Humans
- Jerome Rothenberg (author)
- Harold Cohen (author, artist)
ISBN
978-1-946031-37-2
LCCN
2017951482
Page count
62
Keywords
Poetry, Prose, Illustration, Art, Drawing, Drawings, Digital Art, AI, Music, Culture, Indigenous, Native American, Nature
Publication date
2017
Language(s)
English
Publication media type
Print Document
Translation
Publication series
Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts
Flower World Variations (Expanded Edition)
As part of the Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts series, The OS presents FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, a revised and expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg’s variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition, the book has been redesigned and expanded, featuring an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen’s writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such, it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate.
“The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the ‘human / other-than-human worlds’ originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice!” — Cecilia Vicuña
The backmatter of this book contains post-scripts from Rothenberg and Cohen; an essay written by Cohen titled “The Material of Symbols,” originally published in 1977 and reprinted with permission; and other supplementary materials.
About the Contributor(s)
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant- garde poetry such as FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, Technicians of the Sacred, and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. Recent books of poems include Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, A CRUEL NIRVANA, A Poem of Miracles, and RETRIEVALS: UNCOLLECTED & NEW POEMS, 1955- 2010. His most recent big book is Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, co-edited with Heriberto Yepez, and he is now working on a global and historical anthology of outsider and subterranean poetry.
Harold Cohen (1928-2016), a groundbreaking digital artist, won a reputation as a painter in London in the 1960's, but is best known for the project that would occupy him for 40-plus years: the invention and evolution of the AARON program. He worked for decades bringing computing into the mainstream of art and exhibited widely with AARON. His work has been exhibited at the Tate, the LA County Museum, The Stedelijk, the San Fransisco Museum, documenta 6, and elsewhere. There is a permanent exhibit dedicated to his work at the Museum of Computing History.
