Joseph Lease clearly feels the urgency and relevance of prophetic testimony. The title of his third and most recent book, Testify, published in March by Coffee House Press, is an imperative. But who does it come from and toward whom is it addressed? To the poet, of course, and perhaps to us. Does it come from God? That’s a harder call.

Lease starts out by quoting the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s assertion that “the sin most insistently called abhorrent to G-d is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.” Robinson, a liberal Christian, wrote these lines in the wake of welfare reform in the mid-1990s, as an attack on the Christian right. Lease, who is a Jew, redirects its charge at us as Americans, regardless of whether we are Jewish or Christian. But he is justly wary of any claim to speak for the Almighty:

and the leaves roll just like faces, and the faces blow like thieves, and we all keep our explosions, and you taste joy in the night, and the lost boys answer slowly, and the corpse picks up the phone, and we all claim that we’re holy, God won’t leave our dreams alone—

Too many people are too sure that they have a direct line to God. Lease can’t be sure that it’s God on the other end, or that the Creator is the author of his dreams. Who knows where they come from?

Of course, American Jeremiahs don’t have to come with the direct sanction of the Lord of Hosts. Frequently, they don’t. They find their authority elsewhere—in nature, for instance, or in the very essence of democracy. There is no reason for Lease to be any different, but he is. He assumes no authority. His discomfort with a full-fledged prophetic calling comes from the fact that in the end he is no better than anyone else. His “I” doesn’t stand against an intransigent “you.” It falls into the complicit and complicated morass of the American “we.”

Lease’s attempt to find a prophetic place for himself leads to an intense lyricism and a sometimes dizzyingly associative grammar. Testify is really a skein of quotes, clichés, and floating bits of experience. Some of them are obviously personal, some of them collective. At times these bits and pieces come thickly pasted together:

And—as if this phrase had never been abused in our lifetimes—to the ideal of a free society. It’smidnight inmy body,4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten. How am I ever. A clown explains the war

At other points, they hang loose in the middle of the page as if they were hovering in the middle of the air:

If birds

Tangle

Prayer

I

I’m

While Lease is a very evocative stutterer, his intent is clearly documentary:

“Give in.”

NASDAQ +12.90. Dow close: 10,617.78.

Hey kids, big sexy corporation!

Don’t be a quitter—

According to Lease, our lives are made up of shopworn words and private sensations. We move through an atmosphere of stock quotes, policy debates, breaded olives, and wood smoke.

In the face of this, Lease poses the question that lies at the heart of almost any philosophy worth the name—“What is the good life?” The ancient Greeks defined it in terms of contemplative moderation; the Prophets, as righteousness; modern Americans, as individual fulfillment and physical comfort. A latter-day prophet might pick one of these answers and stick to it.  Lease does not. He lives between them.

His calling is ambiguous. Isaiah’s mouth gets touched with burning coal. Lease, caught in his daily concerns, gets something less than that. He’s given nothing more than a little green light:

I have to teach. I have to run, eat less junk. Oh CNN. What start or color. There’s a fist of meat in my solar plexus and green light in my mouth and little chips of dream flake off my skin.

There is not much room for vision when your heart is described as a “fist of meat.” Testify yearns for the spirit, to be sure, but finds itself caught in the brute matter of the present day.

Testify’s beauties come from the tentativeness of its tone. Here’s how the book ends:

pro-business policy solutions solve your child’s sleep problems book-birds shining leaves hang fat grapes so mist deep kiss mouthful of wind like wet peonies his head is winter are you a worker health insurance health insurance health step into the water and step into the road step into the water and step into the sky health insurance greed health insurance greed before you know it you’re lying in a pool of blood

I hear that everywhere I go

That pool of blood is both a sign of guilt and perhaps even an apocalyptic hint, but no more. Lease offers no prescriptions and suffers no proposals. There is anger in Testify, and there is love. But unlike Whitman and Thoreau, Lease offers no whiff of redemption, and unlike Jeremiah before them, no consolation.

Lease might be on to something. Perhaps we have too many aspiring prophets already. Lease is suggesting that discomfort—not certainty—might provide enough sanction for a prophetic stance today. Such a stance is confrontational but not in the regular way. It needs to say something different, something that you do not hear everywhere you go. In a world of 24/seven coverage, Testify is trying to do just that.

Alcalay’s most recent book, “neither wit nor gold” (from then), reminds us that he started off as and remains very much a poet.  To understand what he’s up to, it helps to remember an image from two decades ago, a few lines from his best-known piece of academic writing, the provocative After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. At the beginning of this passionate defense of “impure,” polyglot culture (his model is pre-expulsion Spain), Alcalay cited Maimonides. Following the Jewish sage’s warning that all light is not the same, Alcalay presented his own historical work as a form of dialectics, a constant shuttling between presumed causes and assumed effects:

Untangling the strands of the past—or submitting to their confusing but exhilarating intricacy—cannot simply be an act of recognition, of fitting events into fixed patterns, of just seeing the light. It must begin, rather, by apprehending the sources of light and the present objects they shade or illuminate, and follow with an active, incessant engagement in the process of naming and renaming, covering and uncovering, consuming and producing new relations, investigating hierarchies of power and effect: distilling light into sun, moon, and fire.

Alcalay doesn’t see the complications of the past as a cause for despair but rather as a source of hope. Through thought old relations become clearer, and new ones become bracingly possible.

Alcalay is therefore something of a utopian—I mean this as a compliment—and as with many utopians it is hard to distinguish his radicalism from his conservatism. This comes through most clearly in his poetics, in the way that he puts his creative works together. On the one hand, his book-length albums of borrowed language and surprising juxtapositions identify him as an “experimental” writer, in the fine tradition of modernist  and post-modern literary collagists. (It is a nice but not necessary fact that as a child he played badminton with the monumental avant-garde poet Charles Olson.)

On the other hand, he traces his insistence on quotation back to the medieval Hebrew practice of shibbutz—which, in the words of Hebrew scholar David Yellin, cited by Alcalay in After Jews and Arabs, is “the lighting of a candle from a lamp already lit, or the kindling of flame from a fire already blazing.” In earlier poetry, the original light was Scripture and the first spark was divine. In Alcalay’s work, though, that spark is secular and historical. His poetry aims to retrieve what has been lost to oblivion and, more important, lost to violence. Alcalay’s most impressive poetic work to date, the book-length from the warring factions, is an elliptical meditation on the atrocities committed during the Bosnian civil war of the early 1990s. Alcalay has borrowed most of its language and formulations from documentary sources, and its “I” is very rarely Alcalay himself. And yet this process can yield evocative, haunting results:

do not feel badly because you have lost

sight of this daylight no matter how hard

I try nothing happens today to you alone

those who have reached the place where

death stands waiting have not pointed out

a way to circumvent it I myself grieve when

I look back there into the past it is enough

to make anyone ponder now here at last

we are ready to end this when you start

to leave you must not think back

with regret you always return

garment of brightness

wildnerness

in the midst

of plenty

There are a lot of people here. This scary little passage teems with with I’s and you’s and they’s and we’s. They keep changing places, and the perspective does as well.

That fugal ambition is key to Alcalay’s project. He wants his readers to see from a number of viewpoints and take a number of positions. This necessarily involves seeing himself in the third person, looking at himself from a certain distance. In “neither wit nor gold” (from then), Alcalay has taken various things he wrote during the 1970s—poems, notes, diaries, many reproduced in their original handwriting or font—and made something of a scrapbook from them. He intercuts these rags and patches with photographs of musicians he took during the same period, and he creates a portrait less of himself than of a certain milieu at a certain time.

Beyond the musical references, what gives this book its historical resonance is not so much its details—although they can be telling—as its period style. Alcalay, who is now in his late fifties, comes from New England, and he hung around in Boston, where he seems to have been strongly influenced by the odd mixture of Beat hipness and poetic altitude that marks the work of the underappreciated John Wieners. In a way, the young Alcalay sounds more like a member of a previous generation. He listens to jazz, not rock, to Archie Shepp, not Janis Joplin.

“neither wit nor gold” demands from its reader a good ear for style and a sophisticated ability to jockey between the past and the present. The title poem stands at the book’s threshold, and its archaic diction, a riff on the 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet’s riff on the Book of Matthew, places you in a historical no-man’s land:

rust and time

nor wit nor

gold abet the

old song’s burden

part prophecy part

longing the hanging

garden a shadowy

dream the world

grows so very old

though once we

too were young

My guess is that Alcalay takes “burden” here in  its musical sense, meaning a refrain or a chorus. He therefore seems to be offering a little apology for the writing that follows. But the present from which he tenders this is also old (or old-fashioned), at least as far as its language is concerned. We are the future—longed for, prophesied—that the past dreamed of and wrote poems about. This future though is also time-bound and never as modern as it thinks. Our present is shot through with the traces of those prophecies and dreams, just as our language bears our history within it.

As a chart of his early poetry’s longings, “neither wit nor gold” points forward to Alcalay’s subsequent career—you can hear what his writing wanted to be and what it would become. It also shows precisely when and where it started. That said, the book doesn’t display the politics that subsequently came to distinguish Alcalay’s career. The poems in this book precede the eight years he spent in Israel in the late 1970s and 1980s and therefore come before his involvement with the Israeli Black Panthers and with Palestinian-rights organizations. They precede his celebration of “Levantine” culture. They precede his work in and on Bosnia. They seem to come before Alcalay himself.

And to a certain extent, that is precisely Alcalay’s point. Although the young poet of “neither wit nor gold” can be sentimental, this is not a sentimental book. The older Alcalay does not seem particularly nostalgic for his previous self. Rather, the capacity to see from another’s point of view that informs from the warring factions marks this book as well. In this case, though, Alcalay is not involved in direct address to a “you,” nor is he trying to imagine another person’s experience. He approaches his experience as if it were somebody else’s. He takes his own poetry, his own notebooks, and his own diaries as documentary evidence of another person’s life and therefore presents them as the index of a different, never-quite-forgotten world.

It is as hard to describe “neither wit nor gold” as it is to describe its author. It is a poetry book that is not exactly a book of poetry. It excerpts very, very badly because every page relies on its context and every poem and fragment, every note and picture, on its neighbors. It depends on its look as much as on its sound. Its title warns us that it lives between negations just as its title’s punctuation tells us that it is made of quotations. But to say that its title tells us all hardly tells the half of it.

Pinsky made his name as a meditative poet, a man given to writing poems called “Sadness and Happiness” and “An Essay on Psychiatrists” as well as a book titled An Explanation of America. This earlier work is marked by a formalism that carries itself with an enviable ease—rhymes you don’t quite notice, meter that doesn’t intrude, a diction that is both precise and evocative without ever being demanding. His first two books display the most sinuous syntax. Pinsky can weave sentences over lines and lines of verse so that they twist and turn without ever losing the cadences of normal speech.

I bought An Explanation of America as a senior in college in 1979, the year it came out, and didn’t get it at all. It is not a young man’s book. (Pinsky was already 39 when it was published.) With its extended imitation of the great Roman poet Horace, it maintains an even-temperedness that doubles as a kind of Apollonian distance:

Of course, one’s aspirations must depend
Upon the opportunities: the justice
That happens to be available; one’s fortune.
I think that what the poet meant may be
Something like that; as for aspiration,
Maybe our aspirations for ourselves
Ought to be different from the hopes we have
(Though there are warnings against too much hope)
When thinking of our children.

The impersonal “one” shades into a barely personal “we.” Perhaps our hopes for our children should be different. Perhaps not. The poet’s job is to weigh the possibilities.

At this stage in his career, Pinsky loved semi-colons, those partial breaks between clauses that connect while still separating them. As his work went on, though, the long sentences became less measured. They turned into lists of things and thoughts that bumped up against each other. The semi-colons gave way to commas. The lines piled up as the objects piled on. Here is Pinsky’s terrifying poem of 1984, “The Figured Wheel,” which describes a literal juggernaut, a great destructive wheel that “mills everything alive and grinds/ The remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked graves and oceans.”

It is hung with devices
By dead masters who have survived by reducing themselves magically

To tiny organisms, to wisps of matter, crumbs of soil,
Bits of skin, microscopic flakes, which is why they are called “great,”
In their humility that goes on celebrating the turning
Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentingly over

A cow plodding through car-traffic on a street in Iaşi,
And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky’s mother and father
And wife and children and his sweet self
Which he hereby unwillingly and inexpertly gives up, because it is

There, figured and pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel.

The wheel is of course a metaphor—a figure—for time or death or sheer wanton destructiveness. In fact, as this force has neither presence nor reason, it can only be conceived by way of metaphor. But being able to see it in the mind’s eye (another metaphor) does not bring much consolation. The wheel that means fate is itself meaningless. It does not lead to any transcendence or to any real hope. There is still a saving touch of wit in the resignation we hear as Pinsky relinquishes that “sweet self.” By the same token, he has no choice.

The increasing urgency of Pinsky’s poetry—its more jaggedly syncopated rhythms and harsher diction—comes from this grim, pagan vision. My guess is that Pinsky’s fierce commitment to poetry derives in no small part from his sense that only metaphors and art itself can save us from nihilism. Our ability to decorate the devouring wheel—to imagine the juggernaut in the first place—makes us human and helps us survive. A philosophy major back in the day, Pinsky takes seriously Nietzsche’s claim that the world is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. We have art, the philosopher says, so that we do not perish from the truth.

Such a conviction could easily lead to the aesthete’s cynicism about the daily grind of politics. Pinsky, on the other hand, has remained that oddest of modern beasts, a public poet. During his tenure as poet laureate in the late ’90s, he was charming and uncompromising in his commitment to the democratic necessity of poetry. This was not just special pleading or wishful thinking. Pinsky has a capacious view of creativity that includes religion and politics and in fact extends to the whole clamor of human activity. For Pinsky, the ongoing cultural improvisation of mongrel America is a great existential accomplishment.

