The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega, Hidary’s 2011 collection of poetry, essays, and childhood memoirs, explores the gravitational pull of the two seemingly opposing forces that have shaped her sensibility on and off the poetry scene: the Jewish and Puerto Rican, the Kaiser roll and the bodega, salud and l’chaim, Rosh Hashanah and the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Holocaust survivors and hip-hop. It also describes how it is that a good Jewish girl became a badass slam poet who started performing and competing in what has been a historically male-dominated venue.

After receiving her MFA in theater from Trinity Rep Conservatory at Brown, Hidary wrote her first solo show, Culture Bandit, in 2000 and later performed it at the venerable Nuyorican Poets Café. What, one wonders, would the founders of the crown jewel of Puerto Rican poetry in Manhattan, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, think of her usurpation of Puerto Rican identity? In the ’70s, when the café was founded, it was a radical locus for expressing the Puerto Rican experience of discrimination, poverty, white oppression, and cultural angst in New York City. Ethnic cross-dressing would not have been appreciated.

Apparently this is still true today. Hidary has been called a race traitor and has been accused of stealing from Puerto Rican culture, specifically for the catcall mamita (which is also a term of affection). Puerto Rican-ness functions as a metaphor for the tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture contained in her own identity: Her maternal grandmother is from Aleppo, Syria, whereas her father’s mother is from Latvia. When I asked Hidary about her attraction to Latina identity and her playful yet powerful blurring of identity and cultures, she explained that her parents, progressive secular Jews, sent her to an experimental public school where Latinos, African Americans, and hip-hop predominated. She also went to Hebrew school. But she formed core bonds in her public school with Latino students, especially with a certain Letty Mangual. Hidary says she fell in love with the warmth of her family, their traditions, their food, and even Santa Claus. When I asked her why she felt the need to switch cultural worlds, she pointed to her body. She was a chubby girl growing up and she never felt like this fit within her Jewish community. Instead she found a home in the Puerto Rican body where curves are the norm and being “flaquita,” or super skinny, is most definitely not. And with that, her future identity as a cultural bandit was born.

The opening and closing poems in Hidary’s collection address the discomfort that both she and the curious bystander feel when trying to pin down her ethnicity: “What are you?/ Are you white?/ Are you Puerto Rican/ Are you Italian?/ oh, you’re all jewish?/ do you speak ‘jewish’?” Sometimes curiosity turns to an angry accusation: “Do you think you’re something you’re not?/ you know you’re jewish, right?/ … so if you’re not latina why the hell do you call/ yourself the Hebrew mamita?”

Racial and ethnic tensions are at the heart of Hidary’s work, and watching her perform (there are many YouTube videos of her performances) is like watching a cultural stealth bomber whose goal is to target warehouses of cultural stereotypes. She is a vibrant performer who gathers speed and explodes at the climax of her poems. She is the woman who is too independent, too hard to handle, who can’t relax when she should let things slide. She is the wild woman, the wise woman, the woman that makes men scared. She exploits our settled beliefs and fears about the boundaries of race and gender to generate discomfort, anger and laughter.

When I mention to her that some think we are in the post-race or post-post identity era she scoffs: “Not true.” Although these prejudices are perhaps no longer articulated as openly in our politically correct environment, they persist. Sometimes, Hidary said, because she is Jewish, others assume that she thinks and shares certain complicit and inherited perceptions of African Americans or Latinos. In turn, sometimes, because she “looks” Puerto Rican, people openly share anti-Semitism with her. Because Hidary can “pass” in both communities, she is a secret witness to flourishing underground racial tensions and prejudices. In her book she shares an alarming incident where a fan criticizes her for dating black men and labels her a self-hating Jew. He writes to her, “Vanessa, please do not tell me you date the schvartzes.” Her response is a moving poem; “dear, dear, yeshual,” she writes. “Sometimes the ones I refer to as my people/ are truly the most ignorant strangers to my soul.” And just recently, she said, she took a good friend up to the Bronx for a slam poetry event. While they were in the audience awaiting her friend’s turn, a Latino poet was on the stage. His poem devolved into a diatribe about how Jews control all the money. “It is still the most common and prevalent stereotype that I hear,” she said. “Jews are greedy, Jews are running the world.” When she hears this kind of stuff she always confronts the speaker.

Jews have plenty of lazy or stiff-necked prejudices of their own, especially when it comes to the hybrid identities that Hidary addresses in her work. As someone who frequently speaks to Jewish groups on questions of identity, she has found no shortage of exclusionary stereotypes directed against people whose identities seem unclear, the children of interfaith marriages. “I am in complete support of those who wish to date within the religion, but I don’t believe in turning away interfaith couples and converts,” she said. “I believe we can still have a strong Jewish community by opening up our doors to those who ‘marry out’ and have interfaith children. My work reflects this view, and I am sometimes not sure how it will be received.” Her heightened sense of awareness regarding stereotypes, negative and positive, forces her to constantly question ethnicities and our interpretation of them, and she is not afraid to call people out on their secret beliefs. “I’m something of a cultural policewoman,” she said. “I don’t go proselytizing all over town about it, but if I encounter prejudice I confront it.”

In the end, the collection is a confession of how Hidary switches tribes, how she is not culturally loyal to one ethnicity but to many. And why cultural dislocation is her milieu. She is a poser: “To be—or not to be—a poser,/ That is the question.” For if identity is a cultural construction, then la mamita hebrea de Siria is the perfect construct. And I, as a gringariqueña judía, am proud to recognize the importance of Hebrew mamitas.

And more recently there was, until this year, Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) a Palestinian-Israeli poet who lived in Nazareth and ran a souvenir shop. Not as widely celebrated as Amichai, he may be more famous in English than at home, due to Adina Hoffman’s fine 2009 biography in English and the translations into English from Arabic of her husband Peter Cole with Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin. Taha, no less than Amichai, wrote with accessible wit and wisdom about life in this contested place, of which he was a native. Toward the end of his life, he too commanded a large audience at Israeli poetry festivals, in the Hebrew translations of Anton Shammas.

Agi Mishol. (Iris Nesher via Wikimedia Commons)

Currently, the beloved veteran poet Agi Mishol (disclosure: I translated a book-length selection of her poems, Look There, in 2006; she is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry in Hebrew) continues to be extremely popular and draw large crowds. She is often called a successor to the great Israeli women poets Yona Wallach and Dahlia Ravikovitch, with poems as deceptively simple as “Blue Bird”:

On the kitchen
counter

the goat-eyed
cat
carries a blue-feathered
bird
already dead
the beak still
in a pincer grip
on a pomegranate twig

each of us holds
something
in our mouths.

But poetry here, as elsewhere no doubt, is no longer the province of one clearly identifiable artistic elite, and certainly not the province of only a few poetry kings or queens. There are hundreds of poets active in Israel, and they come in all stripes: lyric, protest, experimental, minimalistic, formalist, academic, and others. A poet’s union is forming, and, as the prelude to its first meeting, an open reading was held in the street last month on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard.

Because I am a translator, I know that for poetry to cross language borders, it must have strong content and brilliant or at least surprising thoughts, not the province of all writers, even the very good ones. To stay at home with honor, poetry must touch a local nerve—be sensitive to both language and current affairs—which is a different thing. Since it may very well be true, as Charles Simic said in a famously negative 2007 New York Review of Books essay about Robert Creeley, that “there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading,” this will be a brief journey among excerpts from what I consider excellent poems by poets you have probably never heard of. I make no claim to represent everyone’s taste, just my own. And space limitations will mean that mostly everyone is being left out.

***

I’ll begin with a beginner, a barely published 29-year-old Hebrew poet whose first language is Russian: Johnny Spector. I can’t translate him, as I hesitate to translate rhyme and it is nearly impossible to reproduce consonance and assonance. I find that the words emphasized by the repetition of sounds change so completely in translation that a rhymed translation often loses content, in order to give a pathetic illusion of formal similarity to the original.

To feel the force of its beauty, however, you can read the first line of Spector’s “Poem for Budapest” for yourself in a transliteration of the original Hebrew: “Lah-lekhet beh-mah-seh-khat shah-lehket hah-gashmeem. Blee mah-seem. Beh-lo-mileem.” The poem opens with a scene of walking, after a rain, without really noticing, and without uttering a word, on the piles of fallen leaves that are also masking something. The poet, by the way, is writing a thesis on the ethnic identity of prison wardens in Israel.

Continue reading: Zecharya, Behar, and others

Basya Schechter invites Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry into her home in downtown Manhattan to talk about the connections between Heschel’s little-known poetry and his later works, and about her own journey from yeshiva girl to widely acclaimed singer-songwriter. [Running time: 24:06.]

Yitzhak Laor was born the same year as Israel: 1948. He has written stories, novels, plays, essays, and journalism, and his poetry has been recognized as among the best—if most controversial—of his generation. In 1972, Laor became one of the first Israeli Defense Forces soldiers to refuse to complete his compulsory military service in the territories captured during the Six Day War, a decision that earned him a brief prison sentence. Today Laor lives in Tel Aviv, where he edits the literary magazine Mita’am.

Issue 12 of n+1 magazine features six of Laor’s poems, presented both in the original and my translation. Here are three—from radically disparate periods in Laor’s career. What unites them are biblical allusion and a doubting of language’s capacity to effect political change—a crisis marked by flares of rage and humor.

To read more of Laor’s work, you can purchase the current issue of n+1.

Take Care, Soldier

Don’t die, soldier, hold the radiophone,
don your helmet, your flak jacket, surround
the village with a trench of crocodiles, starve
it out if need be, eat Mama’s treats, shoot
sharp, keep your rifle clean, take care of the armored
Jeep, the bulldozer, the land, one day it will be
yours, little David, sweetling, don’t die, please.

Keep watch for Goliath the peasant, he’s trying to sell his
pumpkin at the local market, he’s plotting to buy a gift for his grandkid,
   erase
the evil Haman whose bronchitis you denied treatment, eradicate
the blood of Eva Braun by checking on the veracity of her labor pains,
   silence her
shriek, that’s how every maternity ward sounds, it’s not easy
having such humane values, be strong, take care, forget
your deeds, forget the forgetting.

