TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED @ 50
Please join us at the Poetic Research Bureau this evening to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jerome Rothenberg's rotten-myth-quashing, secularly-sacred-myth-reinforcing Technicians of the Sacred: in the shadow of Thanks-taking. I'll be reading Quechua poems against settler colonialist bosses without mouths, and interpreting poems about murder-by-dissection from Blake and Jordan Abel. As 5 Every Day describes the event:
Just about fifty years ago, the poet John Rothenberg published “Technicians of the Sacred,” an unusual anthology pairing avant-garde and experimental poetry from the West with folk songs, artworks, and ritual texts from cultures across the world. In doing so, he created the theory and field of “ethnopoetics,” a formal approach to transcribing oral traditions into poetic text that conveys the power and beauty of those performances on the page, and suggests that poetic literature is larger than geographic, temporal, or cultural boundaries could ever contain. The book has become a landmark, and is now going into its third edition. To celebrate, Rothenberg himself will make an appearance tonight at Chinatown’s Poetic Research Bureau, for a reading and discussion co-presented by The Library Foundation of Los Angeles. With poets David Shook, Harmony Holiday, Will Alexander, Douglas Messerli, and Jennifer Scappettone.
Chinatown 951 Chung King Los Angeles, CA Price: FREE!
Time: 7:30 PM → 10:00 PM
