The Serpent and the Fire

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.

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