Rothenberg is a polymathic figure who is distinctly at odds with the career profile established by poets born a few years earlier. A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, James Merrill, and W. S. Merwin have practiced poetry--and thereby exemplified the role of the poet--as romantic outcast, dissent, and ironic standard-bearer of the life of imagination in a time of drought. Rothenberg, by contrast, has insisted on poetry as an art of reclamation, rekindling individual sensibility and communal ties in the same gesture. He stands apart from the dominant tendency in postwar American poetry in that he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge literary criteria as the sole frame for poetry, an activity he views as continuous with duende, cante hondo or deep song, the deep image of shamanic penetration into the starry sky of the body. "I've had a strong recoil from 'literature' & 'criticism' as a sufficient context...