That thy days may be long, that the days of thy children may be long,
   that one day
they shall hear of thy deeds and shall stick fingers in their ears and
   scream
with fear and thy sons’ and thy daughters’ screams shall never fade.
Be strong, sweet David, live long unto seeing thy children’s eyes,
though their backs hasten to flee from thee, stay in touch with thy
   comrades-in-arms,
after thy sons deny thee, a covenant of the shunned.
Take care, soldier-boy.

שמור על עצמך, חייל

חַילָּ, אָל תָּמוּת, לְמִי יש כֹּחַ לִשְכוֹל
רַדְיוֹפוֹניִ, חֲבֹש קַסְדָּה, לְבַש שַכְפָּ”ץ, הַקֵף אֶת
הַכְּפָר בִּתְעָלָה, מַלֵּא אוֹתָהּ בְּתַנּיִניִם, אִם ישֵׁ, הַרְעֵב
אִם צָרִיך לְהַרְעִיב, אֱכֹל אֶת מַמְתַקֶּיהַ שֶל אִמָּא, אַל
תָּמוּת, צְלֹף, מַלֵּא מַחְסַנּיִּוֹת, נקֵַּה את הָרוֹבֶה הַטֶּלֶסְקוֹפּי
שְׁמֹר עַל הַג’יפּ הַַמְּשֻרְיןָ, עַל הַדַּחְפּוֹר, שְמֹר עַל הָאָרֶץ
יוֹם אֶחד תִּהְיהֶ שֶלְךָ, דָודִ קָטָן, מָתוֹק, אַל תָּמוּת, בְּבַקָּשָׁה מִמּךָ.

הִזּהֵָר מן הדְּלַעַת של גלְָיתַ הַפַלָּאח, הוּא מְנסֶַּה לְמָכְרָהּ
בַּשּׁוּק הַקָּרוב, לֹא מֵרָעָב, לִקְנוֹת לְנכְֶדוֹ מַתָּנה הוּא זוֹמֵם, שְכַח
את הָמָן הָרָשָׁע שֶמָנעַתָ טִפּוּל בַּבְּרוֹנכְִיטִיס שלוֹ, מְחַק את דִמּוּמָהּ
שֶל אֶוהָ בְּרָאוּן, כְּשֶבָּדַקְתָּ אִם זיִפְָּה צִירֵי לֵידָה, דוֹמֵם את צִוחְוֹתֶיהָ
כָּכָה נשְִמָע כָּל חֲדַר לֵידָה, הֱיהֵ חָזקָ, לֹא פָּשוּט לַעֲבוֹר מָה שֶאַתָּה
עוֹבֵר, בֶּטח לֹא פָּשוּט עִם עֲרָכֶיךָ הָהוּמָניים, רָק אַל תִּתְבַּישֵּ
)הַצָּרפָתים בְּאַלְג’ִירְיהָ לא הָיוּ יוֹתֵר טוֹבים(, שְׁמֹר על עַצְמְךָ, שְכַח

אֶת מַעֲשֶׂיךָ, שְכַח אֶת הַשִּׁכְחָה, שְׁכַח אֶת שִׁכְחַת הַשִּׁכְחָה
לְמַעַן יאֲַרִיכוּן ימֶָיךָ, לְמַעַן יאֲַריכוּן ימְֵי בָּניֶךָ, לְמַעַן יוֹם אֶחָד
ישְִמְעוּן עַל מַעֲשֶׂיךָ ויְתְִקְעוּן שְׁתֵי אֶצְבָּעות בָּאֹזנְיַם ויְצְִוחְוּן
מִפַּחַד, צְוחָה אֲרוּכּה אֲרוּכָּה, וזְעֲַקַת בִּנךְָ/בִּתְךָ לא תִדֹּם לָעַד.
הֱיהֶ חָזק, דָּודִ מָתֹק, והְַאֲרֵך ימִָים, רְאֵה את עֵיניֵהֶם של ילְָדֶיךָ
עָרְפֵּיהם יחֵָפֵזוּן לִבְרֹחַ מִמֶּךָ, שְמֹר עַל קֶשר עִם חֲבֵרֶיךָ
לַנּשֶק, אַחֲרֵי שֶבָּניֶךָ יתְִכַּחֲשוּ אֵלֶיךָ, בְּרִית בֵּין
הַמְּנדִֻּים. שְמֹר עַל עַצְמְךָ, חַילִַּיקוֹ

Continue reading: “Shut Door.” Or view as a single page.

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.

His (subscription-only) essay on the ancient poem can also be found in the magazine’s August 8 edition.

The Pleasure Principle [New Yorker]
Earlier: Our Revenge on Wagner

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.

You often talk about how meditative poetry is and how important it is for finding out who one is. What have you found out?

I find out certain things that repeat and keep coming back. I have a proclivity for certain gambits, references for certain words. And in that way I have some insight into how I work. But it’s hard to draw conclusions about who I am. What I find in my own work, reading it back or writing it, is not anything more than any astute critic would find out. And so to say that I know only as much as a shrewd critic would know is not saying much.

One of Richard Howard’s essays talks about the absence in your poetry, and many critics after that refer to the absence.

When someone’s written a poem [“Keeping Things Whole”] that begins, “Wherever I am, I am. In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing,” it’s easy to conjecture this guy is obsessed with absence. In essence it suggests the world could get along very well without him, that the imposition of consciousness is a negative factor because he is what is missing wherever he goes. He becomes, one could say, a negative influence. He disrupts the orderly. Absence is part of everything. You could say that the desire to be missed is a preoccupation with absence.

What do you love about poetry? Do you wake up and can’t wait to start writing?

Rarely. When I’m going strong I can’t wait to wake up and start. Without having something promising to work on, life would be pretty boring. With nothing to do, with nothing I like doing, why wake up in the morning? What I like about writing is its incision, the fact that language is operating at its fullest. Words and poems exist on multiple levels. Poetry is a way of feeling deeply without being threatened. The other thing about poetry, why I like writing it, is I like making things up. I like writing a sentence or a few words and wondering where they’re going to go. How can I create meaning, or the illusion of meaning, out of these words, words that have never been used in this particular order ever before and may not be used so again.

You mentioned working on a memoir about your parents. Tell me about your father.

For a number of years I grew up with a story of my father. My father would tell the story of his mother dying at childbirth and of him living with his father and grandmother in Cleveland. His father was a steel-mill worker. But his grandmother died when he was 5, and his father had no way of taking care of him. So, he put him in a Catholic orphanage.

But he was Jewish.

Yes. That is something that apparently is not so uncommon. Even though there was a Jewish orphanage in Cleveland at the time, it’s possible that the Catholic orphanage was better. It’s possible that it was cheaper. It’s possible that religion didn’t make that much difference to his father. But anyway, his father died when he was 10, and my father left the orphanage and became a street kid, sleeping outside most of the year under a bridge in Cleveland, selling newspapers, eventually getting a job writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He had no other family?

No. None. This is the story he told my mother and the story I grew up with. And then he went to Mexico to make his fortune at 15. Made a small fortune and lost it. Then traveled around the world doing different things, mainly as a journalist. All of it is false. Whatever I’ve just told you never happened.

Are you serious?

In the late ’90s I wrote to the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what the government had on my parents, because they’d been Communists. In the report I received was a detail that my father had been in prison in San Quentin. Sentenced to four years in San Quentin Penitentiary for grand theft when he was 19 years old. He picked up a wallet that someone had left lying around. And he hid it. The guy found it missing. They went looking for my father and they found him. And he showed them where the money was. My father was something of a wise guy. The law took a dislike to him, so they threw him the maximum punishment.

That’s the real story.

That is the real story. Also, at the trial it was revealed that my father’s father had disappeared when he was 2 years old; his mother claimed that his father had died. His mother didn’t die in childbirth. In fact, his mother had remarried and was alive until 1949, at which time I was 15. There were other discrepancies. My father’s father at the time of his disappearance was listed as a salesman, not as a steel-mill worker. When my father later went to Mexico at 15, I think that he must have heard that his father was there. Mexico’s an odd place to go from Cleveland when you’re 15, unless you have a very good reason to go. My father would claim, “Well, there was the oil boom.” And he thought he could make some money in Tampico.

And your mother?

Born in New York, grew up in Quebec City. Spoke Yiddish, French, English. Very artistic. Wanted to be a sculptor. Came to New York, married the Yiddish poet Alex Katz so that he could get citizenship. That lasted about two years. Then she went back to Montreal, where she met my father. Later, she got a degree in pre-Columbian archaeology at San Marcos in Lima. And she did it in Spanish. My mother was a terrific influence on me. She was the one who would take me to museums, she was the one who would look at art books with me, she was the one who would read poems to me. This in lieu of going to synagogue, or doing any of the standard stuff that Jewish people do, religious Jews. I’m trying to be absolutely clear about the place of Jewishness in my psychic development.

Did her Jewish identity in any way define her as a mother?

I don’t think my mother qualifies as a Jewish mother exactly because she was so aristocratic. When they say Jewish mother I think of the shtetl. The ladies or the women in Brooklyn saying their prayers. And she was very aristocratic, wore tailored clothes, spoke beautifully and evenly and very good-looking. But I think unhappiness killed her. My parents were blacklisted, then kicked out of Mexico. From there they went to Nova Scotia. My father managed my uncle’s furniture store, which was already failing. My mother wasn’t an archaeologist anymore. She became a school teacher. They didn’t have an upper-middle-class life. They slipped to the lower middle class.

You called your parents Jews of a certain stripe in an interview. What does that mean?

Well, they were cultural Jews. If pressed I say we’re Jewish. Secular Jews. But believers in socialist causes. God didn’t exist. Josef Stalin was as close to God as anyone could come for my parents. They were sectarian, American Communists, but finally benign. Communism was their religion, which would probably not be their religion today. However, to me the idea of socialism is not abhorrent. In fact, I believe in some kind of social democracy, of socialized medicine, a socialized transportation system, and free enterprise at the same time.

