A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris [Paperback]

Jerome Rothenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003 | Series: New Directions

A landmark collection by one of America's leading avant-gardists.

A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris is Jerome Rothenberg's passage from one century—one millennium—to another. Of the one hundred poems that comprise the book, the first half were written in 1999, the second in the two years that followed. But far more than a marker of era-shifting, it is a collection that reestablishes the primacy of the poetic "I," not in the sense of a confessional, personal voice, but of the grammatical first person as both a singular witness and conduit for others—a kind of prophecy. Often incantatory, the poems in A Book of Witness are a reaffirmation of self in the face of history's darknesses, a shout for life against an indifferent universe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 16th collection of poems from the noted poet, translator and anthologist (Poems for the Millennium) uses the turn of the millennium as a pivot point for a sequence of 100 dreamlike lyrics exploring the functionality of the pronoun "I." Splicing in snippets of poems from an international cast of poets (Neruda, Takahashi, Notley, Schwitters), Rothenberg's short-lined variations on the theme of witness were written between 1999 and 2001,with the stated aim of treating the first-person pronoun as an instrument for acts of witnessing: "I came alive/ when things went/ crazy./ I pulled the plug on/ the reports of/ sturm & drang/ When someone/ signaled I/ left open/ what I/ could not close." The unnamed I of these poems, largely operating in the present tense, is infused with a historical consciousness mostly free of personal references: "I lived apart/ from what was/ forming./ I bartered/ photos of/ the dead./ Soon everything/ caved in & I/ emptied my throat/ till I/ felt cleaner." Acutely aware that poetic identity is subject to reinvention on a line-by-line basis, Rothenberg channels other voices and explores metaphysical themes rather than reflect on a personal past. The result is a sequence that builds a stark intensity through its speaker's tonal immediacy and intimacy in the face of time's passage: "I will now count/ the century/ by ones and twos./ This morning/ all the voices in my dream/ spoke with one voice./ I feel privileged to be here/ among you./ From now on/ we will live/ on borrowed time."
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About the Author

A Book of Witness is Rothenberg's thirteenth book with New Directions, his first since A Paradise of Poets (1999). An internationally celebrated poet, translator, and experimentalist, he is also the editor of several groundbreaking anthologies, most recently, with Pierre Joris, of Poems for the Millennium (University of California, 1995 and 1998). In 2002, he was the recipient, with Milos Sovak, of PEN Center USA's translation prize, for Antilyrik & Other Poems (Green Integer), by the Czech poet Viteslav Nezval.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215377
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215374
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,984,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As In the Book of Thomas, July 19, 2003

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M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris (Paperback)

Scholars speculate that the collection of sayings attributed to Christ in the Book of Thomas were used as a kind of oracle. Many of the utterances are familiar parables, but others are dream-like, perverse, shocking.

This book, too, could be used as an oracle. The voice working here is not that of Jerome Rothenberg, but of something outside the boundaries of the finite self. Each of the 100 poems included in this collection is the by-product of a shamanic ascent (or descent) into the Other that Rimbaud so revealingly invoked in his famous voyant letters. The difference between the two poets, however, is striking. Rimbaud was a brash 15 year old prodigy, ready to set off on an inward voyage, while Rothenberg, who has cast his nets across most of the world's cultures in search of the sources of the visionary, is here returning to the limitations of an aging self, as evidenced by the moving portrait included on the jacket of the book.

Interestingly enough, Rothenberg speaks of the shamaness Maria Sabina in his Postface and discusses her use of the "I," in the mushroom-induced, hallucinatory chants that brought her to the notice of ethnologists decades ago. He doesn't mention the fact that Sabina's shiftings from self to larger self were in search of a language that could heal the bodies of her clients. This omission, I believe, is quite a telling one, for clearly Rothenberg is also on a quest for healing words in these pages. In fact, one could almost say that this volume is one of the poet's most personal books, although the language, striking as it often is, seems to be the product of Oulipo-like processes.

Ultimately, every inward voyager returns to the vehicle that enables the voyage to happen--the body. Rothenberg gives witness to his ascent in a vibrant language whose source is somewhere and nowhere, but is nevertheless locked within the interval between his own birth and his future mortality.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in new and experimental poetry, as it maintains the visionary tradition of people like Moses de Leon, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman, etc. etc., in a time when that tradition has become something of a cartoon in the hands of the neo-beats. I recommend it highly.