Michael McClure & Jerome Rothenberg - San Francisco (Today..

Michael McClure & Jerome Rothenberg
Tuesday, March 16, 7pm
The Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco

Jerome Rothenberg and Michael McClure celebrate the publication of release
of Andre Breton: Selections, translated by Jerome Rothenberg, & published by
University of California Press.

Founder of the Surrealist movement, André Breton has also come to be
recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and influential
poets. The inaugural volume in the Poets for the Millennium series, André
Breton offers the most comprehensive selection available in English of
Breton's poetry, along with a selection of his major prose writings. The
translations, a number of which are published here for the first time, are
by some of the most notable poets in our language, including David Antin,
Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Michael Benedikt, Robert Duncan, David
Gascoyne, and Charles Simic. This volume also includes an extensive
biographical and thematic introduction by Mark Polizzotti, which sets the
poems in the context of Breton's life and overall career.


Michael McClure & Jerome Rothenberg
Thursday, March 18, 7pm
City Lights Books, San Francisco

Jerome Rothenberg and Michael McClure celebrate the release of Maria Sabina:
Selections, translated by Jerome Rothenberg, & published by University of
California Press.

A shaman and visionary-not a poet in any ordinary sense-María Sabina lived
out her life in the Oaxacan mountain village of Huautla de Jiménez, and yet
her words, always sung or spoken, have carried far and wide, a principal
instance and a powerful reminder of how poetry can arise in a context far
removed from literature as such. Seeking cures through language-with the
help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language itself-she
was, as Henry Munn describes her, "a genius [who] emerges from the soil of
the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a native Mexican
campesino people." She may also have been, in the words of the Mexican poet
Homero Aridjis, "the greatest visionary poet in twentieth-century Latin
America."

These selections include a generous presentation from Sabina's recorded
chants and a complete English translation of her oral autobiography, her
vida, as written and arranged in her native language by her fellow Mazatec
Alvaro Estrada. Accompanying essays and poems include an introduction to
"The Life of María Sabina" by Estrada, an early description of a nighttime
"mushroom velada" by the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, an essay by Henry
Munn relating the language of Sabina's chants to those of other Mazatec
shamans, and more.




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