What was your father like?

He demanded a lot of attention. So, growing up I felt oddly in competition with him. I competed for my mother’s affection, which I never felt I got enough of. And so, in some way I resented and loved my father at the same time. And I really was rather cool toward my mother, whom I felt was cool toward me. Although in retrospect I realized she really wasn’t. She was largely the reason I went to art school and then became a poet. I think my father harbored ambitions to be a writer. In fact, he described himself to the judge at his trial when he was 19 as a writer. And my mother, of course, wanted to be an artist. In some ways I fulfilled hopes that they each had for themselves.

The lies, or falsehoods, or however you’d like to call it, that your father told the family, the truths that were hidden, the stories that he created, do they resonate with your creative endeavors, as a creator of poetry?

Absolutely. There is a definite relationship. My father was a fabricator, and I’m a fabricator. He told stories about his life; I simply tell stories. Now it’s hard to do what my father did because everything is available on the Internet. It would be impossible for me to invent a past that never existed and pass it off as the real thing, nor would I want to. I rather like the way things have turned out for myself. I do what I want. I write, I make collages, I have friends, I’m free. I will say this about the United States, it’s allowed me a tremendous amount of freedom. It’s made it possible for someone like me to get by comfortably without being rich. In another country, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to do what I’ve done.

Tell me about your feelings toward Israel.

I have mixed feelings about Israel. I don’t think that the right-wing, religious Jews of Israel have been fair to the Palestinians. I think they’ve created an underclass, and I think they’ve behaved belligerently and aggressively with the settlements. I think they really believe that they are the chosen people, and I don’t think any people should feel they are the chosen people. I think that anyone who is born is a chosen person, by the mere fact of their having been born. But to set one group over another group, I think, is a mistake. How will a solution to the settlements be found? I don’t know what’s going to happen. Recently, I had a conversation with an Israeli. I said, “It’s great what’s happening in Egypt, that they’ve gotten rid of Mubarak. How do you feel about that?” And she said, “Well, I’m a little worried. Mubarak was a dictator, that’s for sure, but he was our dictator.” Now we have Iran, and Yemen, and more.

Is Israel important to you?

No. The Jewish state is not important to me, but it’s important to a lot of Jews who take Judaism much more seriously.

Are you hiding your Jewish identity? Are you from a certain generation that found it easy to eschew Judaism?

You can’t hide what doesn’t exist, or what exists in such a small way. If it were easier, I’d say I was Jewish. If somebody were to say, “What’s your religion?” I would say, that I am an atheist, but my parents were Jewish and atheist, and yes, I’m born to Jewish parents, and quite frankly I’m rather proud of it. But at the end of the day I just don’t think about Jewishness. I don’t think about not being Jewish, or being Jewish. I don’t really know what being Jewish is. I’ve only been to synagogue once or twice because of friends’ kids being bar mitzvahed.

So, you were never bar mitzvahed?

No. I had no Jewish education. The only church I went to, the only religious instruction I had, was in Cleveland, when I was 10 years old, I went to Presbyterian Sunday School because all the other kids went there. I quickly got bored; it seemed silly to me. I was already well on my way to becoming an atheist. If I have a country, it is the English language. It is American literature. The formation of whatever social or literary identity I have is dependent equally on factors that have nothing to do with being Jewish.

What I do think is Jewish about me is a certain sense of humor. I sometimes feel like a middle-European Jew. And I feel, of all writers, the greatest kinship with Kafka, his humor, his strangeness. There’s a peculiar depth to his short fiction which I feel tremendously drawn to. I am charmed by the Yiddish proverbs. So, in some sense, I feel a kind of Jewishness, but that’s only one aspect of my person.

Tell me about the memoir you’re working on about your parents. Why are you writing it?

For my kids. My father’s interesting, and my mother is interesting too, although the story isn’t really hers, it’s about him. To grow up in a household with a person who you depended on, and loved, and thought you knew, but didn’t know, who told stories about the past, all of which were false. I hadn’t a glimmer of the truth until after he died. I find it interesting how somebody could keep a secret for so long, the secret of his incarceration, and to invent another life that would make it impossible to know that he was ever in jail.

Why did it take you so long to get to this memoir?

It had to do with my reluctance to give up the fantasy that I had of my father. My father had become a mythological figure, all-powerful, all-knowing, God-like. When I was young, he had done everything, it seemed to me, that I wasn’t able to do and would never be allowed to do. He was free to do them. In other words, I was reluctant to give up the father I believed him to be. I was also reluctant to reveal his secret. He had worked his whole life to keep the truth hidden, and here I was, coming along, for no good reason except my own curiosity, ready to reveal his secret. My curiosity could have been revealed without my writing the book. But then I thought, “What a great story.”

Do you feel like you’re betraying him in any way?

Yes, I do, I do feel I am betraying him. I feel, on the other hand, betrayed by him, although I understand why, the need to dissemble and keep the truth from his family. I think it’s finally all harmless. My parents are dead; no harm can come to them. My father is one of the nameless legions of people who were born, lived, and died without a trace. My mother too. In some sense, it’s a way of resurrecting them. Betrayal, resurrection, also an act of relinquishing a childhood vision of my parents, and assuming a more realistic, grownup view.

Bridget Kevane is a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University in Bozeman. Her work has appeared in ZEEK, the Forward, and Brain, Child, among other publications.

Exodus

The flat bread
that scratched

our throats
was not symbolic.

We left too quickly
to bring the symbols.

Neither did the bread
portend of manna.

It was bread.
We left

with the skin
on our backs,

with the imprint
of whips.

The symbols
came after,

finding us the way
a lost dog,

crossing deserts,
pinpoints the master

who can’t
live without him.

—Andrea Cohen

Macaroons

I get it now.
You’re dead.
You can’t do
everything
you used to.
Reruns instead
of new episodes.
I get it.
You can’t send
macaroons this Passover,
those dense confections
without flour, conforming
to the rules
of kashrut, the rules
of engagement, which
in the case of our people,
involved fleeing, trading
slavery for the desert.
The land of milk & honey
was a kind of paint-
by-numbers kit
everybody lugged
in his head through
sandy ditches. It’s
best not to commit
directions to Nirvana
to paper: they could be
stolen or confiscated, or
worse: the place itself
obliterated. Forty
years is a long time
to get where you’re going.
Where are you promised?
In the end you spoke
of a boat ride, of
booking passage second-
class, on a vessel that lacked
a rudder, an engine, a sail.
Kaput, you said.
You were looking
for a solution.
Why now? someone
asked—less question
than demand. You
had to go. I
get it. We prepped
you for a journey,
because the mind
gets stuck on the speed
bumps of Fin, of Finito.
The mind insists
on one more
road, one more hello.
I get it: you won’t
be posting macaroons
this year. No problem,
mom. Just send the recipe.

—Andrea Cohen

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great
Paschal candle of the sun.

Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains
As Thor’s and crazed Woden’s
Stain Thursday and Wednesday.

O fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery:
May the old Apollonian flayers
And Jovial raptors pass over us—

Those ordainers of suppers
Of encrypted dishes: bitter, unrisen,
Infants as bricks for the taskmaster
Quota. Fruit and nuts ground
In wine to recall the mortar:

On the compass platter, traces
Of the species that devises
The Angel of Death to sail
Over our legible doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

—Robert Pinsky, from Gulf Music, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007)

Refuge Event

was them in motion
beside the open cart on steel wheels
drawn by a tawny mule in the
modern day having bartered
for cart and animal in
motion beside orchards
bordering the receding town
receding crows on the roof and a boy watching
them above his shovel in his pose
animal poked with a stick
between lurid exhalations and
a finch flicking itself at
gnats in the air
in motion and the crate or cart
mounded with leathers
tools from the workshop
drill press/lathe/iron forms/dyer’s vat
them bartering in syllables
anonymously in August
in wool coats and hats in the
documentary evidence in stiff polished
boots laced high and
unbroken-in
spring rain
had rutted the road
with a gap in motion
in eventual summer
axle needed mending
bucket needed washing
with the wash and the boiling water
(good-bye mother with her bag of wash)
in a surge of details past
slumbering countryside
in a past tense
wing or cargo hold

—Mark Levine, from The Wilds, (University of California Press, 2006)

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.

Rachel’s suicide was not something her work predicted—in the way that, say, Sylvia Plath’s poetry toys with and threatens suicide—but the person we come to know in her poems is deeply acquainted with sadness, loneliness, fear, and doubt. (This is one of the reasons I felt so drawn to them.) Like Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon—now that I’m talking about her work, the last name seems more appropriate than the familiar first—had the rare gift of writing about suffering without falling prey to histrionics or self-pity. “At least/ I won’t be someone who, smiling too often,/ gives too much away,” she writes in “A Bluff,” and strong feeling is something her poetry never gives away. Her deft rhymes and meters, her allusiveness, and her guarded irony are all ways of containing feeling, and thereby heightening it. As she writes in “Commands for the End of Summer”:

Deepen,
leaves, not with what
has made us sorry but
with what was profound about that
sorrow.

Make me
spontaneous,
gathering winds, but don’t
blow so giddily I teeter
too much.

That poem, from Sakura Park, is one of many that seem even more fraught and moving now, when Wetzsteon’s death has shown how hard she had to struggle to keep her balance. Certainly it is impossible to read her new book, Silver Roses (Persea, $16.50), without sensing the shadows retroactively cast by her suicide. (The collection, her fourth and presumably last, was in preparation when she died.) The first poem in the book, “Among the Neutrals,” is a series of haiku responding to an image in the Inferno: Dante assigns the neutrals, “those/ who lived without disgrace and without praise,” to limbo, since even their sins were not positive enough to merit entry into hell. Wetzsteon finds ingenious, wittily concrete ways to bring their predicament home: “How could we not know/ we were drowning in huge tubs/ of lukewarm water?” And then comes the fourth haiku:

Even the poor souls
lower down in the sad wood
stood up for something.

She is counting on the reader to know that the “sad wood,” in the seventh circle of the Inferno, is where suicides are punished: Their souls are turned into gnarled trees, which bleed and wail when their branches are snapped off. These lines, coming on the first page of Silver Roses, might be taken as a romantic indulgence of suicide—better to be a “poor soul” than a tepid one. But in fact, Silver Roses, like Wetzsteon’s earlier work, is admirable above all in its refusal of such sentimentality. The poet is often sad, but she doesn’t glamorize sadness; she knows that it is right to affirm life, which makes the moments when she’s unable to do so all the more powerful. She critiques her own morbid tendencies in “Ex Libris”:

Ballpoint in hand
I mourned corpses by moonlight,
cooed at sightless embryos
safe in their petri dishes

until these sad rites came to feel
as natural as breathing.

Perhaps they were natural.

But so is breathing,
and so is praise,
etching our silver nights and golden days.

This poem is from the third section of Silver Roses, which is the most painful part to read precisely because it is the most hopeful. This group of poems chronicles the happy, complicated growth of a new romance, and their real subject is Wetzsteon’s ambivalence about happiness. Loneliness and the longing for companionship are one of the constant themes of her work; in art and life, Wetzsteon makes clear, she has grown accustomed to melancholy, and knows how to make use of it. She is reluctant, then, to give up solitude, which is such an important condition of her writing. “I must face my fate like Estragon, asking/ What do we do now, now that we are happy?” she writes in “Halt!” In “Interruptus,” poetic inspiration literally competes with sex for her attention:

There was a lull, a break from bliss
when I turned to face the window
looking for all the world, you said,
“like I was composing a new verse.”

But the poem goes on to reconcile art and life, insisting, “I stroke you with both tangible hands/ and feet unstressed or thudding”—the “feet,” in this case, being the iambs of a poem. The poet’s tentative joyfulness is summed up in the last image of the title poem, which is the last poem in the collection. The silver rose Wetzsteon has in mind is the token that the young lover Octavian gives to his beloved Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, in that opera’s most ravishingly romantic scene. In her poem, Wetzsteon remembers seeing the opera with previous companions, who failed to inspire Octavian-like bliss:

I went with others, threw
bouquets and caution to the whirling wind,
believing that the rhapsody on stage
would waft its wonders up to our cheap seats;
but mirrors can be beautiful fierce cheats,
delusions of an oversmitten mind …

In the final stanza, however, we see the poet on the verge of fulfillment, planning to watch Der Rosenkavalier on television with her new love: “and I’ll be there upon the stroke of eight,/ bearing in my trembling ungloved hand/ a silver rose for you.” The gender reversal in that image makes it, I think, especially moving. Wetzsteon is Octavian offering the silver rose, not Sophie choosing whether to accept it, and the one who makes the offer bears the risk of rejection.

If you were to read this poem, and the whole book, not knowing anything about Rachel Wetzsteon, you would not necessarily care whether the relationship she is writing about flourished or failed. As she herself would certainly have insisted, a poem is a poem, not a diary entry; its job is to communicate an emotion, and “Silver Roses” beautifully captures the experience of “trembling,” vulnerable love. But it is impossible to unknow what one knows, and every reader of Wetzsteon’s New York Times obituary was made aware—regrettably, perhaps—that her suicide came after “she had been severely depressed in recent months, partly over the breakup of a three-year romance.” Presumably this is the romance whose birth-pangs we read about in Silver Roses; and this cannot help making the book painfully poignant. Reading Wetzsteon’s poetry means being drawn into her loneliness and her hope:

this closeness all the more delicious for arriving late
[is] prodded, haunted, pierced by doubting voices from the past
who say, Pack up your things and go, this comfort cannot last,
for you are destined now and always for another scene
where you lance boils, sport braces, brood, and wear a size fourteen,
live wholly and quite happily upon an island where
the smallest tender gesture would be more than you could bear.

Rachel does not yet belong to the past; but Silver Roses is a posthumous work, and posthumousness is the first stage of becoming part of the past, part of literature, which is what every serious poet hopes for. If she is still being read a generation from now—and I hope she is—young readers will probably think about her in the same way that we think about figures like Plath or John Berryman—as a poet who was a suicide, whose suicide is part of her literary identity. But to have known her, even slightly, as a living person, with all the freedom and uncertainty of a life still in its prime, and then to see her transformed into something closed, fully achieved, irretrievably past—this has been, for me, an uncanny and piteous enlightenment.

You can listen to some of Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems here:

Two untitled poems from Home and Away, read by the poet. (Audio courtesy of The Paris Review, 2001.):

“Gold Leaves” and “Septimus,” from Rachel Wetzsteon’s posthumous collection, Silver Roses, read by Grace Schulman, author of the introduction to that collection, and of a recent collection of essays titled First Loves and Other Adventures:

An untitled poem from Sakura Park and “Paradigm Shift” from Silver Roses, read by Adam Kirsch:

“Short Ode to Screwball Women” and “Flaneur Haiku,” both from Sakura Park, read by Alana Newhouse:

Anyway! The competition was fierce, but Matthew Siegel, Mary Bilyeu, and Alex Solaño (whose haikus are also Jonathan Safran Foer-themed) can raise their figurative paddles high. They each win a copy of Eli Horowitz and Roger Bennett’s new book, Everything You Know Is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World.

Congratulations! Poems after the jump.

Matthew Siegel:

Paddles in our hands
We breathe this coldest season
Your father’s garage

Ball, light as winter
We swat, we sweat together
Don’t need ”I love you.”

Again the garage
the dangling yellow light bulb
At last we are saved

Our parents divorce
It does not matter you say
Million dollar serve

The world is this small
You hold the ball in your hand
Wind carries it off

Mary Bilyeu:

It’s mesmerizing …
Breath-taking, heart-stopping, too.
Change the world. Play Pong.

Alex Solaño:

It’s sad how badly
Jonathan Safran Foer
Got his ass paddled

Reading the books of
Jonathan Safran Foer
Makes your balls spin wrong

Eating animals,
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Might have helped your game

He thinks he’s so smart.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Gets balls in his face

Related: Smash [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Celebrities Cross Paddles
Jewish Bowling Haiku? Jewish Bowling Haiku

Bearded for years, Berman arrived at the reading clean-shaven, with a powder-blue suit jacket and cropped hair salted gray. (When he goes downtown, he no longer wears a corduroy suit.) He moved comfortably and deliberately at the podium, weaving his poems, uninterrupted by introductions, in with a deeply personal narrative. He spoke about quitting—”I always saw myself as a quitter”—various childhood pursuits, then music, then writing. Some in the audience surely considered other unsaid things Berman quit: A disabling drug addiction and depression. Seven years ago, he went clean after a suicide attempt and embraced Judaism anew. (You can hear him discuss his music and faith in this Vox Tablet podcast, in which he also straps on a guitar and sings Walt Whitman.)

In their first formal outing, 1994′s Starlite Walker, Silver Jews burst forth with a shambled, playful, lo-fi sound. (Stephen Malkmus, a charter member of Silver Jews, would go on to perfect this style with Pavement.) But the strength of the band’s later albums rested less on the music than on Berman’s lyrics. His words, sung in steady baritone, blend literary wit with melancholic Americana. And his poetry does the same.

Berman’s explanation of his departure from music led to his central subject. Contemporary musicians, he disparaged, were “expected to become entrepreneurs.” The increased commercialism he saw while performing brought him to a daunting conclusion: “My dad’s world has subsumed my world.” Berman’s disdain for his father, Rick, the chief lobbyist with Berman and Company, has been public for over a year. Writing to the Forward, Berman couched his opposition to his father in religious terms: “Jews should always identify with the disadvantaged. You cannot ‘graduate’ to a life of self-interest and exploitation.”

For a bulk of the discussion, Berman detailed what he deemed the pervasive impact of his father’s work. “I can’t fight my dad,” he intoned, “but I decided that I would be his nemesis.” And so he has embarked on that project, funding an expository documentary. The effort, he noted, is neither easy nor comfortable. But it is very necessary. “I’m in the process of changing,” he said, “from a reflective person to an active person.”

When the questions began, an audience member asked, sanguinely, why Berman didn’t consider revamping Silver Jews to bankroll this personal project. He brushed the possibility aside, citing the sorry state of today’s rockers (“pandering, pandering, pandering”). But the kernel of his decision is in the transition from reflection—in music, in writing—to action.

This change appears to coincide with a turn in his faith. Or perhaps it’s driven by it. “I’m a complete fraud,” he said, noting his appreciation for Torah study, “because I have no communal relationship with Judaism.” “Now,” he added, “I’m ready to be communal.” He gave a short nod, and left the podium.

Here are the Silver Jews at their final show, early last year:

Related: Silver Lining [Tablet Magazine]
Which Side Are We On? Jews Lead Fight For and Against Key Labor Bill [The Forward]
Silver Jews Singer Polishes Up Dirty Past [Jewish Journal of Los Angeles]
Earlier: Silver Jew Is Genius Cartoonist, Or Not

To celebrate National Poetry Month, every day for the rest of April we will be presenting a Halevi poem a day—or an excerpt of one—in their beautiful modern translations by Hillel Halkin, whose biography of Halevi was published by Nextbook Press earlier this year. For today, here is a pocket-sized version of two of Halevi’s most famous poems, “My Heart in the East” and “On Boarding Ship in Alexandria,” for you to print, fold, and share.

We’re hoping that not only will you love these poems, but that they’ll also inspire your own reimaginings of Halevi’s work. To that end, a contest: compose a song using Halevi’s lyrics, or create an illustration or video inspired by his writing; anything that applies your own creativity to interpret one of these poems. We’ll select the best entries and post them to Nextbook Press and Tablet; one winner will be chosen to win an Apple iPad! Publish your entry on your blog or website and send us a link, or share it in the comments section below. Deadline is April 26, and we’ll announce the winner on Poetry in Your Pocket Day, April 29.

Download complete contest rules here.

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.