Then again, so is his shirt. In a landmark poem from the ’80s, titled “Shirt,” Pinsky focuses on the unexpected excellence and hidden cost of—of all things—a shirt. He thinks of all the people whose work has gone into this everyday commodity: “The loader,/ The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter/ Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton/ As slaves sweated in the field.” Among the descendants of those slaves is a “Black/Lady,” named Irma, who inspected the very shirt he is going to put on. But she is not only the grandchild or great-grandchild of slaves. According to Pinsky, she really is a lady in the old, feudal sense, the heir of the great 17th-century poet George Herbert. She has poetry in her blood or, more to the point, her powers of discrimination and judgment have the dignity of a poet’s.

Like Pinsky, Irma pays the closest attention to the most common of things. Irma, like Pinsky, probably has a sense of the history of slavery and exploitation—the poem includes a vignette of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire—that lies behind this bit of tailored cloth. She definitely understands the craftsman’s skill that goes into it. Pinsky does as well. He revels in the language of shirts, the vocabulary of its details: “The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters/ Printed in black on neckband and tail.” There is something properly Whitmanesque going on here. “Shirt” resists Whitman’s sometimes-breezy bombast just as it resists the pull of his idealizations, but it still makes a brief for the everyday. The shirt is a small miracle of ingenuity and the product of hard toil and real suffering. It is complex in its associations and complicities. Most tellingly, though, it has a hard-won nobility.

If we read “Shirt” in light of the later poems, as the structure of this compilation asks us to do, we realize that there is more at stake than its generosity and considerable wit. In his book on democracy and poetry, Pinsky suggests that we are originally hurt into poetry by loss and consoled by the regularities and beauties of its sound. As he gets older, Pinsky has greater losses: friends, family, the lower-middle class Jewish world of his childhood. The most worrisome loss, though, is the failure of memory. This loss obviously affects us as individuals. More important, it affects us as citizens of a republic. In the spirit of deep satire he writes:

I have never heard America
Singing but I have heard of I
Hear America Singing, I think
It must have been a book
We had in school, I forget.

The line break at “I” points to a thoughtless narcissism that runs through the poem. I Hear America Singing was indeed a textbook, a collection of “folk poetry” from the populist ’30s. It got its title from a poem by Walt Whitman, a paean to the music of ordinary labor. You can forget what you have never heard—Whitman’s poem, the importance of common life—only if you forget the optimistic prospects and demands that that poem and that anthology dream of.

Long-term memory is always in danger. So is short-term memory. Pinsky remembers Amiri Baraka’s hateful lines about 9/11 (“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/ Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/ To stay home that day/ Why did Sharon stay away?”):

I was in the big tent when the guy read his poem about how the Jews
Were warned to get out of the Twin Towers before the planes hit.

The crowd was applauding and screaming, they were happy—it isn’t
That they were anti-Semitic or anything. They just weren’t listening. Or

No, they were listening, but that certain way. In it comes, you hear it and
That selfsame second you swallow it or expel it: an ecstasy of forgetting.

Some big tent. Pinsky’s key word here might be “selfsame.” The particular pathology he describes is based on a defensive, because vulnerable, sense of self, one that cannot maintain any critical distance. It cannot think about things but has to incorporate or expel whatever is alien. Anything alien is forgotten, quite literally swallowed up by the avid and apparently empty self. Pinsky is right. The audience wasn’t anti-Semitic in any conscious way. In fact, it wasn’t really conscious at all.

“Shirt” wants to make us conscious. It wants us to remember. It wants us to look at the intricate histories of little things. It wants to summon up a collective recall, one that is not personal in any exclusive sense and yet includes everyone. “Shirt” is exemplary in a literal way. It can serve as an example for poets and just folks. The French writer Georges Perec exhorted his readers to interrogate their teaspoons. Pinsky has actually done it.

Pinsky has gotten fiercer as he has gotten older, and the later poems suggest ways to read or reread the earlier ones. Pinsky has become something of a public figure—he pulled off an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show with real aplomb—who has not sacrificed the complexities of poetic construction for a false, aw-shucks simplicity. His Selected Poems shows how this was always where he wanted to be. It is a generous selection in all senses of that word. It is a tribute to its quality that it is, at 200 pages, still too short.

Part of Rand’s problem is that he has tended to paint large series of large works. In the last 20 years, he has produced, among other things, Sixty Paintings From the Bible, The Eighteen (based on the Amidah prayer), and The Seven Days of Creation. His most insanely impressive performance was The 613, 1,700 square feet of contiguous, raucously painted panels, each one devoted to a single mitzvah. The work is too big to exhibit in any conventional space, so he showed it in a warehouse in Brooklyn for exactly four hours in 2008.

His 2006 series Had Gadya, on view at Borowsky Gallery at the Gershman Y in Philadelphia through May 5, is more tractable. Ten sizable paintings illustrate the 10 verses of the song that traditionally finishes the Passover Seder. They show Rand at his best. They also demonstrate why he occupies such an odd position in American art.  He is just too religious to be secular and too secular to be religious. Whereas most Jewish painters have been interested in abstract spirituality, candied nostalgia, or a kind of documentary accounting for Jewish life, Rand has recognized that Judaism turns on the Law and on ritual observance. So, he paints pictures devoted to the mitzvot and to prayers. But he is neither pious nor blatantly ironic, which is what gives his work its tension and its energy.

As a song, “Had Gadya” is something of an enigma. On the surface, it is a cumulative tune for children, similar to “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.” A father buys a kid; the kid is eaten by a cat; the cat by a dog and so on up the food chain until the Holy One kills the Angel of Death. What it means and why it was included in the Seder is a matter of debate. Its apparent simplicity and its prominence scream for interpretation. Most people take it as an allegory about the various empires that have persecuted the Jews.

Rand’s Had Gadya offers layers of reference, meaning, and plausible interpretations. The pictures stand as midrashim on the song. Painted on vinyl, they stand over five feet tall and are very, very red—not entirely surprising for a ditty about death. At the same time, their brightness is fitting for such a jaunty tune. The pictures are figurative, and what they show is cobbled together from centuries of Jewish art and painting about Jews. With their dark outlines and word bubbles, they also look like comics.

As such, they should be straightforward, but the most striking thing about these paintings is that they are so elliptical. What should be central is pushed to the side. The animals and objects that serve as the main actors of the song—the kid, the cat, the dog, the ox, the stick, and the water—turn out to be nothing more than decorative features. In their place, Rand shows us scenes of instruction and of everyday life. The paintings depict 18th-century women in the kitchen; a 19th-century man with his grandson; an early 20th-century man hanging around in the street. If the song retells a story about our collective past, then these pictures contend that history takes place while we are going about our business. They reverse our usual emphasis on trauma by highlighting the ordinary.

This contention is most striking in the last of the series, the painting that goes along with the verse, “And the Holy One (Blessed be He) slew the Angel of Death.” An image of our final reward, the messianic cessation of history and death, it is just a picture of a woman lighting candles for the Sabbath. Nothing apocalyptic. Nothing more than that foretaste of redemption, the weekly invocation of universal peace. It is a quiet painting in which the Messiah is still hoped for. He has not yet arrived.

Rand’s pacification of “Had Gadya,” his translation of a song about killing and being killed into pictures of everyday life, would feel too placid were it not for the jarring, second-to-last painting, the one devoted to the destruction of the butcher by the Angel of Death. Here, Rand lifts an image from a Nazi poster, a vicious fantasy of anti-Semitic vengeance. An accusatory finger descends from the sky to point at a caricature of a rich Jew, top hat, hook nose, and all. This is a hard picture to take, in part because it is a hard picture to read.

On its simplest level, the painting restores the song to its allegorical intent. It invokes the Third Reich, the most deadly instance in a long tradition of Jew-hating empires, by reproducing one of its more hateful images. At the same time, a winged skull—an uncomfortable, if traditional, bit of Christian iconography—seems to promise salvation after death. But that skull, canted at the same angle as the avenging hand, is reminiscent of the insignia of an elite SS brigade. And furthermore, although an expression of hope, a winged skull is a specifically Christian symbol. It changes the argument of the song. Salvation after death isn’t really the issue. For Rand, “Had Gadya” becomes a song about salvation from death.

Rand’s play of ambiguities—an unsettling image that unsettles a whole series of images—lies at the heart of his work as a whole. Rand’s paintings are about the mixture of fatality, hope, and adherence to tradition that makes Judaism distinct. Rand knows a lot about Jewish texts and seems to know almost everything about the history of Jewish (and non-Jewish) art. He lets this knowledge jostle around. He pits incongruities against each other. His paintings argue and question.

And so here’s the rub. Rand’s paintings take Judaism seriously without falling into old-world kitsch or unexamined faith. In their range of reference and their demanding juxtapositions, they are postmodern but are never dismissive. Rand’s pictures just won’t fit. This is his distinction. It is also the reason why you rarely get the chance to see his work.

For more than five decades Adrienne Rich has written urgently. Her books have presented themselves as the latest reports from the front, and Rich has fought on several fronts.

She has, as the saying goes, lived the contradictions. A Fifties good girl and Sixties feminist, a lesbian mother and baptized Jew, she has cast herself as a speaker for the dead, the oppressed, and the forgotten. In the poem “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most famous manifestoes, she presents herself as a Jacques Cousteau of the battered spirit, bent on salvaging the wreckage of history:

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

She is able to save the arrogant bravery of this stance by insisting that she is part of an “us.” She is claiming that her single—and singular—person can stand in for the collective. For a generation of feminists, it did.

It’s been almost 40 years since “Diving into the Wreck.” In spite of the importance of issues like gay marriage, identity politics aren’t as important any more. Many of our old concerns—like war and the economy—have returned as new concerns. Rich has moved with the times. She devotes a number of the poems in her most recent book, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, to her opposition to our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and to a defense of the poor.

But her poetry doesn’t always keep up with her commitments. Some of the new poems are just too obvious, such as the “Ballade of the Poverties”:

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into:  take it:  it’s yours.

A poem of witness and prophecy, to be sure, but its archaisms (princes and courtiers) are not archetypes but clichés. Attacking the masters of the universe is too easy.

Rich knows this and the pun in her title poem shows that she realizes what is at stake. Poetry should refuse to serve the powerful, but in a time of clandestine torture and extraordinary rendition, lyric poetry just won’t do:

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon’s eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Synatx of rendtion:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb     disgraced     goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

This begins as a love poem or at least a poem of desire: a woman looking at another woman (is she imagining herself?) in a pastoral, then an intimate setting. That woman might be aware of the “unslept unsleeping elsewhere” but her awareness isn’t enough. Poetry—especially lyric poetry of a very traditional kind—doesn’t cut it. Perhaps no language will. Torture goes beyond poetry. It exceeds grammar.

This poem clearly separates the political from the personal because they don’t quite overlap for the poet. And that is generally true of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The political poems are brittle and self-righteous precisely because they don’t draw on Rich’s best muse: her experience. The personal poems in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve are more supple, especially those on poetry’s most traditional, existential subjects—love, loss, and death:

Called in to the dead: why didn’t you write?
What should I have asked you?

—what would have been the true
unlocking code

if all of them failed—
I’ve questioned the Book of Questions

studied gyres of steam
twisting from the hot cup
in a cold sunbeam

turned the cards over lifted the spider’s foot
from the mangled hexagon

netted the beaked eel from the river’s mouth
asked     and let it go

Perhaps the big mysteries suit her. As she says: “[T]here’s a divide/ between the shores of sickness and the legendary purifying/ river of death You will have this tale to tell, you will have to live/ to tell/ this tale.” At 81, Rich is a survivor in the most literal sense. This is her experience now and might well be her tale.

***

Andrea Cohen’s often lovely, sometimes loopy, poetry circulates between death and comfort, between images of inexorable loss and expressions of inexplicable hope. In Kentucky Derby, which just came out, she writes poems with odd titles like “Love Poem with a Trash Compactor” and “Coupons in the Afterlife.” These provide good indications of her m.o. She likes to take slightly outlandish metaphors or odd juxtapositions and coax them wittily back to sense.

At the same time, though, Cohen is capable of writing “Transport,” in which she introduces Lena, a German woman who taught her how to forge railway tickets:

It’s what Lena’s mother learned from her mother,
who tucked her in 1940 into the Black Forest,

into a train alone beneath a black
and star-starved sky, her own yellow
star torn off and burned, her mother
somewhere back there, not waving, burning.

The last image might not be all that surprising in a poem about the Shoah, but it is rendered stranger by its nod to a famously dark work by the English poet Stevie Smith, “Not Waving But Drowning.” It is also made more poignant—almost painfully so—by the notion that Lena’s grandmother’s sacrifice is as tender and as natural as a parent putting a child to bed.

A similar evocation of parental care is given a wide and positively redemptive turn in the title poem of the book. It begins, typically, with what appears to be a joke: “Next year in Jerusalem,/ with mint juleps. This year/ in Peterborough with Wyatt and Anna.” The messianic affirmation of the Seder is Americanized with that mint julep and then deflated and deferred. The poem meanders through an account of watching the race, remembering her uncle’s mynah bird, drinking a little beer and heading back to the McDowell Writer’s Colony, which, she tells us, is “my version of Eden.”

McDowell would be any author’s paradise, but for Cohen it is not the leisure to write that is enchanting. It’s something more communal and much more dream-like:

We are all
made of honey and butter and one of us has a yellow
school bus which we board from time to time
for a field trip that involves riding in circles
and falling asleep, which involves
all of us being ponies in a meadow.
The sea and sky are made of grass.
It can’t last. It lasts.

The yellow star has become a school bus that goes nowhere but around and does it so safely and reassuringly that its riders fall asleep, become ponies in a land that is so full of milk (or butter) and honey that the very sky is made of grass. A realist would say that a dream like that is just plain childish and that a state of bliss like that just couldn’t last. A utopian would say that it isn’t and that it can. In the end, our redemption is nothing less than the promise of such plenty and such peace.

In the most notable of the poems in his new book, If Not For the Courage, Morris imagines himself watching an old video of what he thinks is the band Blondie. But the lead singer is somehow wrong:

NOT
Debbie Harry, but my aunt, Diane
Simon, 78, currently of Pembroke
Pines, Florida, formerly Plainview,
Long Island.

And it’s not only Aunt Diane. The band actually consists of the older generation of his extended family. Everyone’s up there except for “Uncle Arnie, 80, who shoots his/ age, and Rina, who married into/ a dynasty of dental prostheticians and/ and owns a beach home in Marblehead.”

For all the humor of the family lore, the lower-middle class striving (dental prostheticians! and a dynasty, no less!) and the idioms of a bygone time, there is an edge to Morris’ joke. You can hear it in the phrase “currently of Pembroke,” an expression you only catch in wedding announcements and, more pointedly, in obituaries.

In the bizarre juxtaposition of his relatives and Blondie, Morris both presents his pedigree (suburban Jew and quondam punker) and contemplates his death. He conjures up a double, a “caller from Kentucky,” who, at 40, is well past the glory days of the New Wave clubs of the late ’70s: “flabby, bald, and given the state of punk, / wishing for a lobotomy from Joey, who is like Johnny and Dee Dee/ and Big Daddy Ernie, really gone.” It is just a little horrifying to realize that Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny—founders of the Ramones, the band that brought us wonderfully dumb suburban punk classics like “Teenage Lobotomy”—are all dead, or, in a hipster lingo long since passed, gone, baby, gone. Big Daddy Ernie sounds like an old blues shouter or a late night deejay. He was, in fact, Ernie Morris, the poet’s father, who died more than 30 years ago at the age of 45.

The Ramones, Big Ernie, and Aunt Diane constitute Morris’ intermediate past, that odd period that seems like just yesterday and isn’t. Joey Ramone (born Jeffry Ross Hyman) died 10 years ago this April. Dan Morris is no longer 17. He is, in fact, 48 and has three small kids. His students are now hipper if not than thou, at least than him. By his own account, Morris, who once lived in a pop-culture future present, now survives as a middle-class, middle-aged revenant. Not that he mourns much. Morris is too happy a dad and too self-deprecating a poet for that. He is just surprised that this thing—call it age or call it history—has happened to him.

Morris’ sense of history is not sacred in any sense. Nothing particularly religious there. He tells a witty parable of a hung-over vegan—a hipster like himself and yet not himself—who “self-mockingly sniffs the hops” of the last beer in the fridge as if it’s an etrog and finds, in that ambiguous gesture, his own small measure of salvation. When he discusses the Holocaust, Morris talks somewhat provocatively about the “[l]eavings/ of the usual guilt for a porky Jewish Yid who happens to love brats in steam/ beer.” He makes it clear that the Shoah is a real presence for him but mostly as a “usual” guilt that attends it (usual for my generation, at least) and as mere representations of the original horror.

Stephen Paul Miller, Morris’ co-editor, is not all that different, although he is at times less gentle and a good deal edgier. In the riffs of his athletically speedy poem-essays, he is happy to take the history of Judaism head-on as in “There Is Only One God and You Are Not It,” which will be published in a new collection to appear this year:

There’s only
one god.

Stick with Yahweh. Enjoy
His touching if psychotic collective cognitive
shift of
ground from which we think—

power and reality rumble in subtle, pre-Platonic spheres.
Yahweh
sanctions sweet
proto-ideological me

and I’ve already spent nine
minutes
on identity with three
for music ’n poetry.

This last crack shows that his enthusiastically blasphemous take on the Almighty was originally part of a performance. Miller associates poetry with oral presentation and intellectual provocation, with standing there in front of an audience and riffing in high terms and low talk. Poetry is about communication and community, something you do in public.

So, voice is very important for Miller. It is for Morris as well, who is a dab hand at mimicry, imitating a language he associates with his long-dead father (“bupkis/ Crapola, daddy can’t rub two nickels, stuck somewhere between shit/ and shinola”) or one he associates with his students: “while you pretend to be this rad/ instructor …/ hiding out here as/ resident wild hair genius at Purdue in Northwest fucking Indiana cornfields.” And it’s somewhere in voice that Miller and Morris’ most interestingly secular Jewishness can be found.

Miller and Morris are secular in the most radical sense. They live in a human, historical time that is not made whole by redemption. They talk about their kids—a lot—and their daily lives not because those lives are somehow exemplary. Nor do they believe that the shards of earthly existence can be transfigured by acts of tikkun. They are just (just!) doting Jewish fathers, guys who eat brats and corn flakes (but not at the same time). They listen to the Ramones and Blondie. They don’t claim to be glamorous. They are academic shlubs.

They’re also wiseasses. Avantgardistas mean to unsettle and when possible to surprise. (The old motto, épater la bourgeoisie means nothing more than to amaze the stuffy middle classes.) That is the signature of their novelty. In this way experimental artists bear a certain affinity with Jewish comedy. Think Lenny Bruce or Sarah Silverman. Think that seminal influence, MAD Magazine, whose furshlugginer humor originally crossbred a Yiddish zeal for deflation with a sly and markedly adolescent contempt for authority.

One of the particular novelties that poets like Morris and Miller as well Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and others have brought to contemporary American poetry is a mix of slapstick, abstract thought and verbal experimentation. The arguments splay. The sentences fracture. The syntax veers, and the language becomes rich and strange. All the while, they’re working on their timing and cracking jokes. Theirs is a male Jewish nerd’s revenge on the establishment.

These guys don’t speak Yiddish, to be sure, but they remember some of its inflections. In this, their poetry is of their generation. Anyone not brought up on MAD or classic movies like Blazing Saddles or the Bergmann take-off De Düva, or old recordings of Lenny Bruce and the 2000 Year Old Man, would not be able to reproduce its particular tone. But they won’t need to. Being of their time, they will tire of our own future past and produce a new experimentalism. And a Jewish secularism of their own.

It’s always been hard to pin Benjamin down. Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist, deconstructive spirit—he has been many things to many people. It is equally hard to describe what he did, in part because Americans don’t really make intellectuals like him. Benjamin, whose most important work was written in Berlin during the ’20s and then in Paris during the ’30s, wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one. To use a quaint expression, he was a man of letters. Even that does not do him justice.

Uwe Steiner’s new book on Benjamin—which attempts to put Benjamin in his historical place—doesn’t really do him justice either. Steiner traces Benjamin’s mature work to the thinker’s early days as a radical student before the First World War, when Nietzsche was all the rage. Fair enough. Steiner also has a larger goal: He wants us to stop trying to bend Benjamin to our intellectual will—be it Marxist, deconstructive, or religious. A laudable goal but also slightly perverse, because Benjamin had no trouble trying on others’ thoughts to see if they fit. Even worse, Steiner’s approach scants Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional allure.

Benjamin’s remarkable endurance derives as much from his style as from his ideas. Or rather, his brilliant, damnably esoteric critique of capitalist culture is one with the pathos and indirectness of his prose. His sentences suggest. They imply. At their best, they radiate. Hence the remarkable bursts of scholarship his work has seen over the last few decades. He reminds people of what they might think.

His most famous set piece comes from his last work, a series of aphorisms called “On the Concept of History.” Written in the short period before he killed himself while trying to flee from the Nazis, this paragraph gains some of its considerable melancholy from retrospect, from the fact that it has been taken as his last will and testament:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A beautiful piece of writing that gets an extra kick from its pessimistic counter-intuitive punch line. Progress doesn’t progress in the slightest. It is a steady march through disaster. And there is nothing, it seems, we can do about it.

Bleak stuff. But Benjamin’s ability to arrest you with the solidity of an abstraction can tempt you away from the thin thread of his argument. On its own, this paragraph presents us with a picture of fallen and unredeemable history. In the context of the other paragraphs of the essay in which it appears, we can see that the Angel of History does not have the last word. History, Benjamin maintains, is permanently, if elusively, susceptible to revolutionary change.

Benjamin claimed that his work was saturated with theology, even—or rather especially—when it appears to be at its most secular. In the piece that contains the Angel, the revolution fulfills a theological mandate by making “whole what has been smashed.” Benjamin imagines that it will enact tikkun olam in a very literal sense. Benjamin’s colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, once accused him of believing all too squarely in the Last Judgment. Though Benjamin tried to recast his thought into more acceptably materialist terms, Horkheimer had a point. Benjamin might have talked about redemption as the historical fulfillment of squandered hopes, but at heart he was always listening for the final trump. He was waiting for the glorious resurrection of the dead.

Benjamin’s thought was essentially religious. It clung to the twin promises of redemption and transcendence. The man worked from the clearly Jewish intuition that justice cannot be derived from the world as it is. Justice is precisely that small break from nature instituted by the Law. Our problem is not that nature is sinful. Our problem lies with the fact that on its own, nature just isn’t enough. It needs to be transcended, if only just a bit. As his friend T. W. Adorno was fond of reminding us, the Talmud says that the redeemed world will be like this one, but a little different. And that tiny shift means everything.

But what happens when we, as the children of modernity, have lost the Law? That is where Benjamin’s messianic politics slip in. Gershom Scholem, the magisterial historian of Kabbalah, always maintained that Benjamin was a Jewish thinker and not really a Marxist. For his part, Benjamin argued that he pursued a single goal—the radical transformation of the world, a utopian strike against suffering. His was not the tikkun olam of good deeds and incremental improvements, but of bold risks and decisive moves.

Sure, sure, there is a great deal of Romanticism in all this (as Steiner would be the first to point out) and a sentimentalizing anarchism that speaks of another era. Even so, Benjamin proposes a heresy we might want to consider: redemption without faith. He refuses to give up the rigors and promises of theology for a more amenable, even amiable ethical Judaism. He therefore cuts a different path for the post-religious. Just as Scholem, however unwittingly, presents us with a Kabbalah without halakhah, so Benjamin quite wittingly addresses a theology without God. An intractable contradiction? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is a historical conundrum that we have yet to overcome.

All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don’t want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.

I want certainty, science: everything you are, do, think; think, do, are,
is precisely twenty-two percent Jewish. Or six-and-a-half. Some nice prime.
Your suffering is Jewish. Your resistant, resilient pleasure in living, too,

can be tracked to some Jew on some bridge on page something or other
in some city, some village, some shtetl, some festering shvitz of a slum …

This is vintage Williams: long lines kept afloat through the conversational speed of his diction. His fluency hides a problem, though. He’s not asking how Jewish he is. He’s asking how he is Jewish, what’s Jewish in him.

All right, then, can we cast Williams as a Jewish poet? If we are to judge by the evidence of Wait—and his 2006 Collected Poems—he doesn’t draw on many Jewish sources. The man is widely read, and many of his poems take as their occasion a famous book or a famous writer (“I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante”). While some of them are Jewish, their numbers are few. Wait cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ortega y Gasset, Goethe, and Zbigniew Herbert. Nary a Jew among them.

As Williams has gotten older, his poetry, which was once known for its unflinching dedication to the concrete, has become comfortably abstract, buoyed along by what he calls “spurts of cogitation, these suppositions strung/ like air on air.” The poet who can consider rats in the backyard (“devious, ruthless,/ rapacious, and every/ day I loathe/ them more.”) can also imagine “traversing the maze of my brain: corridors, corners, strange,/ narrow caverns, dead ends.” Those strings of suppositions are not particularly Jewish in their structure, their themes, or their inspiration. Williams has always expressed a strong desire for social justice and a liberal’s hatred of violence, especially the redemptive violence of the religious extremist or the millenarian revolutionary. Many Jews would agree with him, but that’s hardly conclusive. So would many non-Jews.

“Jew on Bridge” is not typical, then. In its associative leaps and bounds, it is thick with Jews. It begins with a tiny incident—hardly an incident—in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s hero Raskolnikov passes a Jew on a bridge. He concentrates all his prodigious anti-Semitism on this one lone, nameless soul. After pondering this unknown Jew on an unknown bridge over the Neva, Williams turns to another Jew on a bridge, this time in France. He thinks of the poet Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, in 1920. A Romanian fluent in Russian, possessed by German, and completely at home in French, Celan escaped from a Nazi labor camp and ended up in Paris, only to commit suicide there in 1970. In his brief, tormented transit, Celan wrote the most important German poetry of the second half of the 20th century, all of it shaped and deformed by the Shoah.

English and German fragments of Celan’s most famous poem, “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) appear and reappear in “Jew on Bridge”:

He stood on the bridge over the Seine, looked into the black milk of dying,
Jew on bridge, and hauled himself over the rail. Dein aschenes Haar…
Dostoevsky’s Jew, though, is still there. On page something or other.

The real Jew, tortured by the particular history of the European past, is dead. The literary Jew, a compass of all disgust, remains.

And Williams, standing somewhere between these Jews on their respective bridges, wants to know where he fits in. He is adamantly secular and uncomfortable around the religious. He might occasionally be “lonely for God,” but let’s be honest, only occasionally. As he presents it, he is perhaps too American—too far away from the European root—to count.

But Williams finds his way into the doleful history of European Jewry through an elegant sleight of hand. His father, like Celan, was named Paul. His grandfather was named Benjamin, which brings to Williams’ mind Walter Benjamin, the great German litterateur. Benjamin—the German, not the grandfather—killed himself in a Spanish hotel while trying to flee the Nazis.

