"Global anthology of twentieth-century poetry"--Back cover.

In this fourth volume of the landmark Poems for the Millennium series, Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour present a comprehensive anthology of the written and oral literatures of the Maghreb, the region of North Africa that spans the modern nation states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania, and including a section on the influential Arabo-Berber and Jewish literary culture of Al-Andalus, which flourished in Spain between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Beginning with the earliest pictograms and rock drawings and ending with the work of the current generation of post-independence and diasporic writers, this volume takes in a range of cultures and voices, including Berber, Phoenician, Jewish, Roman, Vandal, Arab, Ottoman, and French. Though concentrating on oral and written poetry and narratives, the book also draws on historical and geographical treatises, philosophical and esoteric traditions, song lyrics, and current prose experiments. These selections are arranged in five chronological "diwans" or chapters, which are interrupted by a series of "books" that supply extra detail, giving context or covering specific cultural areas in concentrated fashion. The selections are contextualized by a general introduction that situates the importance of this little-known culture area and individual commentaries for nearly each author.

The first volume offers three "galleries" of individual poets - figures such as Mallarmé, Stein Rilke Tzara, Mayakovsky, Pound, H.D., Vallejo, Artaud, Césaire, and Tsvetaeva - along with a sampling of the most significant pre-World War II movements in poetry and the other arts: Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, "Objectivism", Negritude. In the second volume editors Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have extended the gathering to the present day. In the third volume editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and postromantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism.

Powerful essays on the state and aims of contemporary poetry.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester