Since its first publication in 1968, Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred has educated a generation of poets, artists, and readers to the multiple faces and possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight," and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg's revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968.

Jerome Rothenberg is a poet and one of the world's leading anthologists. His more than fifty books include Poems for the Millennium, Volumes One and Two (California 1995, 1998), co-edited with Pierre Joris. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

"Mr. Rothenberg's aim—as is evident in his extraordinary work in ethnopoetics and in anthologies he has edited...—is that of rediscovering the 'archaic' worlds of myth, vision and revelation, all the while connecting these worlds of mostly oral tradition to the poetic 'revolution of the world' as epitomized by writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson. . . . A continually surprising and energizing work."—The New York Times Book Review

"Technicians of the Sacred is surely the outstanding anthology of our time. . . . [Jerome Rothenberg is] a Stakhonovite of the sacred."—Parnassus

"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