Two suicides, two Jews, two relations. Williams brings Celan and Benjamin into the family through the accidental alchemy of their names. He brings himself into the circle through a profoundly melancholy sense—whose cynicism is only half a joke—of a common fate: “Aren’t we all in that same shitty hotel on the bridge in the shittiest world?” It is not clear whether that “we” is confined to Jews or extends, in a sweeping existential gesture, to the whole human race.

Most likely it is the latter. Williams locates his greatest affinity to Benjamin in the German’s exquisite ear for suffering, in what Williams describes as Benjamin’s shame at human brutality. Nevertheless, Williams is uneasy with the grand existential gesture. By killing himself, Benjamin has tried to overcome mankind’s shame by erasing “all the names that ever existed” including those that maintain the Jewish past. He has annihilated us all.

Where can Williams go from there? It must have been difficult to end this poem, one in which Williams—born in New Jersey in 1936—attempts to attach himself to the catastrophic fate of Mitteleuropa. Nothing could be less Jewish, less evocative, than his own name, and so he rolls others off his tongue, those names that have driven his meditation from the get-go:

Celan on his bridge. Raskolnikov muttering Dostoevsky under his breath.
Jew on bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath.
Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Haar. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath.

Ash and breath. Ash vs. breath. The poet will breathe and write in spite of the camps.

While there is something both stirring and pretentious in this—is suicide really the point?—we Jews do believe in survival through names, and Williams is nothing if not a poet of memory. Williams has always been strongest when elegiac. He has written many poems in which he meditates on lost friends, lost loves, or, as in this description of his old, now “inner-city” high school, lost possibilities:

Come dusk, the classrooms emptied,
the books shut tight, those forsaken treasures
of knowledge must batter the fading blackboards
and swarm the silent, sleeping halls,
like shades of lives never to be lived.

He is a skilled mourner, to be sure. His Jewishness lies in how he mourns.

“Jew on Bridge” tempts you to read Williams backwards, from Wait to his first book 40 years ago. If you do, you can see that he has always been sitting shiva for the whole 20th century. He has had a strong tendency to view its public disasters through the scrim of the Holocaust. The first poem in his first book was dedicated to Anne Frank. He has written poetry about Auschwitz and translated Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish writer once described as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” Although he can be quick to generalize from the particular experience of the Shoah to the plight of humanity in general, Williams is also capable of evoking that experience in its uncomfortable specificities:

You’re in a room. Dark. You’re naked. Crushed on all sides by others naked.
Flesh-knobs. Hairy or smooth. Sweating against you. Shvitzing against you.

Such writing requires empathy, and empathy is a product of the moral imagination, the ability to identify with another’s situation. Williams has both to spare, sometimes to a self-lacerating fault.

The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has suggested that the important thing is not a person’s identity but his or her identifications. Williams, like many of his generation and like many after, finds his secular Jewishness right in the heart of the Shoah. However limited that identification might be—it misses many aspects of Yiddishkeit—it is capable of producing deep commitments and memorable poetry. Whether it can continue to do so remains to be seen. Whether it should do so is another matter completely.

It tells us a lot about the younger man’s relation to his father, about the writer’s relation to his book, and about Cavell’s own complicated style of thought that the all-important conversation that should have taken place, didn’t. Cavell leaves it hanging. No ruminations on life and death; no dialectical exchange on duty. Instead, Cavell’s father falls asleep. The son—and Cavell is nothing if not an acute reader of Freud—goes off to find his mother. And that is that.

Cavell began writing Little Did I Know when he was about to undergo treatment for heart disease seven years ago. He saves the vignette about his father for the last pages of the book, as a kind of punch line. Cavell’s philosophy, quirky as it is, has always been about responsibility and, more important, about our tendency to avoid offering accounts of ourselves, about our unwillingness to stand by what we have done and what we should do. It is about missed connections, about our fear of paying proper attention to ourselves and the world. Little Did I Know is his accounting for himself.

It is not easy to give a brief take on Cavell, because he has always been, both figuratively and literally, all over the map. He was born in Atlanta to a musician mother and to an immigrant father (a frustrated, indifferent speaker of English who was also a frustrated and indifferent entrepreneur). The future philosopher spent his childhood traveling back and forth between business ventures his father was pursuing in Georgia and California. His father hated him; his mother loved him. He was a skilled musician, studied composition at UCLA, and did not so much flunk out of Juilliard as funk out. He got his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard, taught at Berkeley, then returned to Harvard and spent the better part of his very productive career in Cambridge. He has written both extensively and widely.

The memoir makes it tempting to cast Cavell’s career as a son’s wish to mediate between the severity of his father’s disappointments and the warmth of his mother’s creativity. After all, Cavell has spent the better part of five decades mediating between different schools of philosophy and between philosophy and the arts. He has written several books about film, and he is passionate about opera. It’s fair to say, though, that he does not just practice aesthetics, the philosophical description of the arts. One of his most stunning peculiarities is that he writes about the arts as if they were philosophy. Needless to say, Cavell’s approach doesn’t always work, but when it does, as in his 1994 article on the Marx Brothers in the London Review of Books, it can be liberating.

So, yes: Cavell is a conciliator, but to get at his insights, at his importance as an instigator, it makes sense to see him as a philosopher bent on disappointing disappointment. For Cavell, the scandal of our individuality is the source of a fundamental heartbreak. In becoming aware of ourselves, we lose the world. We doubt it and our knowledge of it.

We do not miss our appointment with the world through an error—we are indeed separate from it—but we are tempted to draw the wrong conclusions. We begin to the feel that objects as they “merely” appear to us are not what they really are, that there is something more out there. We feel that there must be a realm more real than the one we live in. Philosophy is all about this dilemma. It describes our desire to draw away from the ordinary, to locate reality elsewhere. By the same token, philosophy can try to turn us around, recover the everyday, and restore us to the pleasures of connection.

Nevertheless, our disappointment counts. It is not wrong. Things could be different, and they could be better. So, for Cavell, to return to the world does not mean accepting things as they are. To return to ourselves does not mean we should be content with our imperfections or with our discontent with them. His is a philosophy of what he calls “moral perfectionism.”

Cavell is worried about his right to say all this. How can he make such wide-ranging claims? Our individuality undermines our authority. His philosophy asks how personal experience can speak validly to and for others.

This is a tough one. We like to think of our lives in terms of their climaxes, breaks, and traumatic turns. These surprises might mark us, but they are not the stuff of the everyday. Cavell writes that “so much of what has formed me has been not events but precisely the uneventful, the nothing, the unnoted that is happening, the coloration or camouflage of the everyday.” The unnoted isn’t the stuff of story. We register it not as an event but as a mood. Mood tells us about ourselves and is our gateway to the world. It is the way that personal experience gets articulated and generalized.

So, it makes sense to read Cavell as he himself reads Emerson—as a philosopher of mood. But moods, like the tones that convey them, are hard to pin down and even harder to account for. As any reader of Marcel Proust and Henry James knows, you need a lot of space to summon forth a mood, and you need an eye for social or psychological nuance to keep things interesting. Cavell allows himself the space, but once young Stanley is out of his teens, Cavell the writer is not really that concerned with telling details. He is also too nice a guy to dish. He provides us with hundreds of pages of garrulous reticence about his friends, children, and wives, the books he has read, the books he has written, and the places he has visited. He is a bemused son and a loving father. He is the model of a grateful friend.

Gratitude is a virtue and like most virtues makes for dull reading. The most famous parts of the most famous memoirs of philosophers—Rousseau’s theft of a ribbon, Augustine’s theft of pears—turn on their vices. Sadly for the reader, Stanley Cavell is not a vicious man. He might not discuss death with his dad, but that is about as far as it goes. There is no villain in his divorce. What is more disappointing, Little Did I Know doesn’t provide us with any new or surprising insights into the turns of Cavell’s philosophy.

This is not Cavell’s first pass at autobiography. He went at it more pointedly and more concisely in 1994’s A Pitch of Philosophy. But, for all its longueurs, Little Did I Know is valuable to the extent that it makes it very clear just how much Cavell’s thinking owes to his immigrant Jewish background. The most obvious aspect of this debt—his insistence on what he calls moral perfectionism and his recourse to the theme of return—is perhaps the least intriguing. Equally obvious is the extent to which his concern with disappointment and despair is an attempt to come to terms philosophically with his father’s frustrated hopes. Cavell’s lonely childhood, his mother’s absences, and his father’s angry, angered distance must have led directly to his fascination with the ineluctable privacy of other people.

Judaism, as a sociological fact, if not a religious one, is also a form of privacy, a kind of unbridgeable separation that stands between the Jew and the outside world. This must have seemed especially true to generations of immigrants and their children. You can hear it in Cavell’s almost punctilious worry about his authority to speak and his warrant to be heard. There were plenty of Jews in Philosophy and English departments in the 1950s and the ’60s, but it couldn’t have been all that comfortable. (I know of a tenure case as recent as the 1980s in which a senior faculty member complained that a Jew couldn’t teach Shakespeare.) Jewish academics of my cohort did not experience this. In fact, with and without reason, a Jewish professor nowadays would feel comfortable claiming that Jewishness is in itself a claim for authority. The difference is telling, not the least in terms of our moods and therefore our thought.

We can learn something from Little Did I Know, but let’s be honest: There is no reason for most people to read it. For a good introduction to Cavell’s turn of mind, you might want to go to the wonderful The Senses of Walden or to his book on Hollywood comedy, Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell’s memoir does not explain his philosophy as such nor how it works out in the end. But, in its own elliptical and sometimes maddening way, it does show where the thinking came from and how it got its most salient aspect: the wisdom of its elegiac optimism, its tone of disabused affection.

When I became pregnant my brain and body were suddenly filled with static. This static was less a sound than a sense that the flickering of snow on a tv screen had been made into liquid and pumped into my veins. It was difficult to think, hard to do anything at all. After a while, I realized that it was her signal. I couldn’t hear my own ways of thinking or feeling with this other person’s atoms multiplying inside of me. It was the sound of the big bang, and my own radio brain was tuned in.

Everything gets crossed in this passage: sounds and liquids, big and small, inside and out, baby and universe, time and whatever it was that was before time. And the poet, somewhere in the middle, registers it all.

I’m not sure what the hiss of poetic static would sound like, but I guess it would require a uniformity across the bandwidth, a murmur without specific information. Weiser gives us something else, a fine jumble that signals too much, not too little information:

A person sits next to a world of almost situations
making a living as a memoir
thoroughfares fill with drizzle scrambling
progressive strangers with their ding eyes
I am sure a fugue is near
in the almost-echo of park benches—
this is not the city of the blessed worker
Americana seduction like original face paint
reflected in a gridiron puddle

The lines veer off from each other after an initial point of contact—you can reconstruct how punctuation might connect them. There is even a kind of electrical tension between then words, especially when Weiser makes her nouns act as adjectives. You get the sense that the phrases “ding eyes” and “Americana seduction” are merely momentary hookups. Momentary, but not necessarily or completely arbitrary. Weiser’s disruptions serve a clear purpose. She is trying to get at something between the senses and between sense. She is trying to get at what she in one place calls “the ocean of more everything.”

We Jews call this ocean and this plenitude God, the Big Bang’s Big Bang, and it is tempting to read Weiser’s poems as something akin to an expression of faith. She definitely nods in this direction. She articulates a very Jewish notion of revelation:

Revelation is at heart a linguistic event
and all creatures with lungs can speak

After all, God reveals Himself by voice and in writing. He talks to the Jews. And He makes sure that the Jews and that Nature talk back. The psalmist tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God and that their voice fills all speech and every language.

But these lines appear in a poem about “macguffins,” the false leads that drive the plot of thrillers and mysteries. Our Adamic acts of naming, of finding the real names of things, might be nothing more than our own “bludgeoned burgeoning of sleep’s asymmetry.” By the same token, names are all we’ve got.  In other words, while all creatures with lungs might be talking, we can never be sure what exactly it is that they’re saying. We have to pretend—for the moment at least—that we do.

So, Weiser is really much more a skeptic than a mystic. For all that, she is a cheerful improviser on infinite themes. She sees ahead of her “an endlessly opening frontier of rapid sketches/ pressed between the pages of knowing.” The vision thing can get awfully dreary unless—like William Blake or Henry David Thoreau—you can muster a sense of humor. Karen Weiser has a sense of humor. She likes to play. She mixes up her diction and lets music direct her lines:

when I imp my wing to sing
and thrice appear a melancholy thing:
I should sleep-wake in my third-best days

On her first-best days she doesn’t seem like a melancholy thing at all.

There’s no reason for sadness. The driving force behind the poems—at least as Weiser presents them—is childbirth, not death; a potential gain and not a certain loss. At bottom, her book is predicated on the possibility, almost the certainty, of being able to meet and greet at the appointed time:

It’s small, the moment of opening between us
and I will meet you here without fail

She counts on what she terms “the generosity of opening.”

This opening might be spiritual. It is also quite literal—there is nothing  as concrete as pregnancy and childbirth—and thumpingly American. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, that quintessential, boys-own dream of freedom, Huck tells us that he is going “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Weiser wants to light out for new territory as well, but she’s not a guy and the adventure is internal. At the same time it’s also out there in the ether, in the linguistic equivalent of an electromagnetic hum.



The 20th century solved the problem of the epic by creating long serial works, what the poet Ron Silliman has called “life poems.” Like the great Modernist epics—Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Louis Zukofsky’s A, and John Berryman’s Dream Songs (to name just a few)—DuPlessis’ Drafts is made of discrete units that look, on the surface, like separate poems because their immediate occasions appear to be different. But like the other “life poems,” Drafts is bound together by the concentration of its attention and the durability of its concerns.

