Rebel Footprints - Second Edition

The international bestseller,"The Book of J" (1990), coauthored by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (Grove; Faber in UK) was followed by several books of poetry and prose before "A Life in a Poem" became a Guggenheim Fellowship project in 2013. The borders between poetry and translation, poetry and prose, have been crossed and re-crossed in Rosenberg's work, going back to the early '70s, when "Paul Evans and I established Voiceprint ("An Ant's Forefoot/Eleventh Finger Edition"-the two mags we edited) at the University of Essex, where I was a grad student. Then, Lit/Writing teaching (at York University, Toronto; The New School, NYC; most recently Princeton) and editing-but mostly I remained a student of origins: of my family's escape before the Holocaust (the half that made it) and which shaped my desire to both measure civilization's shadow and to somehow escape the grandiosity in doing so (as my father did, establishing the short-lived American Popcorn Company-in Detroit, where I was born); of the culture that produced the first great modernists like Gertrude Stein, who turned history sideways, using it as a lens through which to register glints of the unconscious; of the American blues culture that produced Blind Willie McTell and the existential deadpan that still cracks the tightly-wound pottery of much current poetry; of the Everglades ecosystem, near my current home in Miami and where I became poet-in-residence at Fairchild Tropical Garden; and of the Hebraic culture that produced the great biblical writers in Jerusalem, where I once lived and worked. Like a Freudian, I've searched for the origin of the primary lost writer in myself by returning to those at the origin of Western history, while trying to stay anchored in the present scene of writing in my Adirondack chair."