Poems for the Game Silence

"I look for new forms and possibilities," writes Jerome Rothenberg in Poems for the Game of Silence, “but also for ways of presenting in my own language the oldest possibilities of poetry going back to the primitive and archaic cultures that have been opening up to us over the last hundred years." Indeed, it is this combined sense of mystery and authenticity, in words and new structures that approach archetypal chant, which informs his verse. First published in 1971, this volume of Rothenberg´s selected poems brings together the work of a decade: a wide range of experimental forms set beside renderings of American Indian, Australian, and other so-called primitive songs, as well as some of the more recent ancestral poems that explore the author´s own origins.