Duplessis is a noted feminist scholar, and it is no surprise that Drafts sees the political as the personal and that in Pitch it takes our war in Iraq head-on. As Duplessis says, “Every part of this is inflected by war.” Like her friend, teacher, and foil, George Oppen, she takes war as a question of individual responsibility. She is particularly bothered by the role of the poet in a period of conflict. She articulates this theme in a number of places and in “Hard Copy,” a complicated meditation on Oppen:

To resuscitate
The covenants that are
Available
To fabricate them as
Humane and secular

And thereby to address
Wrongs of the world, ruthlessness,
Despoiling and injustices:

Is the agenda in front of us.

DuPlessis lends nuance and hesitation to this bald statement of poetics through her line breaks. Not all covenants, just those that are available. Available covenants that will need to be fabricated further—created out of whole cloth (as we say of lies)—so that they can be humane and secular. (Does this mean that religion cannot be humane? In a recent essay she expresses a certain doubt on that score.) All this is our agenda. But whose? Hers, to be sure, and Oppen’s as well. And, it must be assumed, also ours.

DuPlessis refers to covenants and therefore to the Covenant, and like many progressives she seems to locate her Yiddishkeit in no small part in a secularized version of the Jewish demand for justice. In “Hard Copy,” the emphasis lies on witness and repair. But when she describes herself and her work, DuPlessis defines her Jewishness in broader terms. You could call it an attitude, “a reverence for textuality so intense it moves into an antic quality within the seriousness, an exilic, nomadic sensibility, a certain kind of humor … a quarrel with the negative space some call God, a particular, actually somewhat skeptical, somewhat hopeful attitude to fulfillment and messianic hope.”

I have culled this quote from an essay called “Midrashic Sensibilities” in order to suggest that her greatest tie to the practices of Judaism lies with her “reverence for textuality” and, more specifically, that aggressive, loving, and creative approach to texts we call midrash. Midrash became a preferred term among Jewish literary critics in the 1980s. It was used (and overused) as a way of both claiming and justifying the speculative forms of interpretation that marked that time. DuPlessis’ poems are midrashic to the extent that they are more often than not meditations on other poems or texts.

Her poem “Midrash,” (included in the previous collection of Drafts) is quite explicitly a lengthy meditation on the German philosopher T.W. Adorno’s often misquoted and usually misunderstood dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric:

Is this midrash on Adorno done?
No. Midrash is never over,
being neither lost nor won.

The individual commentary and the individual poem might end—the writer has to stop somewhere as that jokey little rhyme indicates—but by her lights midrash is never conclusive. Interpretation and argument always remain in draft because they can be taken up again and again.

The poems in Pitch are midrashim in the broadest, reverentially textual sense. They take secular works, most often poems, as their subject. These poems serve as pre-texts, which she probes, questions, and answers. In “Hard Copy” she riffs on Oppen’s great “Of Being Numerous,” section by section. In “X-Posting,” DuPlessis takes the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Keine Delikatessen” (“No Delicatessen”—an unfortunately prosaic translation which loses the notion of “delicate eating” in the German) and “trans-interprets” it: She borrows from it, elaborates on it, grabs sounds from it, and varies it.

DuPlessis’ notion of Jewish textuality is not limited to her version of midrash. In other instances, DuPlessis adopts recognizably modernized Jewish forms and modes. She reworks the genre of proverb, for instance, and enjoys mimicking the play of rabbinic questioning. Some of DuPlessis’ proverbs are jokes of a particularly nonreligious (or anti-religious) type: “Worship is a sinking ship.” Others appear to come from the Pirkei Avot by way of Kafka: “Winnow the old words; harrow the new; seed from the few.” The poem “Interrogation” sounds in places like the imitation pilpul you find in the French poet Edmond Jabes’ work. Here is Jabes:

What if the book were only infinite memory of a missing word?
Thus absence speaks to absence.

And here is DuPlessis:

But you say this isn’t written in your “voice”?
No it is not, and it is also not not.

You could say that the equivocation in the last line sums up her notion of her “midrashic sensibilities.” At the moment the poem speaks for her, it doesn’t. Or, at the moment that it appears to speak without her, it gathers her in.

Through joke, proverb, and questioning—by being there and being more than there—DuPlessis tries to go beyond what she takes to the limits of personal expression. She is not afraid of the didactic, of direct address, or of abstraction. After all, midrash is about debate and conversation and conviction. DuPlessis’ convictions are as strong as her ambitions are high: “Whenever I see the time is wrong,/I knock it hard to start it up again,/hitting the table where I do my work.” Her project therefore requires a constant pitch of seriousness, a continuous attentiveness on the part of both the poet and the reader.

Pitch seems difficult because it does not reflect on experience as much as take the act of reflection as its experience. It tends to be intellectual and intellectualizing. There is an important point to all this. Pitch—and here it is of a piece with everything that DuPlessis has ever done—actively dismantles old-style clichés of the female poet as a sensitive skylark. Pitch isn’t easy going (or easy-going), but then if it were it would be a failure on its own terms. In its expansiveness, Drafts presents us with this specific woman’s life in its particular times and on its particular terms. It serves as the ongoing record of DuPlessis’ mind at its work and midrashic play.

The god commanded a naked stone be set up
and with no marks upon it. But I had
lost that god or it had become something

like a rain one hears but does not see.

For Heller, God has become a mere anthropological fact, but one whose injunction against graven images Heller obeys. He will go as far as observe it—and Judaism—as a command to a certain kind of silence. And that silence is golden because its desecration is the stuff of disaster:

I took silence into time, marking the absence
of our late vocabularies in their conspirings,
these new mythologies , as they fell from on high

through our skies and through our roofs
scouring our minds as cosmic rays heave
traceries in the cool white lime of tunnels.

He can only mean 9/11 when he refers to the conspiracies that fall from the skies in a horrible parody of revelation. He divorces his negative Judaism from the consipirators’ adamant Islam. His heresy—which takes God’s word as a form of abstinence—is less an anathema than theirs, which claims to take that word literally.

His most recent book, Beckmann Variations, is also haunted by the attack on the World Trade Center. It is marked by a long meditation on the paintings of Max Beckmann. Beckmann, an émigré German whose mature works ranged from the Twenties until his death in 1950, was always Modernism’s odd man out. The formal ingredients of his work—his thick applications of paint, his heavy use of black outlines and his palette—bring to mind a number of his contemporaries, but his recipe was different.

Beckmann has often been lumped with German Expressionists like George Grosz, whose acid caricatures of Weimar society were meant to shock and disorient. But, as Heller points out, Beckmann wasn’t particularly interested in social satire or agitprop. At heart he was a mythmaker. He did not want to lampoon his contemporaries but to uncover the primal forces that drove them. He wasn’t looking for examples. He was hunting down archetypes.

Archetypes crowd Beckmann’s paintings—figures from Classical mythology, figures that should be from Classical mythology, generic kings, harlequins, people in masks and so on. It is not always clear how they relate to each other because Beckmann’s work mixes the contemporary and the archaic, the near and the far. This leads Heller to the conclusion that Beckmann’s viewers have respond to this art with art, have to confront Beckmann’s enigmatic stories with stories of their own.

Beckmann Variations is meant to be that kind of confrontation. Heller balances more-or-less conversational prose meditations on the paintings themselves with poems that, as he puts it, employ figures “that will release in language the power of the painting.” Heller translates that power into aphoristic poems:

The master departs he always departs.
So it is with kings who sail off on boat-like thrones,
who perform the miracle of going. Don’t wonders
occur when iron reason has left the scene,
and cruel profanations no longer astound us?

This is Heller’s way. He matches straightforward description with abstraction. And with Beckmann, you need a lot of abstractions for it all to make sense.

Kings, reason, wonder, and profanation. Heller’s Beckmann is a creature of World War I who understood early on the dangers of National Socialism. He was not a Jew but a “degenerate” artist (as the Nazis called them). He was fired from his teaching job in 1933 and finally fled Germany in 1937. So Heller, whose Judaism has been the subject of most of his work over the last four decades, is able to call on Beckmann as an expert witness to the murderousness of the world.

Beckmann serves an important purpose for Heller. He provides a model for visionary art, because he seems to apprehend the essential structures of the world. Vision—the prophetic stance that Heller associates with poets like William Blake and William Butler Yeats—enables the artist to tell us that what generates the news isn’t new at all. Visionaries use myth to show us the primal forces that drive us. Beckmann reveals to us that we are determined by our cravings for violence, sovereignty, and submission. This version of things is rather grim, but Heller admires Beckmann for accepting it without melodrama (although there is more than enough drama, even melodrama, in the paintings). By the same token, Heller does not see Beckmann’s work as tragic. Heller insists that there are brief moments of light in the paintings. These spots of brightness grant—at however distant a remove—a small degree of hope.

Most importantly, Beckmann seems in some deep way to have predicted 9/11. It is one of the tricks of historical perspective that you cannot look at Falling Man (1950) now without thinking of all those bodies plummeting from the Twin Towers. It looks like current events only caught up with Beckmann 50 years after his death.

Perhaps this is too easy. The man in the painting is metaphoric, but the people who threw themselves from the World Trade Center were heart-wrenchingly real. As a series of tropes and tentative explanations, Beckmann’s visionary art can tell us a good deal about the world but it did not foresee the destruction in Lower Manhattan. When we forget that it is at best a provisional figure of thought, we too fall into the potentially brutal literalism that Heller denounces in “The Heresy.”

Modernist writing presents Heller with two options: the mythic assertions that Heller finds in Yeats and the worldly precisions of his other avowed influences, poets like George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky. The events of 9/11 pull Heller in both directions. On the one hand, he reads the attacks on New York and Washington (and the subsequent attacks on London and Madrid) as a failure of enlightenment, as the result of precisely that danger that the Second Commandment warns us against. On the other hand, he wants to understand these atrocities mythically—in terms of jealous Olympians and fundamental drives. As a reader, I know which I prefer: I’ll plump for Reznikoff, Oppen, and Zukofsky any day. But as a poet, Heller knows that he does not have to make a final choice. It is the back and forth of the choosing itself that provides the drama of the work.

Kaminsky, whose award-winning first book, Dancing in Odessa, was published when he was 27, sounds just like what an American reader would expect a Russian poet to sound like. His work is full of fine, dramatic gestures. Here is “Author’s Prayer”:

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise.

Kaminsky has no qualms about taking on the whole burden of modern Russian history. He is happy to assume the whole burden of modernist Russian poetry—in English no less. The pathos of his situation is thick enough to taste. As befits this pathos, his poetry is oratorical and full of liturgical repetitions:

Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.
For the secret of patience is his wife’s patience
Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat,
he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her forgetting,
a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath.
Let them borrow the light from the blind.

This poem, from his as-yet-unpublished second book, shows that Kaminsky’s universe is folkloric in its themes and presentation. It is populated as much by archetypes as by people.

Kaminsky’s poetry is unequivocally Russian. You can hear this when he reads: Ecstatic lyricism is his hallmark. Most American poets are pretty flat performers of their poetry. Not Kaminsky. To hear him chant his work—and there is at least one remarkable recording on the web—is to be overwhelmed by just how theatrical, how foreign he seems. As he once said in an interview, he views exile as a “wonderful gift.” Like his hero Joseph Brodsky, he cuts an amply romantic figure.

In contrast, Matvei Yankelevich’s recent book Boris by the Sea is anything but dramatic. Yankelevich has gotten a lot of attention for his translations of Daniil Kharms, a Soviet-era author who died of starvation in 1941. Kharms was something of a character—a 19th-century dandy in the Stalinist ’30s—and also something of an absurdist:

It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.

And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.

Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I’ll write about Pushkin after all.

Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.

In so many ways, this is vintage Kharms. It is funny, of course, but frustrated and frustratingly inconclusive. By rights, this piece shouldn’t exist because it cancels itself out. It hovers indecisively at that moment when it comes into being.

While it’s tempting to read Kharms’s work as a series of parables about the horrors of the first decades after the Russian Revolution, it’s not really about that world at all:

There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing to speak of! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.

The red-headed man is not a bureaucratic non-person. He is an ontological one.

Kharms wrote plays, novellas, short pieces of prose, and poems. They cohere through their refusal to draw normal causal connections. His narratives hang suspended because their beginnings do not begin and their endings bring nothing to an end. Nothing starts, nothing finishes.

Yankelevich has learned a lot from the master. It is hard to call Boris by the Sea poetry, though it is necessary to do so because in the end, Boris runs afoul of narrative. It also asks to be read closely, like poetry. Boris consists of short texts, some with line breaks, some presented as little bits of dialogue, some as little hunks of prose. They are both like and unlike Kharms:

Boris lived in his room and thought about why people need each other. People need each other, thought Boris, to check each other for ticks. People need each other for solving the problem of what is inside.

In a similar vein, Yankelevich writes:

Boris looked himself over and realized there were many parts of him that he could not see. And only a small part of these parts was on the surface.

The ticks are a nice, idiosyncratic touch but only a touch. The “problem of what is inside” is Yankelevich’s chief philosophical worry.

Boris has no defining features beyond a naive, sceptical interest in things. So to call him a character is perhaps going too far. He has characteristics. They do not develop. Each text, each small section of texts finishes up more or less where the book does, that is, where it kicks off.

Yankelevich differs from Kharms in a fundamental way. Kharms presents the world as if it made no sense. Yankelevich presents personality as if it made no sense. Boris is as cut off as Descartes’s famous “cogito,” which is only certain that it exists because it can doubt. It is as lonely as Descartes’s spiritual son, Samuel Beckett:

Boris had no parents—he appeared.

Or maybe he just didn’t remember them.

He simply had no faith in the past.

And he didn’t go there.

You cannot imagine anyone in Kaminsky’s poetry not having a past. If anything, the past is where they all go. Boris is not an exile precisely because he does not originate anywhere. No history sparks his nostalgia.

Boris by the Sea is peculiarly Jewish. Yankelevich once asked his father what it meant to him to be Jewish. His father—an outspoken dissident during the 1970s and the only Jew (according to his son) who did not want to leave the USSR—replied that it lay with his tendency to see nothing but text, to see everything as if it were constructed by words.

If the word precedes the world, then language itself comes before everything else. And language is a real problem for an immigrant. As befits someone who moved to America when he was four, Yankelevich writes a flawless English. Nevertheless, I do catch a few—just a few—Russianisms in the book. Sometimes his cadences give him away, but only sometimes. That is about it, a little trace to remind you that Yankelevich wasn’t born here.

Boris, the resident alien of Yankelevich’s book, cannot help coming across as undeniably Russian. Even if you do not know that Boris By the Sea started in Russian, you can hear that it lives in a space between languages. It translates linguistic dislocation into philosophical scepticism, a sense of not belonging in your words into a sense of not belonging at all.

Boris By the Sea is a singular book. There have been excellent—and sadly neglected—American poets who have written similarly odd poems. That said, no one to my knowledge has written about immigrating into a new language as completely and at the same time as obliquely as Yankelevich. That is what makes him so fully hyphenated—so recognizably Russian at the same time that he is so consciously American.

Of course, it is odd to speak of the city of God—the title of St. Augustine’s most influential book—in relation to a Jewish poet, but Hirsch has an affection for Christian mystics, like Dionysus the Areopagite and the French philosopher Simone Weil, who features in two poems and plays a supporting role in a third. In “Away from Dogma,” Hirsch admires her subtlety and her determination: “[B]etween the word forsaken and the word joy/God came down and possessed her.”

Hirsch does not seem to a have a mystical bone in his body, nor is he given to belief, as he writes in what amounts to a strenuously self-critical autobiographical poem, “A Partial History of My Stupidity” :

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

Hirsch has sought and God has escaped him or escaped from him. That said, Hirsch identifies strongly with Jews and Judaism, as he shows in his elegies for friends and family as well as in a beautiful, because singularly unmelodramatic, account of the children of Terezin.

Even in those elegies, though, we can hear his complicated relationship to the God of his forebears. He states this clearly in “Yahrzeit Candle”:

[And] turning back to each other in light
of our fresh role as keepers of the dead,
initiates of sorrow, inheritor of prayers,

Lord, which we recite but cannot believe,
grown children swaying to archaic music
and cupping our losses, our bowl of flame.

Here Hirsch is doing what he does best. He turns verbal precision and syntactical complication into a knot of connotation. The light is both literal (the candle) and abstract (“in light of”). The poet and the person he addresses are initiates (a good religious—though not Jewish—term) in mourning, but Hirsch’s strange grammar turns God into the true inheritor of prayer. The benedictions therefore benefit him, even if they are spoken without faith. So, they stand there, the continually bereaved children of dead parents, repeating words that should be empty but that serve to contain and re-inaugurate their loss. They transform a simple candle in an equally simple glass into an eternal light and something of a ritual sacrifice.

So, the Kaddish serves as a model of prayer, but only just. In an extended meditation on 17th-century Dutch painting, Hirsch proposes something less direct but more heartfelt:

If painting is to be a form of prayer

(prayer which Weil called “unmixed attention”
and George Herbert “something understood,”
one form among a myriad of forms),

then the Dutch artists prayed obliquely
by turning away from the other world
and detailing the plenitude of this.

That plenitude expresses itself as the physical exuberance of the familiar, “the daily pleasures and sufferings/of usual people, the Saturday nights/and Sunday mornings of human life.” These oblique examples of prayer lead us back to the dignity of our everyday existence:

Because this world, too, needs our unmixed
Attention, because it is not heaven

but earth that needs us, because
it is only earth—limited, sensuous
earth that is so fleeting, so real.

It is precisely the ephemeral that requires our care, the momentary that is “so real.”

As a result, Hirsch is left in the cities of men and women. Not surprisingly, the majority of his poems are about love, and plenty of those are straight-out love poems. An old subject, but for him, love signals the sheer wonder of survival:

And as I turn home where
I know you are already awake,
Wandering slowly through the house
Searching for me, I can suddenly
Hear my own footsteps crunching
The simple astonishing news
That we are here,
Yes, we are still here.

Astonishing? Perhaps, in its own quiet way. But it is news that bears repeating every day.

Without mystical awareness or a daily regimen of religious observance, Hirsh is left with what he has called “wild gratitude.” Yet Hirsch is not a poet of wildness nor do all his poems give voice to thanks. Quite frequently, he expresses regret or a pained nostalgia for missed chances and unfulfilled possibilities:

The times my sad heart knew a little sweetness
come back to me now: the coffee shop
in Decatur, the waffle house in Macon…

Hirsch is standing on the brink of sentimentality—is his heart really so sad?—and sentimentality is the danger that retrospect constantly faces. Like love and passion, the past demands our discretion.

Usually Hirsch is discreet about his history without being coy. He is also discreet in other ways. He often writes about sex with gusto but without specifics, and his commitment to desire allows him to launch his most energetic heresy:

I think the whole shebang—the serpent, the apple
with knowledge of good and evil—was a setup
because God couldn’t stand being alone
with His own creation, while Adam and Eve celebrated
as a man and a woman together in Paradise,
exactly like us, love, exactly like us.

It is better to live in company than to be divine.

Hirsch prefers the Saturday nights and Sunday mornings of love to the blasts of sublimity because he presents himself as an essentially lonely man. He is an insomniac walking alone at dawn or a visitor standing by a window at night. He is there and somewhere else in a constant state of reflection.

Hirsch gazes out or he looks back. In this too he is traditional in an American way—not for nothing does he write about Edward Hopper. Like Hopper, there is a constant strain of melancholy in Hirsch’s work, a dying fall. And like Hopper, he is never apocalyptic. Hirsch doesn’t write poems with grand slam endings. He probably couldn’t. His love of the small links that bind him to the world would surely never allow it.

Bernstein is a master of his effects and as such, writes well, but he has spent more than three decades breaking the decorum of “good” poetry. He’s cracked wise, shattered syntax, and played havoc with grammar. Bernstein has gotten sentimental where he shouldn’t and waxed political where he could.

For all his avant-garde bobbing and weaving, Bernstein usually lets you know what his poetic experiments are all about. His new and welcome All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (FSG) contains a number of signposts, like this one from “The Klupzy Girl”:

Poetry is like a swoon with this difference:
it brings you to your senses.

There, he’s done it. He told you. Or maybe not. Swoons aren’t supposed to wake you up and Bernstein doesn’t really make you swoon. He just wants you to pay attention to what in the world we can possibly do, as in “Dysraphism”:

Poem, chrome. “I
don’t like the way you think.”:
a mind is a terrible thing to spend.
That is, in prose you start with the world
and find the words to match; in poetry you start
with the words and find the world in them.

Don’t spend your mind, think with it. Read poems.

By Bernstein’s lights, poetry gives you the lowdown on the arrant stupidities that put us in our place. Bernstein has fun mixing and matching pre-fabricated language, making crazy salads with clichés. He writes in “Foreign Body Sensation”:

After two years at Met State, I became increasingly eager to work with severely disturbed children. I am beginning to dabble in writing screenplays, humor and poetry. What time is left I devote to coursework at the Divinity School, where I am studying for the priesthood. It seems I have done other things also, but maybe not.

The canned expressions of personal growth don’t express anything, least of all growth.

As an antidote to these inane turns of speech, Bernstein creates phrases that you have never dreamed of, sentences that defy grammar and obvious sense:

Mass of van contemplation to intercede crus of
plaster. Loots of loom: “smoke out”, kmerely
complicated by the first time something and don’t.
Long last, occurrence of bell, altitude, attitude of.

Bernstein isn’t interested in the standard canons of meaning here. A self-confessed utopian, he tries to get us to hear the echo of things that do not exist—at least not yet.

Of course, all this can be confusing and annoying, but Bernstein welcomes disruption and doesn’t really worry about being a noodge because he’s indulging in comedy, both high and low. On more than one occasion he has called himself a Groucho Marxian and his muse might well be that wonderful interchange between Groucho and Chico Marx in A Night at the Opera. “That’s in every contract,” Groucho says. “That’s what you call a sanity clause.” Chico replies: “You can’t a-fool a-me there ain’t no sanity clause.”

Groucho Marxism enters his poetry in any number of places. Here’s one:

…Or, as
They say in math, it takes two lines to make
and angle but only one lime to make
a Margarita.

Bernstein clearly loves a good punch line. He’s the Henny Youngman of contemporary verse. One of my favorite moments in Bernstein’s work does not appear in the Selected Poems, no doubt because it was actually a 60-second lecture given at the University of Pennsylvania:

My lecture is called “What Makes a Poem a Poem?” I’m going to set my timer.

It’s not rhyming words at the end of a line. It’s not form. It’s not structure. It’s not loneliness. It’s not location. It’s not the sky. It’s not love. It’s not the color. It’s not the feeling. It’s not the meter. It’s not the place. It’s not the intention. It’s not the desire. It’s not the weather. It’s not the hope. It’s not the subject matter. It’s not the death. It’s not the birth. It’s not the trees. It’s not the words. It’s not the things between the words. It’s not the meter. It’s not the meter—[timer beeps]

It’s the timing.

To dissect a joke is to murder it, but this little lecture, like so many of his poems, is about speed, especially when the timer goes off. The essence of Bernstein’s poetry is its antic glee.

Bernstein’s particular play with language—his puns and misapprehensions—marks him as a Jewish poet. He makes this point in “The Lives of the Toll Takers”:

The hidden language of the Jews: self-reproach, laden with ambivalence, not this or this either, seeing five sides to every issue, the old pilpul song and dance….

There is no plain sense of the word,

nothing is straightforward,

description a lie behind a lie

but truths can still be told.

That “old pilpul” song and dance shows up in Bernstein’s work not only in his insistence on seeing five sides to every issue, but also in his manic habit of seeing five sides to every word. Sure, the truth is out there, but it don’t come easy. It hides. It lurks behind or between the words, or, as the great rabbis would have it, in the marks that adorn the very letters on the page.

Bernstein is fascinated by the very stuff of words, their grunts, their sounds, the way they look on the page. In some of his recent poems, he turns away from the wild, wiseass disjunctions that were his trademark and toward a new/old kind of lyricism, an imitation of the forms and dictions of now discarded poetries:

Tuneless I wander, sundered
In lent blends of remote display
Until the bottom bottoms
In song-drenched light, cradled fold

It is less important to parse than to listen to that stanza and hear—something that has not been all that common in Bernstein’s poetry—a kind of pathos, a vulnerability.

At the same time, his political poetry has become more topical and more pointed, though no less funny:

War is never having to say you’re sorry.

War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.

War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged.

War is a slow boat to heaven and an express train to hell.

War is either a failure to communicate or the most direct expression possible.

War is the first resort of scoundrels.

It says a lot about our situation that this list goes on for pages.

Bernstein’s work is not for everyone. It can’t be—that is the very nature of the avant-garde and of Bernstein’s particular brand of comedy. More’s the pity. The tummler has some important things to say. Especially when he says them well by writing them badly.

***

The title of Jeremy Sigler’s new book is Crackpot Poet.

Crackpot is a lovely word, no less lovely because it is archaic. (The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “crackpot” as someone “having a cracked brain or impaired intellect; a crazy person.”) Sigler isn’t crazy but his poems stand out because they are atavistic. They’re about sound, and a certain kind of sound at that.

The silliness in title of his poem “Gravitea” should give the game away:

State of
Still sit

I’m in it

yet out
of it

the potion
of my patience
tried

I dried
too soon to
be applied
wet

I went to
try out and
stepped out

of line

I let my
tea just be
a bag

in gravitea

Jokes, puns, a touch of echolalia: this poem lacks gravitas because it indulges in the pleasures of an old-fashioned kind of play.

An ear trained in the arcana of English literary history will hear in Sigler’s work a touch of the early 16th-century poet John Skelton’s “To Mistress Margaret Hussey”:

Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentil as falcon
Or hawk of the tower.

Skelton’s style fell quickly out of fashion, to be sure, but survives in nursery rhymes. We should take nursery rhymes seriously. They are the first poems that we ever learn.

It doesn’t matter that “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” might refer to Mary, Queen of Scots (and then again it might not), or that “Ring around the rosy” bears with it a dim memory or the Great Plague of 1665 (or then again it might not). Meaning is not what matters most in either the playground or in Sigler’s poems. In the end, it’s the rhythms and the songs that count.

Mikics was in the thick of it. Now a professor of English at the University of Houston, he earned his doctorate at Yale when it was the mother ship of literary theory in America. In the mid-’80s he was a follower of Derrida, drawn in by the Frenchman’s bracing skepticism. In many ways, Who Was Jacques Derrida? serves as an explanation of Mikics’s own rejection of skepticism, of his disillusionment with disillusion itself.

Philosophical skepticism aims to demonstrate that our attempts to make unequivocally valid claims about the world are ultimately misguided. To put it simply, Derrida’s writings from the 1960s to the 1980s sought to show that the history of Western thought tried and failed to nail down the essences of things because things do not have essences to speak of. A subtle dialectician, he argued that there was nothing as unstable as the notion of a stable identity and nothing less knowable than what appears directly before us.

For those who hated him, Derrida was a mountebank, a sloppy thinker and even sloppier writer whose antics did nothing but muddle what should be clear. To those who loved him—and his defenders were as ferocious as his detractors—he offered a whole new way of thinking. According to Mikics, both sides were wrong.

But in his own way, Mikics stands with Derrida’s detractors. Through a series of careful analyses, he maintains that Derrida was sometimes a brilliant misreader of the philosophical tradition and often an egregious one. Always attentive to the problems and the questions that Derrida avoided, he finds Derrida most instructive in his failure to move from doubt to any feasible ethics or politics. According to Mikics, Derrida was allergic to psychology, which Mikics calls “the most palpable sign of our existence, our inner life.” As a result, the philosopher was unable to think about motives and responsibilities. This was a major failing because in the end, Derrida was unable to theorize convincingly about ethics.

Mikics does not share Derrida’s unwillingness to talk about inner lives. Although he does not speculate often about Derrida’s motives, the biographical structure of the book shows just how central to his thought Derrida’s childhood as a lower-middle class French-speaking Jew in Algeria during the 1930s and 1940s actually was. During the period of French colonization, Algerian Jews aligned themselves with the colonizers and this meant that the Derridas were triply if not quadruply marginalized. They were Jews in a Muslim country run by foreign Catholics; they were outsiders in a country of Arabs ruled by Europeans and, during World War II they were pariahs to both the surrounding population and to the government.

This alienation was key to Derrida’s development. A few years before his death, Derrida said with his typical paradoxical vigor that “nothing for me matters as much as my Jewishness, which, however, in so many ways, matters so little in my life.” Derrida was never a practicing Jew. Nevertheless, as Mikics shows, he strongly identified with Jewish thinkers like the French-Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and with Jewish writers, like the French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès. However, the real force of his Jewishness might be best sought elsewhere, in his inability to take either yes or no for an answer.

Derrida constantly took contrarian, if not outright rebellious, stances. He did not like assuming the protective coloring of his surroundings. When he arrived in the early 1950s at the most elite of French universities, the École Normale Supérieure, he chafed against the Marxist orthodoxy of his professors and refused to join the cult of Jean-Paul Sartre—a philosopher whose influence he called “nefarious” and “catastrophic.” Derrida did not follow the path of political engagement favored by his colleagues. Rather, by close and often inventive readings of major texts from the philosophical and literary traditions, he sought to blow up philosophical certainty.

But there were limits to his subversion. Mikics locates one of the major fault lines in Derrida’s thought in the philosopher’s prophetic tones, his “fondness for apocalyptic drama,” which works against his reluctance to imagine the apocalypse itself. According to Mikics, Derrida might have aspired to the end of Western metaphysics and he might have adopted the language and some of the practices of the avant-garde, but he could not run full-out at the future. He wrote like a radical in favor of the moderate.

Derrida’s split persona—revolutionary and ultimately conservative at the same time—goes a long way toward explaining his influence in the American academy. His insistence on close reading made him congenial for literature departments, and his pronouncements made close readings appear consequential. What is more, Derrida’s timing was perfect. His reputation in the United States grew at that point when being a hippie was not a political statement but a “lifestyle choice” and when many of the energies of the late ’60s had become merchandised or bogged down in economic stagnation. At a time of retrenchment, Derrida promised a kind of liberation that did not depend on ethnic or gender identity, a freeing of thought that was intellectually disruptive and could, if need be, serve politically progressive ends.

Then, there is also the matter of his prose. Derrida at his best was an excellent writer. His sentences are Proustian in their length and in their subtle ironies. Like Joyce, he piled pun on pun and paradox on paradox in a serious defense of the mobility of thought. Derrida was Baroque in a way that makes many English-speaking readers nervous because it is too French, too witty, and not sufficiently down-to-earth. Even so, complication has its pleasures.

As it turned out, American deconstruction had a good run, but by the early ’90s it had begun to falter. The discovery that Derrida’s friend Paul de Man had been an intellectual collaborator with Nazis caught Derrida flat-footed. And then the Berlin Wall fell and the map changed. Derrida tried to catch up and turn his thought toward politics and ethics. His thinking drew closer and closer to Levinas, who had developed a brilliant way of showing how religion (particularly Judaism) and philosophy could justify each other without doing themselves an injustice. At the heart of Levinas’s brilliant, spooky work stands the notion of an ethics beyond calculation, a fundamental responsibility for suffering that annihilates self-interest. Although Levinas was able to give flesh to his abstruser musings in the course of his famous lectures on the Talmud, the English philosopher Gillian Rose had a point when she called his theory a form of Jewish Buddhism.

Mikics will have none of it. An informed and sympathetic reader of Levinas (as he is of all the Jewish texts he discusses), he is particularly critical of this period in Derrida’s life. He dismisses Derrida for not reaching beyond an airy language of sacrifice to discuss concrete ethical choice. He will not forgive Derrida for what he sees as the philosopher’s unwillingness to engage in moral judgment, for “scanting the life we live with others in favor of textual abstraction.”

Harsh stuff. Mikics is fierce in his convictions and to be sure he could be more generous to Derrida. Nevertheless, he might be right. In the end, Who Was Jacques Derrida? will not close the account on Derrida. Through his clarity and commitments, Mikics has opened the books once again.

The 84-year-old poet (who is also the founder of the non-profit Sheep Meadow Press, which has published Yehuda Amichai, Peter Cole, and many other renowned poets) takes on God in a number of ways and in a number of moods, quite frequently in the same poem. In the middle of “Bad Joke,” Moss talks about God’s responsibility for the disasters of history:

War is the hair on His head,
The beard He strokes when he sits in judgment.
He would never have a little fat belly like Buddha.
Looking around to the world, I say to God,
“Careful, you may just fall on your face.”
And so I move to farce.

Moss depicts the Lord of Hosts as a bloodthirsty despot whose impartiality plays out as destruction.The Almighty sits on a throne of majesty but not necessarily one of justice:

He downed all history and our yesterday’s dead.
Are His eyes on fire without tears.
Does He evacuate?

God devours His children with neither pleasure nor regret.

With the jarring question about divine hygiene (“Does He evacuate?”) the poem takes up a new problem. Moss is concerned with the way his poetry can—and cannot—talk about God. He comes by his scruples honestly; Maimonides reminds us that the Torah speaks in the language of men, and the trouble with that language is that it attempts to recreate God in our image. We make a fundamental blunder when we try to imagine God in human terms, because the very essence of God (for Jews at least) is that He transcends the human completely. This injunction against the seductions of everyday language affects the poet most of all; if you push your luck far enough, you press against the absurdities of analogy. If God eats, does He also shit?

Of course not. The Almighty doesn’t really eat, nor, for all our hopeful metaphors, does He really have a face that he can turn towards us. The attempt to lend our attributes to God leads us to both bad theology and bad jokes. The Lord does not slip on celestial banana peels. Any poem that tries to imagine divine slapstick is not a call for redemption but a farce.

You might complain here that “Bad Joke” doesn’t so much come to an end as evaporate, sacrificing its solidarity with the victims of history for a clever bit of irony. But Moss’s brief against catastrophe still stands. Its flight into metaphor might be suspect, but its protest remains the same.

Rather, Moss tempers the ferocity of “Bad Joke,” with a witty bit of self-deflation. This is typical of his worldliness, the indulgent cosmopolitanism of a man who has traveled widely and who sells paintings by the Old Masters for a living. Moss loves the excesses of ancient mythologies and admires the opulence of art. Furthermore, he does not have the sublime certainty of the believer. He is not, he tells us, a particularly religious man. But he takes pains to show us that he is a particularly Jewish poet.

In “Work Song,” Moss describes his distance from Hebrew and from ritual:

I am surprised, when close friends
Speak Hebrew, that I understand nothing.
Something in me expects to understand them
Without the least effort
As a bird knows song.
There is a language of prayers unsaid
I cannot speak.

As a poet, he wants to get it right. But to get it too right, to make the work perfect, is to butt up against the Second Commandment. So the Jewish artist has to try to get it wrong:

Unsynagogued, unschooled, but lettered,
I drag a block of uncut marble—
I have seen prayers pushed
Into the crevices of the West Wall,
Books stacked against boulders,
Ordinary men standing beside prophets and scoundrels.
I know the great stoneworkers can show the wind in marble,
Ecstasy, blood, a button left undone.

Again, the metaphoric nature of language gets the artist into trouble. How do you move from figures of speech back to the concrete practices of the Jewish world without being conned by the images you have created? Moss suggests that we imitate the ancient Jewish stonemasons who would willfully mar their work in some way. In Moss’s case, this means that the writer of “Bad Joke” has to turn his anger into vaudeville by showing how limited his poetic means truly are.

Moss therefore demonstrates his conviction that the Law requires art to turn against itself, to invest in its flaws and own up to its limitations. Moss is a master of this double play—of the phrase or a figure of speech that cuts two ways, of the joke that isn’t kidding.

Moss loves to pit his impulses against each other and for that reason (but not only for that reason), you cannot do his work justice by reading it in wisps and scraps of quotation. Here, in its entirety, is “Psalm:”

God of paper and writing, God of first and last drafts,
God of dislikes, god of everyday occasions—
He is not my servant, does not work for tips.
Under the dome of the roman Pantheon,
God in three persons carries a cross on his back
as an aging centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros.
Chinese God of examinations: bloodwork, biopsy,
urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair in the study of dark holes,
fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vaginal.
Like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel.
May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it,
swallow its meaning. My Shepherd, let me continue to just pass
in the army of the living,
keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead.
It’s true I worshiped Aphrodite
who has driven me off with her slipper
after my worst ways pleased her.
I make noise for the Lord.
My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.

In Moss’s remarkably carnal prayer, the idolatrous can stand next to the monotheistic, because “Psalm” transfuses the divine with the physical. Moss has no trouble placing pagan lust at the dead center of the poem because his great hunger for the book is no different from his appetite for sex. The “leaves of the vaginal” segue very easily into the leaves of Ezekiel’s book and for good reason. Moss does not want the fire of prophecy. He just wants to keep on wanting.

Rejoicing is an argument about pleasure, a meditation on both appetite and spiritual aspiration. In the end, Moss is a spectacularly pagan Jew. He is profane as only those who take their religion seriously can be.

To begin with: Finkelstein is keenly aware of the theological implications of Judaism. In a article in the academic journal Shofar, the poet and critic Alicia Ostriker claims that contemporary American Jewish poets seek holiness “not in the disembodied God but in the physical world.” This might be true of many Jewish poets, but not of Finkelstein. The man invokes a very Jewish—because absolutely disembodied—God, as in the poem “Desert”:

Neither upon the sky nor upon the ground

Neither in the desert nor at the mountain

Neither in the heights nor in the depths

Neither present nor absent

Neither known nor unknown

Neither strange nor familiar

Neither whole nor in fragments

Neither revealed nor hidden

Neither sacred nor profane

Neither spoken nor silent.

While it might sound like mysticism, it is pure, rational Maimonides who tells us that every time we try to nail God down in our own, too human terms, we increase our distance from Him. Finkelstein keeps Him in the realm of the divine, represented as the space between contradictions.

When Finkelstein turns from the attributes of God to our own imperfections in the poem “Scribe,” he has no trouble enlisting the cadence of the prophets:

You have heeded the word of the outside god

and you have heeded the word of no god at all,

like a prophet turned archaeologist

a scribe turned into a scribe.

This is pretty harsh stuff. Finkelstein charges us with having foresworn the future by chasing false gods or—just as bad—chasing no god at all. We have turned prophecy into nostalgia and turned our holy scribes into scribblers, the guilty transcribers of a not quite forgotten past.

Finkelstein teeters on the edge of a thumping sanctimoniousness, but he is saved from the brink here by the fact that he is indicting himself as much as he is chastising the tribes of Jeshurun, perhaps even more so. He has no other choice. God is too far away and Finkelstein has appeared too late in history for faith. This hardly presents a vista for hope and certainly not one for redemption. But Finkelstein’s work has no trouble freely espousing both a secularized recuperation of religion as well a religious approach to the secular.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Scribe is a series of poems based on a seemingly unlikely muse: architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, a gently polemical attempt to realign architecture and city planning with a very generous notion of human need. But Alexander describes architecture in terms of poetry, seeing in them both opportunities for physical, linguistic, and emotional fulfillment. Finkelstein, whose poems often engage the space of the whole page, sees poetry in terms of architecture. More importantly, Alexander places great stock in the imagination. He claims that a home, like a city, needs its private spaces and its dreams. “Make a place in the house,” he writes, “which is locked and secret.” There, “the archives of the house, or more potent secrets, might be kept.”

Finkelstein’s secular midrash allows him to use a bedroom to reflect on his own psyche, his love and his poetry at the same time, as in “Children’s Realm”:

I want it so within myself

and within those I love—

a continuum of spaces

where the child at play

may pass by or enter

that place common to all

of my being

Nor can it be

too far from that grown-up world

also of bodies and minds

of storms and of the peace after storms

the child and adult facing each other

across a space that is all

terror and enchantment.

You can hear a kind of meditative stateliness (the archaism of that “so” ) which goes with the biblical repetitiveness (“storms and the peace after storms”). All this leads to that quiet little bang at the end, the magical face-off between generations.

There is a payoff to his use of Alexander’s book. “Sacred Sites/Holy Ground” stands at the imaginative center of Finkelstein’s topography of a radically transformed world. In it, he quotes Alexander’s call for “SACRED SITES.” Like Alexander, Finkelstein does not name these sites nor does he specify the exact nature of their sanctity, beyond the fact that laws should afford them permanent protection: “OUR ROOTS/IN THE VISIBLE SURROUNDINGS/CANNOT BE VIOLATED.” Our roots in a visible landscape—not in divine sanction; these are utopian, not overtly religious places.

