Essays document the author's theories of poetry, discuss the goals of oral poetry, and analyze brief poems and poetic concepts.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

18 essays on the subject. With contributions by Mallerme, Stephen Lansing, David Guss, Karl Young, Dennis Tedlock, Becky Cohen, Jed Rasula, Alison Knowles, George Quasha, Tina Oldknow, Dick Higgins, Edmond Jabes, Paul Eluard, Gershom Scholem, and Herbert Blau.

By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay.

A wide ranging survey of internationally celebrated and acclaimed poet, translator, and editor Jerome Rothenberg. Surveying the entirety of his 50 plus years of writing and covering his 80 plus published books, this volume provides a further insight into the mind and breadth of writing of Rothenberg to date. Further critical commentaries are provided by both the author and Heriberto Yepez.

A Paradise of Poets is Jerome Rothenberg's tenth book of poetry to be published by New Directions, beginning with his Poland/1931(1974). In considering the title of his newest collection, he says: "Writing poetry for me has always included an involvement with the life of poetry--& through that life an intensification, when it happened, of my involvement with the other life around me. In an earlier poem I spoke of this creating a paradise of poets ... I do not of course believe that such a paradise exists in any supernatural or mystical sense, but I have sometimes felt it come to life among my fellow poets and, even more, in writing--in the body of the poem." In Rothenberg's hands, the body of the poem is an extraordinarily malleable object. Collage, translation, even visual improvisation serve to open up his latest book to the presence of poets and artists he has known and to others, past and present, who he feels have somehow touched him, among them Nakahara Chuya, Jackson Mac Low, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kurt Schwitters, and Vitezslav Nezval. Kenneth Rexroth once commented: "Jerome Rothenberg is one of our truly great American poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the mainstream of international modern literature. No one has dug deeper into the roots of poetry." With A Paradise of Poets, it is clear that this evaluation is as fresh today as it was twenty-five years ago.

EDWARD L. SCHIEFFELIN: From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers