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.

About the Author

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.

From Our Blog

A Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg at UC Press in 2017, seated beside his collections: “Technicians of the Sacred” and “Symposium of the Whole.”Jerome Rothenberg, who passed away on April 21, was a giant in the poetry community and a longtime author, anthologist, and translator for University of California Press

Public Fellows Spotlight: Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez

This blog post originally appeared on UC Santa Cruz's Humanities Institute Blog and is reproduced here with permission. All photographs by Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez.Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a sixth-year Literature PhD at UC Santa Cruz. In 2018 she was a Summer Public Fellow with UC Press

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

Reviews

"This seminal effort redefines what it means to write and read poetry in the Americas. It’s a must-read."
— Publishers Weekly

"No one taught me more about poetry than Jerome Rothenberg."—Nick Cave

"Embracing the Americas as 'a self-perpetuating work in progress,' this book honors poetry as ungovernable, as a field of knowledge, grounded and dispersed. The hemispheric here is also archipelagic, Indigenous, diasporic, and attuned to what Lezama Lima calls 'a continuity that questions.'"—Urayoán Noel, Associate Professor at New York University

"The Serpent and the Fire is an extraordinary compendium of the myriad poetic expressions of the Americas. Spanning three millennia, from the Neolithic to the present, from handprints to earthworks, the editors take us on a remarkable journey through pre-Conquest civilizations, invasions, colonialism, the African heritage, waves of immigration, Indigenous cultures, industrialization, creation myths, geographies, ethnicities, shamans, ceremonies, and gods worshipped then and now."—Homero Aridjis, poet and President Emeritus of PEN International

"The Serpent and the Fire is the newest in a series of anthologies that make the poetry of the Americas a necessary field of knowledge. Rothenberg and Taboada's selections present multiple galleries, configuring a newer and more expansive map of techniques and histories. The anthology threads through its galleries the origins and the present of a literary practice that goes back hundreds of years while relating the personal to the collective and the local to the continental."—Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Professor of Communication and Director of Latin American Studies at Boston College