The suggestive relation between Finkelstein’s vision of a fulfilled life and redemption is telling. Redemption remains a promise while utopia remains a hope. These days, they are both the stuff of chastened prophecy and skeptical exhortation. But according to Finkelstein, they both are necessary if our scribblers are to transform themselves into scribes.

***

It doesn’t seem quite fair to talk about Natalie Lyalin’s Pink & Hot Pink Habitat and dwell on the fact that she was born in Russia. But it is unavoidable. She herself says that “the immigration experience has been a great and interesting rift in my life. I think that kind of upheaval is great psychological material for writing poems.” That rift shows up in her poems in a number of ways.

Like much contemporary poetry her work is disjunctive. In “Jeffrey Bloodhound Sans” she writes:

Girl words. A tomato. A plum. An apricot.

Time is holding in a clear tube.

Time is lightning on a spare key.

Words that do not yet exist. Alibubo. Bubsigtree. Grivstalbikt.

But these disjunctions are not just examples of a period style. They express deep dislocations—linguistic, physical and psychological.

Language first: it’s hard not to view her flights of linguistic fancy as the result of having to live between languages. Memories of Russian come up when she imitates her father’s voice: “Feel this here pain” and “Whatever happened at prom?” Speakers of Slavic languages have a miserable time with definite articles as well as finding the right place for adjectives and adverbs.

When it comes to syntax, English is also remarkably simple compared to Russian, German, and a host of other languages. But English hammers non-native speakers with the number and complexity of its idioms. The freedom to get idioms wrong, to discover new connections, even to make up words that do not yet exist, is miserable for an immigrant, but a real gift for a poet.

Nevertheless, dislocation has its costs:

Your family is in flight. It seems that decades didn’t happen or happened all at once. The next few years are all weddings. On the end of holidays we wait for the next holiday. We remember bombed out resorts and the constant cigarettes.

(“Opalescent”)

Lyalin the poet cannot distance herself from the confusions of memory. She might begin as a “you” but ends up inevitably with a “we.”

Pink & Hot Pink Habitat is not a particularly grim book, although for all its surface play, it is a very serious one. Lyalin has probably earned the right to express real doubt: “They promise that G-d is not vengeful,/ but do they really know that.” But by the same token, doubt also lends weight to passages like this:

Humans are G-d’s secret architecture and your mother is the cupola of maple leaves. I have put myself here, in this orb of muscle and wonderment, grain, gold silk and the map of roads.

(“Dune and Swale”)

Muscle and wonderment. If nothing else, a good prescription for Jewish poems.

I want to take the opportunity of my first monthly column on Jewish poetry to talk about two very different recent volumes by two very different, well-established, and frequently published poets: Philip Levine and Hank Lazer. Levine, at 81, has published 19 books and has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His newest volume, News of the World, appeared this fall. Prolific, but less well known, is Lazer, whose most recent book, Portions, came out this summer. While both poets take risks in the ways they try to solicit our attention, Levine tells readers real life stories, while for Lazer, the poems are the stories.

Levine makes a point of his clarity and sympathy. Here is the end of “My Fathers, the Baltic”:

Yusel Sprickulnick,
I bless your laughter
thrown in the wind’s face,
your gall, your rages,
your abiding love
for money and all
it never bought,
for your cracked voice
that wakens in dreams
where you rest at last,
for all the sea taught
you and you taught me:
that the waves go out
and nothing comes back.

Levine belongs to that school of writers who tailor the length of their lines to their syntax and their syntax to the length of their lines. This regularity allows him to spring some neat and subtle surprises: Yusel’s abiding love is not for family or country but for money, even though it turns out that either he never got the money in the first place or never had a chance to spend it.

This subject matter is also typical of Levine. He mostly writes about the petty degradations and despairs that the poor have to survive and the quiet dignities that pull them through. Levine, who comes from Detroit, served his time in industrial jobs. He tells stories about workers and their families. He has written that this has everything to do with being Jewish, although he has left behind the Orthodoxy of his youth: “This was my Detroit Jewish heritage…If I betrayed my loyalty to the people I worked with, regardless of their race or position, I would be despised in God’s eyes.”

Some God. “My Fathers, the Baltic” allows no space for providence and no place for redemption. The elemental forces of this world show nothing but indifference. Hence Levine’s yizkor books of the downtrodden and his feeling that if he did not write about them, they would be lost forever. He wants his poems to be acts of solidarity. His is a leftism of the heart.

In the end, Levine’s Yiddishkeit is tied to the relative simplicity of his diction and his fascination with what he calls “the stubbornness of things”:

They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

The common clutter of everyday life has to stand for itself because, like the people who made the table, the salt shaker, the glass, and the picture frames, it stands by itself. The things of this world all display the same mixture of toughness and vulnerability. And justice demands that they not be forgotten.

Levine’s sentiments (and his on-again, off-again sentimentality) have led to a consistent body of work. His poems refer directly to the world outside the text. They retail events and then comment on them. In the end, they are well-constructed reflections of and on experience.

Hank Lazer’s poetry is more elliptical than Levine’s; simplicity and a reliance on anecdote are not for him. Lazer traces his roots to the avant-garde and to the heterodox, to earlier Modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Celan. Lazer does not write about an experience that has already taken place. He claims that poems are “primary objects,” that they are themselves the experience they seek.

Taking the number of parashot—the cycle of Torah readings over a year—as his guide, Lazer has limited the poems in this book to 54 words each, setting for himself the task of maximizing meaning in minimal spaces. Instead of Levine’s straight-ahead sincerity, Lazer’s Portions depends on enigma, fleeting reference and the sense of many things happening all at once. The breaks within lines as well as between lines attempt to wrest forth as many connections and dislocations as they can.

Like Levine, Lazer—in this book at least—relies on a very short line of no more than three words. But though his syntax can be rather gnarly, it makes an odd and often compelling music. Read the poem “Exiled” out loud:

When exiled from
same when here
evokes difference to

say jew &
to explain miracle
of light wind

horizon tug guiding
container ship to
harbor coral reef

exposed at low
morning tide why
i am not

with them in
temple inventing here
a form of

prayer as others
in morning travel
word for word

We can worry the grammar of the last stanza and ask who those others are who travel “word for word.” Or perhaps it is the poet himself. Or maybe he invents, word by word, as they travel. In the end, readers do not have to choose between these readings. Rather we are supposed to allow the ambiguities pile on each other.

By the same token, the poem stakes its claim as a form of prayer, one that stands in for the morning service. Lazer tells us that he is not in temple (a nice American Reform touch, that word) and his spirituality is Jewish in its identifications but not in its ritual engagements. He makes the same case in a section of his poem “Religion:”

in hebrew i
am told there
is no word

that means “religion”
for how or
why extract that

experience that emotion
from the surroundings
of everything else

Religion as Lazer describes it is both an experience and an emotion that cannot be separated from everything around it. It is part of any thick description of life, or, to take this further, it is indistinguishable from life.

Just as the best of Levine’s qualities—his verbal and rhetorical solidity—cannot be divorced from his loving struggle with that “stubbornness of things,” so Lazer’s strengths—the music he draws out of equivocations and a lyrical stuttering— derive from his desire to draw poetry as close as he can to religion by laying as much stress as he can on experience.

Lazer is no more playing hide-and-go-seek than is Levine; both are betting, but the two poets’ wagers are different. Levine doubles down on his sense of justice and hopes that the relative simplicity of his writing and the single-mindedness of his passion for commemoration won’t drive the reader away. On the other hand, Lazer risks alienating the reader through his syntactical complexities and unorthodox opinions in order to turn the poem into an occasion for thought, for playing with possibilities.

You don’t really have to go digging with these poets. We don’t need interpretive shovels. Sure, there are references and symbols, but they’re not the important thing. The depths are there on the surface, ready for the taking.

Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam’s Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life is not disappointing. In a short series of equally short lectures on four important religious philosophers of the 20th century (Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Ludwig Wittgenstein), Putnam outlines a rigorous and yet livable approach to Judaism. He writes for a general audience. He doesn’t indulge in parsing. There are no nits.

Instead, Putnam asks us to confront some fundamental issues. What is the essence of the divine? How do we account for evil? What are the ethical demands that religion makes on us? He suggests that we need to pose these questions differently. We should not ask what God is, but how we should experience Him. We should not explain evil but confront it. We should find our way to God through our relations with our fellow humans and not the other way around. According to Putnam, the big problems aren’t so big. In fact they aren’t even problems.

Putnam’s book is recognizably and in a certain way also traditionally Jewish. It presents its own coherent argument in the guise of a commentary on other texts. It speaks through them as well as about them. This approach allows Putnam, who has been one of the leading American philosophers of science for over four decades, to begin with Wittgenstein’s insight that faith is different from science because it does not depend on proof. You can abide by the tenets of the Torah even if you don’t strictly believe that they were handed down at Sinai. You can balance the story of Adam and Eve and the theory of evolution because religious truths are not necessarily damaged by contradictory evidence.

Religion can withstand secular science because religion is more than a series of dogmas. It represents a way of life. It expresses an attitude toward the world and is deeply entwined with a set of everyday activities and commitments. Religion cannot be outfoxed by science or logic. Try as they might, cosmologists cannot prove that the heavens do not proclaim the glory of God.

But God’s glory does not tell us anything meaningful about what God actually is. Putnam argues that all discussions about God’s essence are hopelessly misguided. Our attempts to fathom essences lead us into even worse confusion. Try to define the essence of a piece of cheese and you’ll get a good idea of what he means.

So how can we talk about God if we cannot say what He is? The world provides us with an important clue. We live in thick personal networks, but have real trouble being certain that we really know other people. We can guess what they’re thinking and we can get a notion of what they’re like, but can we say who they really” are? Where would that really” be? It would have to lie beyond the contingent messiness of everyday life. And that messiness is all we can count on.

We might not know other people in any strict sense, but we can acknowledge them. We can accept that we all exist in a complex set of relations with each other. In a similar way, we might not know what God is, but we can acknowledge that God is and that we stand in His presence. If we can’t really talk coherently about God, we can still talk to Him. This means—and it is a profound point—that just as we cannot pin down God’s essence, we cannot explain why catastrophe does not cause the heavens to darken. We cannot account for evil—to say, as the Kabbalah does, that evil is the excess of God’s justice tells us too much and too little—but we can argue with God about it. We can fight it.

That fight and our acknowledgement of God redirect us to concentrate on the business of this world. Putnam indicates that we can only prove ourselves worthy of God’s love by imitating it through loving-kindness. This is a difficult task because it does not always entail large, public acts of heroism. In fact, it rarely does. It is private, constant and requires an exhausting attention to the world. It requires, in Rosenzweig’s words, the strength to meet the small—at times exceedingly small—thing called the demand of the day.”

Our confrontation with the demand of the day” would seem to mean that our ethical behavior flows directly from our experience of God’s love. But it is also possible to see ethical behavior as an intimation as well as an imitation of God’s presence in the world. It allows us to move beyond mere nature.

According to Putnam (who is here following Levinas), we can transcend ourselves through a rather strict adherence to ethics. If we truly believed that we were unique, we would not restrict our loving-kindness to those who were like us, as is so often the case. Our benevolence would extend towards everyone. Of course, we cannot be reasoned into this sense of responsibility. We cannot base it on the order of nature. Quite the opposite. Responsibility of this order makes us reach beyond our daily concerns. It is a mundane repetition of Abraham’s hineni,” his here I am” in the presence of God. Just as the children of Israel accepted the yoke of the Law when they said, We will obey and we will hear,” those who lead the ethical life obey the summons of responsibility before they ask why they should. It is there—beyond survival, beyond desire and beyond personal advantage—that they rise above nature. It is there that they sense God’s path through the world.

Because Putnam’s emphasis lies squarely on our relations with each other and our relations with God, he leaves out a lot. He figures God as our beloved and not as our judge. He is not particularly interested in the supernatural, in miracles, or in the world to come. He does not even seem to care if God did indeed create the heavens and the earth. He pays attention almost exclusively to our worldly existence as Jews. Because of this, it is easy to imagine that a lot of people will not find Putnam’s arguments all that convincing. For them Judaism is more than a way of life. It is an assertion of eternal truths. It tells us about God. It insists on creation. It places our hopes beyond this world.

My guess is that none of this would particularly bother Putnam. He would argue that such claims only lead us back to our previous conceptual muddles. More to the point, he does not think that philosophy is about being right. In another context, Putnam has written that philosophical reflection gives us an expectedly honest, clear look at our own situation…through the eyes of one or another wise, flawed, deeply individual human being.” Putnam obviously feels that our own situation is one in which we have been stymied by discussions of God’s nature and vexed by the question of God’s providence. It is also one in which many of us have given up on a Jewish world that is torn apart by doctrinaire disputes and painful political-religious divisions.

Putnam has drawn a map for those who are trying to find a rationally justifiable and emotionally satisfying way back to a more robust Judaism. He also provides something of a prescription for our present ills. If we dwell on our relation with God, we can live together as Jews without falling into bitter arguments about what He is. If we see Judaism as a way of life, then we can maintain both study and the practice of the mitzvot while allowing for a large degree of tolerance. If we can balance our love of the people Israel with our responsibility to those who are not like us, we will be able to maintain solidarity without succumbing to xenophobia. Putnam’s lectures, whatever their limitations, fulfill some of our best wishes for philosophy. Through their attentive accounts of Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, and Wittgenstein, they indicate what we might hope for. More importantly, though, they indicate what, if we take care, we still can do.

David Kaufmann teaches English at George Mason University.