The Serpent and the Fire

Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-520-30354-6
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 816 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 168 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 1275 g

Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology—an experiment in omnipoetics with Javier Taboada—reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries

 

The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American “omnipoetics.”

 

The Serpent and the Fire is divided into four chronological sections—from early pre-Columbian times to the immediately contemporary—and five thematic sections that move freely across languages and shifting geographical boundaries to underscore the complexities, conflicts, contradictions, and continuities of the poetry of the Americas. The book also boasts contextualizing commentaries to connect the poets and poems in dialogue across time and space.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rothenberg, Jerome

Taboada, Javier

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatur: Sammlungen, Anthologien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Pre-face 
Thanks & Acknowledgments

PRELUDIUM
America before America

(Patagonia, Argentina)
from Cueva de las Manos 

(Lower Pecos River, Texas)
from The White Shaman Mural: Narrative & Vision 

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen: from The Amber Goddess
Is Back 

(Epi-Olmec)
The Tuxtla Statuette 

(Adams, Ohio)
American Earthworks: The Great Serpent Mound 

(Inuit)
Inuksuk (Helper) 
(Mayan, Palenque, Mexico)
from Temple of the Tree of Yellow Corn 

(Quechua)
A Narrative Quipu 

(K’iche’ [Quiché] Mayan)
from Popol Vuh 
Jerome Rothenberg: An Academic Proposal

(Mbya-Guaraní)
from The Ayvu Rapyta: The Origins of Human Language 
Jorge Elías Adoum: “In the Beginning …” 

See excerpt for complete Table of Contents

Über Autor(innen)

Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024) was an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer, with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and the five-volume Poems for the Millennium. He was a founding figure of ethnopoetics as a combination of poetic practice and theory, and was a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance.
 
Javier Taboada is a Mexican poet, translator, and anthologist currently working as Editorial Director of the Press at the Popular Autonomous University of the State of Puebla.