Abstract

Rothenberg's little book consists of poems on the right-hand pages facing quotations from the Jewish visionary tradition on the left. It could just as well have been named “The Jewish Notebooks,” both because it derives from Rothenberg's work in editing The Big Jewish Book, an anthology of visionary texts from ancient to modern, and because, in structuring his book as text and (poetic) commentary, he has given it a quintessentially Jewish form.

It is a book about Jews and a book about vision. Rothenberg, who has transcribed Native American poetry as well as written his own, finds himself drawn (yanked?) into Jewish vision. In his poem for Paul Blackburn he is “exiled in Salamanca—& driven mad by—Image of the Temple.”