What an immense pleasure this was. To have the chance to celebrate Jerome Rothenberg, his influence on me, and on so many people, it was a beautiful night all told.
The event was held at Birkbeck College, London, hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc) on October 17th 2016. Organised by the centre's director, Dr. Steve Willey.
For my performance I carefully selected poems taken from Rothenberg's 1974 collection Poland/1931 and 1978 collection Seneca Journal and after much deliberation, I interspersed them with my own poems that responded / related to these works as influences. In the live performance, the poems were glued to paper to form two long poems, and then illustrated. Then for the last few minutes, wonderfully, Jerome joined me in the painting.
I had the pleasure to then spend a day with Jerome and his wife Diane in London and really feel inspired and humbled by their extraordinary lifetime of travelling, writing and following a path any of us would be lucky to follow.