More in ‘poetry’

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the ...

Dahlia Ravikovitch, who died in 2005 at the age of 69, was one of Israel’s most beloved writers. No other Hebrew poet, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld remark in their introduction to Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, with the exception of the late Yehuda Amichai, has been so universally ...

The poet Charles Bernstein often writes badly but rarely writes poorly. I mean this as a compliment.
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 ...

“What instruments we have agree/The day of his death was a dark cold day”: W.H. Auden wrote that about W.B. Yeats, but we tend to think it true of most poets, and Avrom Sutzkever, the 20th Century’s greatest Yiddish poet, seems no exception. Born in modern-day Belarus Smorgon, a shtetl located in what is now ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Shalom Auslander explains death to his five-year-old son against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Norman Samuels gives a primer on how internal changes in Turkey have affected (and worsened) its relations with Israel. Reporting from the Herzliya Conference’s final day, Judith Miller notes the tepid reaction to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech. ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Bridget Kevane examines the late Argentinian dissident and publisher Jacobo Timerman, who, sometimes by necessity, played a complex game when it came to exposing anti-Semitism in his country. Zackary Sholem Berger eulogizes the great Yiddish-language poet Avrom Sutzkever, and bemoans Sutzkever’s underappreciated status (go appreciate three of his poems—the final one ...

Reproduced, with permission, from The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. You can read them in Yiddish here [PDF].
How?
How will you fill your goblet
On the day of liberation? And with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark keeing you have heard
Where skulls of days glitter
In a bottomless pit?
You will search for a key ...

Sad news from the Upper West Side: talented young poet Rachel Wetzsteon was found dead, apparently a suicide. Tablet Magazine book reviewer Adam Kirsch, an expert on 20th-century poetry who moreover worked with Wetzsteon at The New Republic (where she was poetry editor), had this to say about her: “at 42, she was one of ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Contributing Editor Victor Navasky says that, by opposing universal health care, Sen. Joe Lieberman has betrayed his faith’s commitment to social justice. Andrew Marantz sees the new 3D blockbuster Avatar through the prism of the Hanukkah story. Poetry critic David Kaufmann reviews Stanley Moss’s new collection of comically God-doubting work. The ...

In Rejoicing: New and Collected Poems, Stanley Moss’s recently published collection, Moss quotes Baudelaire’s sly aphorism: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” For more than 40 years, Moss has been addressing that sole being without worrying whether He exists or not.
The 84-year-old poet (who is also ...