Yiddish poetry was once popular enough to make its way into the pages of major daily newspapers, where it shared space with reporting on politicians, criminals, and the feats of athletes, among other prosaic matters. Yiddish poets sometimes became minor celebrities, drawing large audiences to their readings.

Like the vast majority of the language’s literary figures in the late 19th and early 20th century, these poets had excised themselves from Orthodoxy in order to live and work in environments unfettered by traditional mores. Their productivity kept pace with changes and explosions in other fields—art, literature, and politics attracting young people and sometimes wooing those young away from Orthodoxy. Though many Orthodox Jews were threatened by the new Yiddish papers and literary journals that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they did not all turn away from the new media of the day. Some religious leaders saw the need to allow a measure of cultural permeability, especially after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, when a slew of new Yiddish papers were founded, lest modern art forms and print media lure community members away altogether.

One such figure was the Gerer Rebbe, a forward-thinking rabbi in charge of one of Poland’s largest Hasidic courts. In 1907, he gave the first religious dispensation for a newspaper to serve Orthodoxy, easing tension between tradition and a burgeoning press. He was also among those who founded Agudas Yisroel, the first Orthodox political party, in 1912. Though slowly, modernity was insinuating itself into traditional Jewish life, and the Gerer Rebbe showed that if Orthodox groups failed to adapt to the times, they would continue to bleed adherents.

For some people, the compulsion to write is as powerful as it is unavoidable, and a number of Orthodox writers—those willing to compose prose and poetry within the parameters of traditional Jewish life and law—began to appear in the pages of the newly minted religious press and in tiny literary journals during the 1920s. Many yeshiva kids revered these writers for being able to remain within tradition’s boundaries while writing modern poetry and prose.

One such poet was Shmuel Nadler, profiled in Beatrice Lang Caplan’s excellent essay in a recent anthology, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon. Nadler was born in 1908 into a Hasidic family in a shtetl in Galicia, went to heder and yeshiva, but also studied in a public high school. Considered an excellent pupil, he studied at the Lublin Yeshiva with Rabbi Meyer Shapiro, renowned for having developed the daf yomi, or “page a day,” system, still in use, for Talmud study. Nadler took the unusual step of writing poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew, then considered somewhat daring; in Orthodox circles Hebrew was a holy language to be used for liturgical purposes. In addition, he contributed poems to several literary, political, and socially oriented journals such as Ortodoksishe Yungt Bleter and Beyz-Yankev.

In 1933, Nadler published Besht-symfoniye, the Baal Shem Tov Symphony, which mixed both prose and poetry as well as tradition and modernity in a paean to the founder of Hasidism.

A glowing sun
You have hung upon the skies,
Red roses,
Grass green,
And the trees and I
Draw strength from the sun’s burning.
Praised be God
Creator of Light.

(translated by Beatrice Lang Caplan)

Nadler also included, Lang notes, veiled hints at disbelief and disobedience, pushing the limits of what Orthodoxy would allow.

And though Nadler, the so-called “court poet of the Aguda,” was very much the darling of young religious readers who found him artistically appealing while maintaining some fidelity to traditional parameters, older readers, those who oversaw literary production at the Aguda-run newspapers and journals, were vexed by him.

Meantime, Nadler’s worm had turned, and by the end of 1933, he’d cut off his beard and peyes and left the religious world. His poems, with a distinctly left-wing political sensibility, advocating Communism, began to find their way into publications religious kids were not supposed to read—papers like the Lodz-based Communist journal Literarishe Tribune, where his poems shared space with ideologues like Isaac Deutscher.

Differences between Nadler and his Aguda handlers came to a head in late December 1933, when the party leaders meddled in a performance of the traditional play The Sale of Joseph, meant to be a fundraiser for Khinukh, an Aguda-run educational youth organization. Aguda leaders demanded that the actors in the play be either boys or girls, but not both. Mixing was mukste, or forbidden. They also demanded that the audience be divided by a mekhitse. In the end, neither the play’s directors at Khinukh nor the authorities at Aguda would budge, and the antagonism between them led to the performance’s cancellation.

Nadler, who wasn’t involved in the matter, was nevertheless furious at the meddling and angrily criticized the Aguda for putting its nose where it didn’t belong. He went on to attack Aguda representatives for their lack of action in Palestine, though he did not specify what that action should have been. As reported in the Yiddish daily Moment, Nadler’s grievances were news to the Aguda, and they were shocked by the acerbic provocations on the part of their “court poet.”

But Nadler’s criticisms were just an appetizer. In what seemed like an overnight transformation, he publicly announced that he had become a Communist, shocking everyone. The week after the Khinukh incident, in early January 1934, he gave a lecture at the Warsaw Jewish Literary Union in which he intended to explain his move from God to man. The hall was packed with young people—Hasidic and Communist alike. It was an uneasy mix, and furious arguments broke out between the two groups.

The Hasidim harangued Nadler the turncoat while the proletarians tried dragging them out of the hall. The two sides screamed and pushed and shoved each other until wild fistfights broke out. For his part, Nadler tried to read his text, to explain his exit from the world of Orthodoxy, which had apparently been a long time coming, but he was constantly interrupted by howling catcalls.

Amid the ruckus, a strange thing occurred. A young Hasid who looked remarkably like Nadler mounted the stage and awkwardly approached the poet, screaming in his face, “Akher! For me you are dead,” referencing the Talmudic figure, Elisha ben Abuya, who is said to have gone into pardes, paradise, and became an atheist. The young man began sobbing hysterically, tore his jacket, and collapsed to the floor, silencing the audience. The hysteric turned out to be Nadler’s brother, with whom he had studied in the Lublin Yeshiva, and who was now a rabbi in a Galician shtetl. Nadler’s transformation, in the mind of the brother, was a transgression so colossal that Nadler the poet had to be considered dead. Nadler the rabbi had, right then, begun the process of mourning.

According to Moment’s reporter, the reading was a complete fiasco, brought to an end with the onstage breakup of the Nadler brothers. The crowd dispersed shortly thereafter.

Nadler the poet didn’t stick around either. Immediately after the episode in the Warsaw Literary Union, he left for Paris to work for Di Naye prese, a new Communist Yiddish paper, and eventually became its editor, dropping the heavily biblical “Shmuel” for his nickname, “Munye.”

The last work he published in Warsaw was his Baal Shem Tov Symphony, a mix of Hasidic tales and poetry. Appearing just before he made his public break with tradition, it offered the following:

And to the believer—such goodness for he who believes
In the holy tsadik and the protection he offers,
And who attaches himself to the one above, in thanks and in praise,
When his prayer is realized.

And he who knows that justice will break his solitude
Will never be the man to stumble,
We should all be so privileged to make it
To the redemption in once piece, Amen.

When Nadler got to Paris, his style changed in both tone and content. In the1934 poem “I Didn’t Get My Revolutionary Newspaper Today,” he wrote:

I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today,
I waited fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour
And the postman finally said to me: no way.
My revolutionary newspaper, you didn’t show up.

Not here …  I know, my dear, you did not betray me.
Someone pointed you out, a reactionary, no doubt,
And had a policeman shut your powerful mouth.
I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today.

When World War II broke out and the Nazis occupied Paris, Nadler was still there. It wasn’t the safest place for a Jew or a Communist, but Nadler remained true to his revolutionary ideals and published underground French and Yiddish newspapers during the occupation. By summer of 1942, when it got really hot for the Jews in Vichy France, the Nazis caught and executed him, bringing the story of Shmuel Nadler to a close. He shared his radical attitude toward tradition while facing his own demise in a poem quoted in a Yizkor book for Yiddish writers in Paris:

You shouldn’t say Kaddish at my grave,
And don’t light candles for my soul,
This flourishing, fruitful life
Is our purpose on the earth

Remember you promised to come on the holiday
One hour after dark.
For my part, I won’t keep count of wraths
Or wrongs till you come.
And you: Don’t believe a word I say
Even when it’s wondrous or perverse.

I lie down to sleep like ordinary mortals
And I don’t practice magic.
I forgo the honors in advance,
I bear no resemblance to the daughter of the gods.
And you: Remember when and where.

The common comparison of Ravikovitch with American poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton is not really apt: Ravikovitch writes about herself more ironically than those confessional poets, and is more hardheadedly engaged with the world around her. Still, it is easy to see why the comparison gets made. Ravikovitch’s poem “Clockwork Doll,” from her first collection, published when she was 23, caused a sensation with its cold, ironic, feminist anger:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and round
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground,
And they tried to piece me together again.

Then once more I was a proper doll
And all my manner was nice and polite.
But I became damaged goods that night,
A fractured twig poised for a fall.

If you compare this poem with, say, Plath’s brilliant “The Applicant” (“A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk./It works, there is nothing wrong with it”), it is hard to feel that Ravikovitch’s poem has the same kind of power. Much of Ravikovitch’s early work, in fact, comes across in Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation as swaddled in literariness—it is too “poetic,” in the bad sense. This is not because the translation is inadequate, though I cannot know for sure; but I suspect it is because the translation faithfully attempts to preserve a quality that made Ravikovitch so exciting to Hebrew speakers—her continuous engagement with the vocabulary and conventions of the Bible and the modern Hebrew classics.

In “Clockwork Doll,” for instance, the translators note that Ravikovitch’s metaphor of the fractured twig, which is rather banal in English, would be clear to the Israeli reader as an allusion to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “A Twig Fell.” In that poem, Bialik compares himself to a tree that cannot bear fruit, an image of disconnection and despair that Ravikovitch cleverly recast for her own purposes. This kind of allusion is, to continue the metaphor, the root system of any poetry, and the element that most resists transplantation into a new language. Nor does it necessarily help matters when Bloch and Kronfeld introduce what sound like allusions to well-known English-language poems into their translation. “Even for a Thousand Years” begins “I cannot bring a world quite round/and there’s no sense in trying”; but was Ravikovitch actually alluding quite so explicitly to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (“I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch it as I can”)?

