keep open the channels of renewal

Here is an excerpt from Rothenberg's statement for Contemporary Poets 5th edition, 1991 (pp. 827-28). Notice how he associates the development of an alternative poetics with the post-Holocaust era.

Rothenberg's statement is a good summary of his life-work as a poet and global citizen. The enormity of mass destruction and genocide, during Rothenberg's youth, "created a crisis of expression...for which a poetics must be devised if we were to rise, again, beyond the level of a scream or of a silence more terrible than any scream."