Flower World Variations: A Sequence of Songs from the Yaqui Deer Dance

Poetry. Art. California Interest. Native American Studies. Essay. Hybrid Genre. As part of the Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts series, The OS presents FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS, a revised and expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg’s variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition the book is newly enhanced in quality and features an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen’s writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate.

＂The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the ’human / other-than-human worlds’ originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice!＂—Cecilia Vicuña