But the allusion most important to Ravikovitch’s early work is Biblical, and here Bloch and Kronfeld offer indispensable guidance. Words that sound ordinary, or at best slightly formal, in English are often shown to be meaningfully peculiar in Hebrew. Ravikovitch makes excellent use of hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the Bible, and thus carry a very particular charge for the Hebrew reader. The first poem in her first book, “The Love of an Orange,” perhaps her most famous poem, is passionately carnal, in a way that would become Ravikovitch’s hallmark:

An orange did love
The man who ate it,
To its flayer it brought
Flesh for the teeth.

But the carnality takes on a whole new meaning when we learn, from the translators’ note, that the word here rendered as “flesh” is not the standard Hebrew basar, but barot. This word appears only once in the Bible, in Lamentations 4:10, a description of the siege of Jerusalem: “With their own hands, tenderhearted women have cooked their own children; such became their fare (barot), in the disaster of my poor people.” It is an open question how many of Ravikovitch’s original readers would have known their Bible well enough to understand this shocking allusion, but the translators make the poet’s intention clear, in this and many similar cases.

The allusiveness and the formality of Ravikovitch’s early poetry are largely cast off starting with her third collection, titled with meaningful plainness The Third Book. This appeared in 1969, at a time when poets across the world were in search of a more relaxed and plainspoken style. There is a new tone, sardonic and self-aware, in poems such as “Portrait”:

She sits in the house for days on end.
She reads the paper.
(Come on, don’t you?)
She doesn’t do what she’d like to do,
she’s got inhibitions….
In winter she’s cold, really cold,
colder than other people.
She bundles up but she’s still cold.

This informality does not mean, however, that Ravikovitch has given up her large subjects. When she writes about love in her own voice—rather than as “Tirzah” or “Shunra,” personae from her earlier poems—she is bitterly impressive:

I ask
with a quizzical look:
What else can happen to me
that hasn’t happened to me yet?
I dangle from a cloud
without wings, without a beak
but I don’t fall.
Once when I was in love
I could no longer feel
the cold or the heat.

As she gets older, we come to know Ravikovitch differently, and better. We see her loneliness and sadness, her worries about money and reputation, and—in a series of deeply moving poems—her troubled love for her son, Ido:

A tiny lizard on the wall of your house, Ido,
that’s what I want to be….
With no purpose,
enclosed in a space
where you inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale
oxygen.
We’re not talking about love, Ido.

Starting with the Lebanon War of 1982, Ravikovitch became an outspoken critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestianians. Though not all her protest poems transcend the subjects that provoked them, the provocations themselves—the burning alive of an Arab worker by Jewish arsonists, the killing of a pregnant woman’s fetus “under circumstances relating to state security”—are sufficiently terrible to make the verses powerful. And yet the Ravikovitch who lives on in the memory is less often the public conscience than the private sufferer, the poet who speaks in “The Window”:

So what did I manage to do?
Me—for years I did nothing.
Just looked out the window.
Raindrops soaked into the lawn,
year in, year out….
Winter and summer revolved among blades of grass.
I slept as much as possible.
That window was as big as it needed to be.
Whatever was needed
I saw in that window.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series. This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

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.

In Tablet Magazine, Zackary Sholem Berger celebrated Sutzkever’s ability to continue evolving:

While other writers perseverated on the world that was lost—which for many led to artistic stasis—Sutzkever built new worlds in lyric self-expression. Yes, he wrote about ghetto existence, and about life in hiding while the Nazis raged, but those were his Holocaust-era works, not signposts to an unchanging style. Historical moments were for him the raw material for his own poetic vision, not excuses for occasional verse.

At Jewish Ideas Daily, Ruth R. Wisse—author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power—testifies that Sutzkever inspired her to become a professor of Yiddish literature: “Sutzkever is a master of precisely the kind of wordplay that defies translation, and of a wit that exploits the singularity of a language whose elements are ingeniously fused.”

And in The New Republic’s excellent new online supplement, The Book, Tablet Magazine contributor Jeremy Dauber finds Sutzkever a premier poet of catastrophe:

Sutzkever’s simple descriptions of enormous horrors—perhaps most famously the couplet “Did you ever see in fields of snow/Frozen Jews, in row upon row?”—split the difference, reducing the traces of mass human homicide to a childlike, wondering response at what seems to have become the new natural landscape.

Golden Link [Tablet Magazine]
Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam [Jewish Ideas Daily]
The Elegist [The Book]
Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies [NYT]

Related: Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]

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 to fit
You jammed locks. You will bite
The sidewalks like bread,
Thinking: It used to be better.
And time will gnaw at you like a cricket
Caught in a fist.

Then your memory will resemble
And ancient buried town
And your estranged eyes will burrow down
Like a mole, a mole….

Vilna Ghetto, February 14, 1943
Translated by Chana Bloch

***

The Lead Plates at the Rom Press

Arrayed at night, like fingers stretch through bars
To clutch the lit air of freedom,
We made for the press plates, to seize
The lead plates at the Rom printing works.
We were dreamers, we had to be soliders,
And melt down, for our bullets, the spirit of the lead.

At some timeless native lair
We unlocked the seal once more.
Shrouded in shadow, by the glow of a lamp,
Like Temple ancients dipping oil
Into candelabrums of festal gold,
So, pouring out line after lettered line, did we.

Letter by melting letter the lead,
Liquefied bullets, gleamed with thoughts:
A verse from Babylon, a verse from Poland,
Seething, flowing into the one mold.
Now must Jewish grit, long concealed in words,
Detonate the world in a shot!

Who in Vilna Ghetto has beheld the hands
Of Jewish heroes clasping weapons
Has beheld Jerusalem in its throes,
The crumbling of those granite walls;
Grasping the words smelted into lead,
Conning their sounds by heart.

Vilna Ghetto, September 12, 1943
Translated by Neal Kozodoy

***

1981

A letter arrived from the town of my birth
from one still sustained by the grace of her youth.
Enclosed between torment and fondness she pressed
a blade of grass from Ponar.

This grass and moribund cloud with its flicker
once kindled the alphabet, letter by letter.
And on the face of the letters, in murmuring ash,
the blade of grass from Ponar.

The grass is my doll’s house, my snug little world
where children play fiddles in rows as they burn.
The maestro’s a legend, they lift up their bows
for the blade of grass from Ponar.

I won’t part with this stemlet that yields up my home.
The good earth I long for makes room for us both.
And I’ll bring to the Lord my oblation at last:
the blade of grass from Ponar.

Translated by Cynthia Ozick

MORE: Read Zackary Sholem Berger’s tribute to Sutzkever here.

In particular, those (like myself) who have spent lots of time in Morningside Heights may smile, and feel not a little awe, at how much insight and beauty Wetzsteon was able to wring out of her sleepy, university-town upper Manhattan neighborhood. In “Short Ode to Morningside Heights,” Wetzsteon juxtaposes the grad-school chatter at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with the towering Cathedral of St. John the Divine across Amsterdam Avenue:

The pastry shop’s abuzz
with crazy George and filthy graffiti,
but the peacocks are strutting across the way
and the sumptuous cathedral gives
the open-air banter a reason to deepen:
build structures inside the mind, it tells
the languorous talkers, to rival the ones outside!

Rachel Wetzsteon, Poet of Keen Insight and Wit, Dies at 42 [NYT]
In Memory, and Admiration, of Rachel Wetzsteon [TNR]

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.

At most, prophet was Jeremiah’s day job, the conventional mask he put on in order to voice his poetry more effectively. “It is hardly different today when it comes to the profession of the poet,” Rosenberg writes. “Sometimes he or she is a college professor, but we still call him or her a poet, not even a poet-professor.” He draws a comparison with the contemporary American poet John Ashbery, who has been a professor and an art critic. Still, “Ashbery wasn’t called an art critic-poet, and neither were the poets of Jeremiah called prophet-poets, as far as we know.”

To almost any reader—Jewish or non-Jewish, pious or skeptical—this redescription of Jeremiah cannot help sounding like a demotion. John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, “the most eminent English-language poet alive,” but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself (in the words of the New JPS translation):

The LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me: Herewith I put My words into your mouth.
See, I appoint you this day
Over nations and kingdoms;
To uproot and to pull down,
To destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.

For almost all readers until modern times, reading these lines meant taking their claim at face value. Jews, and Christians, listened to Jeremiah not because he was a good writer, but because he was chosen by God to deliver a message of the utmost urgency.

David Rosenberg knows, however, that we are living in a period when the Bible’s only claims on the attention of many readers is literary. That is why, in titling his book A Literary Bible, he is performing a clever dialectical maneuver. Yes, the title tells us, this Bible is literature, and not even canonical literature: it is a highly selective anthology of stories and verses, rendered into deliberately anachronistic, 21st-century English. Yet Rosenberg believes that literature can and should possess the same kind of moral force and spiritual insight once reserved for Scripture. For him, poetry is the only really sacred speech. It follows that to call Jeremiah a poet is actually a promotion, replacing the doubtful miracle of divine inspiration with the genuine miracle of poetic inspiration.

Here is how Rosenberg renders the famous passage from Chapter 31 of Jeremiah, in which the Lord comforts Rachel:

…these are the Lord’s words:
your voice will cease its weeping

your eyes brighten behind the tears
that dissolve into crystal-clear vision
of the children alive

returning home
from the lands of enemies
from beyond anguish to hope revived

vision is your reward
there is new life for your labor, remembrance
in the presence of children, eyes wide open

turning to the future
that is also yours
within the borders of a reality

and beyond them your descendants
are walking freely
by the strength of an unfailing imagination

an unbroken integrity
a listening dedicated
to the words that bade them live.

When Rosenberg translates Jeremiah, it is plain, he is not just translating Hebrew into English, or biblical idiom into contemporary concepts like “reality” and “imagination.” More profoundly, he is translating the concrete and pragmatic faith of the Hebrew Bible into the abstract and metaphorical faith that is all he, like many of us, can really believe in.

