Jerome Rothenberg (December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024)[1] was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.

[2] Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New York City, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents,[3] and is a descendant of the Talmudist rabbi Meir of Rothenburg.

He wrote works which he described as deep image in the 1950s and early 1960s, during that time publishing eight more collections, and the first of his extensive anthologies of traditional and modern poetry, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poems from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (1968, revised and expanded 1985).

and edited further anthologies, including: Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972, 2014); A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present (revised and republished as Exiled in the Word, 1977 and 1989); America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973, 2012), co-edited with George Quasha; and Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward An Ethnopoetics (1983), co-edited with Diane Rothenberg.

Rothenberg’s approach throughout was to treat these large collections as deliberately constructed assemblages or collages, on the one hand, and as manifestos promulgating a complex and multiphasic view of poetry on the other.

Over the next two decades Rothenberg expanded this theme in works such as A Big Jewish Book and Khurbn & Other Poems, the latter an approach to holocaust writing, which had otherwise been no more than a subtext in Poland/1931.

An expanded 50th Anniversary Edition of Technicians of the Sacred appeared in 2017 and received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2018.