writing.”

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1980

About the author

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.

Reviews

[Brendan]

Rating: None. His writing is too difficult for me to understand, but it might be more accessible for you.

Rothenberg writes without punctuation often, so it is difficult to get the rhythm right. He drops foreign words and phrases into his poems. There's an affinity for phrases (as opposed to fully formed sentences). There are a lot of repetition and one-word lines in these pieces. A lot of these things are stylistic preferences, not necessarily criticisms or praise.

The long poem, "Abulafia's Circles", seems interesting if you can understand it. "Aleph Poem" is also worth noting.

Also, this:

I never knew heaven
could be terrible as hell
or be as bright - "The Notebooks"