Rosenberg’s God promises to give Rachel, the mourning mother, a “vision” of her children, a “remembrance” of them, a future vaguely “within the borders of a reality.” It is all a little wordy and elusive, and at bottom it feels like a description of closure—a contemporary, secular understanding of renewal within the harsh limits of loss and grief. That is all Jeremiah the poet can conscientiously offer. It is different with Jeremiah the prophet, as we hear him in the new JPS transaltion:

Thus saith the LORD:
Restrain your voice from weeping,
Your eyes from shedding tears;
For there is a reward for your labor.

—declares the LORD:
They shall return from the enemy’s land.
And there is hope for your future
—declares the LORD:
Your children shall return to their country.

This is what a grieving mother would want to hear, a simple promise—your children are still alive and they are coming back. Jeremiah can make this promise because he believes in an actual God who is all-powerful. What we meet with in the best, most moving passages of A Literary Bible, on other hand, is a literary God, who has both the power of literature—since poetry can move, inspire, provoke—and the weakness of literature—since poetry is always hypothetical, a matter of thought and feeling rather than history and covenant.

Rosenberg, in his fervor for the power and privileges of poetry, does not always make this distinction as clear as it should be. In his notes and his afterword, Rosenberg is oddly abusive towards biblical scholars like Robert Alter and James Kugel, whom he casts as dullards and pedants, deaf to the Bible’s poetic genius. As a poet himself, he claims a privileged access to the biblical writers’ minds, which allows him to make sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about their intentions—for instance, that “the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not consider themselves divine.” This kind of certainty is characteristic of poets like Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell, whose translations of foreign poetry were imperially bold, and Rosenberg places himself in their tradition: “My apprenticeship in reclaiming biblical authors began, at nineteen, when I was Robert Lowell’s student in New York,” he writes.

But translating Rilke, or even Aeschylus, as Lowell did, is fundamentally different from translating the Bible. A text that claims to be the Word of God makes existential demands on us that a human text, even an ancient and prestigious one, does not. Robert Alter’s translations (which Rosenberg insults) respect the absolute and alien nature of the sacred imagination; Rosenberg, in his very passion to make the Bible communicate, turns it into something more domesticated and acceptable.

In part this is simply a matter of omission. To Rosenberg, the God we meet in the book of Job is “a caricature of God as a representation for conventional religion…. He lacks a human range of emotions.” For this reason, A Literary Bible only gives us Job’s long speech of complaint, which Rosenberg renders with convincing empathy:

why should someone have to walk around
blinded by the daylight
he can’t wave off

that God throws on him
waiting at every exit
in front of me…

every horror I imagined
walks right up to me
no privacy no solitude

and my pain
with my mind
pushes rest aside.

Rosenberg’s translation ends with chapter 31 of Job: “and here for now is ended/the poem/Job speaks.” The beginning of the next chapter, in the JPS edition, reads: “These three men ceased replying to Job, for he considered himself right”; and by restricting himself to Job’s complaining voice, Rosenberg compels the reader to share that conviction of self-righteousness. But the Book of Job ends in just the opposite spirit, as God himself replies to Job “out of the tempest” and brutally, majestically sweeps aside all his protests:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?
Onto what were its bases sunk?
Who set its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the divine beings shouted for joy?

Here, as so often in the Bible, we are reminded that we do not “have understanding” of God, which is why his actions so often appear evil and inexplicable to us. It is precisely because God is God that he lacks “a human range of emotions”—and that is what makes him ungraspable in the terms of literature, which is a humane art. Perhaps it takes a prophet, rather than a poet, to make us see God face to face.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

This year Adam Kirsch, 33, has cemented his position as this century’s first pre-eminent Jewish man of letters. A widely admired poet and essayist, his mind is exercised both by Jewish particularity and the broader world of culture. Both are evident in, for example, his biography of Benjamin Disraeli or when reminding readers of the New York Times that Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum.… Yale professor Langdon Hammer — writing in The New York Times — praised the Harvard-educated Kirsch as a poet-critic akin to a previous “generation of poets who won positions in American colleges as literary critics” and even traced a lineage back to T.S. Eliot.

Mazel tov, Adam.

Adam Kirsch archive [Tablet]
Adam Kirsch: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

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.

“If you’re trying to be an alternative to AIPAC, don’t behave like AIPAC,” poet Josh Healey, who was targeted by Goldfarb for comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, told Haaretz in an interview. Healey and his colleague Kevin Coval, who was criticized for comparing Israel to a whore, issued a long statement accusing J Street’s leadership of “caving in” to what they described as a McCarthyite witch hunt. (J Street officials explained on Monday that they were concerned about crossing the line between being provocative and offensive.)

Meanwhile, Tracy Soren—at 22, the youngest of the three, and just beginning her career as a professional poet—contacted Tablet Magazine to say she was surprised to have been caught up in the whole episode. “I’m not pleased with how this has gone,” said Soren in an interview, who focuses on sexual politics in her poetry and had planned to read a piece about an American trying to understand her Israeli lover’s experience on the battlefield. “I do feel [J Street] went along with the political right, and even though they have to choose their battles, I’m not surprised poetry was the first thing that got cut.”

Soren, who said she was active in her B’nai B’rith youth group as a high-schooler in Queens, added that she’d decided to skip the conference, even though organizers had assured her she was still welcome to attend. “The real issue here is that there’s no space for discussion,” Soren said. “Judaism teaches us to question things, and this was supposed to be a forum to question the conflict and not be called bad Jews. What I’m hoping comes out of this is that those who have been opposing what I was going to say see the peace within it, and that it’s more pro-Israel and pro-humanity than anything else.”

The poetry session will be replaced with a program of excerpts from productions staged by Theater J, a program run by the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C. Theater director Ari Roth, who was slated to moderate the poetry session, told Tablet he has proposed staging excerpts from four plays: David Hare’s 2000 play Via Dolorosa; Hare’s monologue Wall, published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books and performed at New York’s Public Theater; Motti Lerner’s Pangs of the Messiah; and Hillel Mitelpunkt’s The Accident.

J Street Conference Sessions [J Street]
Earlier: J Street Cancels Poetry Session [Tablet]

I especially enjoyed the tunes with darkly appealing minor melodies, like “Ma Lecha Hayam,” or guttural Aramaic lyrics, like “Chad Gadya.” Of them all, “Ha Lachma Anya” (“This Is the Bread of Affliction”) was my favorite. So it might be nothing more than nostalgia that made me such a sucker for the jazzified version of the tune on saxophonist Idit Shner’s debut album, Tuesday’s Blues, flooding me with Passover memories at a time better suited to thoughts of the upcoming High Holidays. But I don’t think so.

Tuesday’s Blues is loaded with jazzed-up versions of Jewish and Israeli melodies, from “Lamidbar” to “Adon Haselichot.” But Shner, who played in the Israeli Air Force jazz band and earned a doctorate in saxophone and jazz studies at the University of North Texas (she’s now an assistant professor of jazz and classical saxophone at the University of Oregon), outdid herself with “Ha Lachma.”

For one thing, she recast it as a sprightly major melody, transforming the dirge-like original into something sunny and bright. She also installed a groovy descending bass line and punctuated the bridge with a couple of stop-time punches during which her backing trio drops out and she declaims the melody alone. It’s an old trick, and an effective one—the herky-jerky character of the bridge creates a sense of tension that is relieved by, and contrasts nicely with, the rest of the tune.

And then there’s the performance itself. Shner starts slow but by the end of her solo, she’s hammering away at the tune’s reinvented harmonies like a blacksmith beating hot iron, inventing little themes and throwing off showers of variations on them. Yet her rhythm section is so good—perfect, in fact—that you could tune her out entirely and still be left with one of the best trio performances in recent memory. Not that you’d want to, of course.

There’s yet more Passover material on tsuker-zis, the latest in a series of discs by trumpeter Frank London and singer Lorin Sklamberg that offer fresh interpretations of sacred Jewish music. Having already tackled nigunim and zemirot, the two long-time Klezmatics colleagues now turn their attention to Hasidic holiday songs, aided and abetted by electric guitarist Knox Chandler, Armenian-American oud player Ara Dinkjian, and North Indian percussionist Deep Singh.

Despite a few high-energy tracks—including a Chandler-driven version of an alphabetical acrostic Passover song (whose 25-word-long title lies beyond the scope of this document) that sounds pretty much the way a whirling dervish looks—the album as a whole exudes a mellow, meditative vibe: music to think about, or at least by. This might have something to do with Sklamberg’s light, reedy voice, with its intimations of emotional depth and fragility. Or it could be the result of the relaxed tempos and open, quasi-ambient textures favored on many of the tracks. But I suspect it is mostly the fault of Dinkjian, whose every pause and flourish threatens to take you out of this world and into another, far more interesting one.

The kind of musicianship displayed on both discs is wondrous to hear, and I have to admit that I tend not to expect it from singers, who, for all their talents, are often much less musically sophisticated than the instrumentalists who back them. That is most definitely not the case, however, with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb

CREDIT: Jason Wu

Whereas her previous recording, Mayim Rabim, was based exclusively on the Song of Songs, her latest, Upto Hear from Here, draws on a much more varied and uneven collection of texts. Some of Gottlieb’s self-penned lyrics, like the ones to “Life Is a Structure That Is (Accept It!)” and “Pomegranate Man,” the opening track whose fruity subject does provide a tenuous link to the upcoming holiday season, recall the bullshit that Mike Myers used to spew when doing his caricature of a chain-smoking beat poet. Then again, Gottlieb’s “Venezia,” a Middle Eastern-flavored composition dedicated to her grandmother and delivered in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with what sound like home audio recordings woven into the mix, is absolutely heartbreaking. Elsewhere, Gottlieb borrows some intriguing lines from the likes of Rumi, John Cage, and Agi Mishol.

In the end, however, the quality of the lyrics is almost irrelevant. Words play second fiddle to sound here, and sound is where Gottlieb shines. She’s a singer who thinks like an instrumentalist, and you can hear that in the very first bars of “Pomegranate Man,” when she sings wordlessly along with trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Loren Stillman, blending in like just another horn player. Whether dipping into straight-ahead jazz, rummaging through her bag of gospel, soul, and Middle Eastern licks, or tossing off an avant-garde gesture, Gottlieb is always an integral part of the ensemble. That she’s able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her bandmates in so challenging an idiom—one marked by constantly shifting rhythms, ambiguous harmonies, and constant allusions to disparate genres—makes it even easier to forgive her lyrical lapses. I don’t know if Upto Here From Here contains quite as many delights as a pomegranate has seeds, but it has enough to make up for the lousy poetry.

