Bearing Witness: Poetry by Teachers about Teaching Book

Rothenberg responds to critiques of the "I" with 100 narrow poems written in the first person. There are perhaps a thousand voices in this book, at least a hundred. The short lines send you through each poem like speeding through a tunnel, I'm thinking of the Lincoln Tunnel, the lights along the top of the walls flashing by as you drive. (This is not rush hour. This is the middle of the night, and you are under the Hudson.) Now you're out of the tunnel, and you want to look back and read what you passed. But there's the next tunnel in front of you. You're in it already, these repeating tunnels where voices report echoes: what they did, what they felt, moving through crowded world...breathless. I want to choose one that is me. One that is me is all of them. I enclose the whole world in every poem. I am everything and no one is me.

2 thoughts for further thought: Rothenberg uses lines from other writers in almost every poem. He cites the authors in the margins. Is what it does too small? a record of what he read, his own lines are bold, and this appropriation doesn't change much. a processional record?

100 poems is a lot. They lose a little steam in the second half. They lose a lot of steam by the end. Repetition of concept or language is not a problem, but Rothenberg gets stuck in a particular rhythm by the end, no longer breaking out of it, no longer breaking syntax, the poems now lull.

But I loved it. I took it as slow as I could, stopping often. I ate them up. The titles are fantastic. The overall idea of split, multi-faceted, constantly shifting identity was accomplished, in beautiful detail.