Matti Kovler composer
COKBOY
Excerpt
Full version
Boston Modern Orchestra Project live from Jordan Hall 18 January 2009 Gil Rose, conductor. Matti Kovler, narrator
Based on Cokboy by Jerome Rothenberg
program notes and full text (pdf)
Rothenberg's most vivid descriptions of the experiences of Eastern European Jewish immigrants arise in tandem with the experience of the Native American. In one of his most successful and widely anthologized poems “Cokboy”, Rothenberg writes “saddlesore I came / a Jew among/ the Indians (Poland/1931). The term “Cokboy” evokes several things; first it is used to suggest an Eastern European mispronunciation of cowboy, thus satirizing the traditionally hostile relationship between cowboys and Indians; second the term obviously suggests male genitalia. This suggestion is metaphorically accurate because “Cokboy” takes up issues of transcultural intercourse and reproduction, or – more precisely, miscegenation. The poem tells us that in this respect, Jews and Native Americans are alike because they have miscegenated American Culture. In this poem, the civilization of an Eastern European Jew is just as extinct as the Native American’s. Rothenberg focuses on describing the disappearance of his culture, which in this text occurs by assimilation. Once the poet begins to explore the disappearance of his culture, and to examine the fate of his own ancestral lineage, he discovers that he did not have to delve too far before coming face to face with the Holocaust.
S. Lillian KremermHolocaust literature; An Encyclopedia of Writers er
