ABSTRACT
Jerome Rothenberg, a second-generation Polish immigrant, born in New York in 1931, has explained that he ‘became a poet in response to the war at mid-century’ (Rothenberg 2006). Like Allen Ginsberg, Rothenberg was of Jewish descent and felt that the ‘designation of poet [ … ] marked some separation, the assumption of a calling that would separate us from the way things were or from another series of expectations that we weren’t willing to assume’ (Rothenberg 2006). Indeed, underlying Rothenberg’s poetry is an anti-authoritarian strain. It emerges in his ‘Poem For The Weather’ where he writes, ‘Over the moon we could hear / the voice of the president, / clear as a church bell, / simple as ether’ (Rothenberg 1975, 8). For Rothenberg, both the State and organised, institutionalised religion operate as ether, anaesthetising society. Similarly, in his poem entitled ‘Women & Thieves’, Rothenberg critiques the suburban domesticated life of a consumer society where people live in ‘the terror / of sleep’, where ‘the women dream of / houses & thieves’ as if directly from a daytime soap opera (16). With the closed line, ‘Then it’s Sunday’, he rejects religion as opposed to faith, that ritualistic religiosity wherein one can contain one’s ‘spiritual life’ to a Sunday service (16).
