“Abulafia’s circles”: Jewish mysticism and counterculture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2016.2.23824Keywords:
Jewish American poetry, Contemporary poetry, Avant-garde, Jewish mysticismAbstract
As part of the generation that was called “the countercultural cabalists”, Jerome Rothenberg contemplates in his poetry different aspects of the Jewish mystical tradition of the kabbalah. The focus of this paper is one example, among many, of this tendency: the poem “Abulafia’s Circles”. Published in 1979 and reprinted in 1980, this long poem brings us three Jewish historical figures: Abraham Abulafia, Jacob Frank and Tristan Tzara. Taken as characters in a mystical adventure, the cyclical structure of the poem presents us with a vertiginous view of Rothenberg’s amalgam of sacred and profane and the role of both in his poetry.
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MEILICKE, Christine A. Jerome Rothenberg's Experimental Poetry and Jewish Tradition. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2005.
ROTHENBERG, Jerome. Abulafia's Circles. Milwaukee: Mebrane Press, 1979.
______. Pre-Faces and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1981.
______. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
______. Vienna Blood and Other Poems. New York: New Directions, 1980.
ROTHENBERG, Jerome; LENOWITZ Harris. A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present, with. New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1978.
______. Exiled in the World: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1989.
SCHOLEM, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Signet, 1974.
______. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.
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