Shall I compare thee to a matzoh ball?
Thou art more soft and more delicious.
My nose is ever-set to heed your call,
Your olfaction could n’er prove malicious.
Tho’ not the type apt to disintegrate,
Blown to bits by a spoon’s first tender touch,
Thou’rt also not the type who’s strength’s so great
A blowtorch is requir’d—which is a little much.
Thy substance intermingles perfectly
With chicken broth that does thyself surround,
Thy supple taste, it doth pair marv’lously,
With the soup’s celery, just plucked up from the ground.
So long as I can’t eat bread for one week,
So long your respite and pleasure shall I seek.

Bad Poetry Contest [MyJewishLearning]

Though an atheist, Radcliffe digs his Jewish roots. “It means I have a good work ethic, and you get Jewish humour and you’re allowed to tell Jewish jokes. For instance: did you hear how copper wire was invented? Two Jews fighting over a penny. And so on.” To which we must respond: Daniel, Jacob—whatever your stand-up alias name is—please abstain from tackling comedy as your next metier.

Dan the Man [Guardian]
Daniel Radcliffe A Secret Poet? [InStyle]

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah

Reading Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s excellent new biography Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (Northwestern University Press), however, the ghost of Isaac Rosenberg’s American life—the life he never got to lead—is continually before the reader’s eyes. What would have happened to Rosenberg’s genius had he been born in the Lower East Side instead of the East End? He would have started out equally poor, no doubt—New York’s Jewish slum was as deprived as London’s, and his father was evidently too private and intellectual a man to succeed in business.

But in New York, Rosenberg would have been surrounded by a vast and thriving Jewish community, in a city dominated by immigrants. He would have joined the great movement of Jewish writers and intellectuals into the mainstream of American life. One can picture him going to City College, living in the Village, marveling at the Armory Show (for he was a dedicated painter as well as a poet), writing for little magazines. Most important, he could have lived a normal lifespan, instead of dying in 1918, at the age of 27, in the killing fields of France.

Being born in England, for Rosenberg, meant a much more difficult, pinched, unconfident existence. Economic opportunities were fewer than in America, class mobility much harder to achieve, and Jewishness a much more significant barrier to cultural acceptance. Here, we are used to the idea that the children of immigrants, who grow up speaking foreign languages, can grow up to be great writers of English; we think of Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller in their Yiddish-speaking homes. Yet while we recognize the Yiddish inflections in their work, it would probably not occur to most American critics to say of them what Gordon Bottomley, a poet and a major booster of Rosenberg’s work, said of him: “Rosenberg was of a first generation to use our tongue, and so had no atavistic or subconscious background with regard to it—and that must have conditioned his freshness of usage.”

Wilson tends to agree that Rosenberg’s strikingly original approach to language” stems from the fact that English was, in effect, his second language.” But surely the hallmark of the late learner of any language is an excessively cautious and conventional style, an attempt to assimilate” in speech. Rosenberg’s experiments in verse, like T.S. Eliot’s or Ezra Pound’s around the same time, ought to be credited to his genius, not his background.

In other ways, too, Wilson’s highly sympathetic biography also shows a certain lack of inwardness with Jewish culture, as when she suggests that Rosenberg’s predilection for images of female demons comes from the kabbalah—a highly esoteric tradition, even more so 100 years ago than today, of which Rosenberg surely knew nothing. She does not mention that, as Frank Kermode showed in his landmark book Romantic Agony, images of female vampires and incubuses were commonplace in the literature and art of the turn of the century. It is not too far from Wilde’s “Salome” to Rosenberg’s “The Female God”:

Queen! Goddess! Animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls?
When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow,
Do not our jealous pulses wake between?
….
Our souls have passed into your eyes,
Our days into your hair,
And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world.
Your world.

Yet if Rosenberg was and remains an exotic figure in British literature, as Jewish writers are not exotic in American literature, this is not to say that his genius went without encouragement. On the contrary, Wilson shows that he attracted patrons throughout his life, both individual and institutional, Jewish and non-Jewish. He was one of a group of eager young people who congregated at the Whitechapel Public Library, built in 1892 by a philanthropic Protestant vicar for the benefit of East End Jews. Many members of the so-called Whitechapel Group—which Wilson describes as a poor, Jewish version of the Bloomsbury Group—went on to fame, including the painters Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. Rosenberg himself won admission to the prestigious Slade School of Art, his fees paid by one Mrs. Harriet Cohen, a wealthy, assimilated Jew who lived in the West End, not the East.

And when he decided, correctly, that writing and not painting was his true calling, Rosenberg’s poetry won the support of leading poets and editors, including Edward Marsh, the founder of the so-called Georgian school. Even when he was in the trenches of the Western Front, Rosenberg could count on encouragement from Marsh, who took time from his duties as Winston Churchill’s private secretary to critique Rosenberg’s poems. Another Georgian poet, R.C. Trevelyan, responded to news of his death this way: “For me it will be one of the cruelest things which this cruel war has done. None of the younger writers … were his equals in imaginative power.”

The terrible irony of Rosenberg’s life is that the war that silenced him also gave him his greatest inspiration. “Personally, I think the only value in any war is the literature it results in,” Rosenberg wrote, in a quotation that appears on the back cover of Wilson’s book. And the group of poems he wrote in France in 1916-18 rank among the most valuable documents of the First World War—visionary, grotesque poems like “Returning, We Hear the Larks,” “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Louse Hunting,” and “Dead Man’s Dump”:

Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! Have they gone into you?
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack,
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

Of course, Rosenberg was not saying that a war is justified by the literature it produces. On the contrary, few people knew better than Rosenberg how terrible the Great War really was. For unlike almost all the other major English poets to serve in the war—Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon—Rosenberg was not an officer but a private, which meant that he was exposed to the full awfulness of army life. From the moment he enlisted in October 1915—not out of patriotic motives, as he insisted, but simply for the money, so he could help support his mother—Rosenberg complained about the indignities and deprivations the common soldier had to put up with.

During training, the food was so bad that soldiers almost starved: “one felt inert and unable to do the difficult work wanted,” he wrote. The enlistment bonus he was counting on for his mother was not paid. And then there was the anti-Semitism: “Besides,” Rosenberg confided to one Jewish correspondent, “my being a Jew makes it bad amongst these wretches.” He did not fight back in person—all his life, he was shy and proud, holding himself apart from would-be friends as well as enemies. But he had his victory in the poetry that was the product and the vindication of his tragic life:

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses,
Then why do they sneer at me?

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931, and while he has been part of the Palestinian literary scene for most of his life, he did not publish his first book of poems until 1983. Over the last few years, however, he has won a growing international readership for his humane, melancholy, sometimes comic poetry, thanks in large part to the efforts of Hoffman, a film critic and author of the essay collection House of Windows, and her husband, the poet and translator Peter Cole. Hoffman and Cole, American-born Jews who live in Jerusalem, are two of the founders of Ibis Editions, a remarkable small press that publishes Hebrew and Arabic literature in translation. It was Ibis that brought out the first English edition of Muhammad Ali’s work, Never Mind, in September 2000—“in the same month,” Hoffman notes, “that the al-Aqsa intifada broke out.”

That kind of grim calendaring can be found in every chapter of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. “In 1946 Taha read his first modern book,” Hoffman writes—just around the time the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel. He produced most of the poems for his first book in 1982 and 1983, during the months when the IDF was invading Lebanon, leading to the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The most important date of all in Muhammad Ali’s story, however, is July 15, 1948. It was on that night that the Galilean village of Saffuriyya, where Muhammad Ali was born and raised, was captured by the army of the newborn Jewish state.

Along with most of the village’s population, the teenage Muhammad Ali and his family fled on foot, ending up in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where his 12-year-old sister, Ghazaleh, died of meningitis. (Six other siblings had died in infancy, Hoffman writes, and the poet was actually the fourth boy to bear the name Taha.) They were able to sneak back into Israel the following year, and eventually even to gain Israeli residence cards, but they were never to return to their ancestral village; Saffuriyya had been leveled and turned into Tzippori, a moshav. Instead, the future poet settled in Nazareth, where he opened a small grocery store. Eventually this grew into a prosperous souvenir shop catering to Christian tourists, which Muhammad Ali still owns today. (The book includes several photos of this eccentric-looking establishment, which is decorated with a sign bearing a quotation from Keats: A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”)

Even this dry summary of Muhammad Ali’s story shows why it is such a painful one for a Jewish reader to encounter, and why Hoffman writes it with such missionary fervor. Here is a man whose life was grievously damaged by the Jewish state—who was expelled from his land, separated from his family, and subjected to discrimination and violence. Hoffman makes clear that Muhammad Ali has never wanted to be a “committed,” political poet—neither his innovative free-verse style nor his ironic humor are suitable for the kind of platform oratory that move large crowds. Yet inevitably, in speaking in his own voice of his own experience, Muhammad Ali is voicing the suffering of his Palestinian generation.

In his poem “The Fourth Qasida,” Muhammad Ali addresses Amira, the girl to whom he was betrothed in childhood, but whom he didn’t get to marry because she wound up on the wrong side of the Lebanese-Israeli border. In the process, he turns Amira into what Hoffman calls an archetypically literary stand-in for all of Saffuriyya and indeed for all that is ever lost to time, to death, and to separation”:

When our loved ones leave,
Amira,
as you left,
an endless migration in us begins
and a certain sense takes hold in us
that all of what is finest
in and around us,
except for the sadness,
is going away—
departing, not to return.

The fact that Taha Muhammad Ali is a gifted poet and a very appealing personality—Hoffman writes of his ability to charm Arab, Jewish, and American audiences alike—makes him easy for the reader to care about. But it does not make his fate inherently more significant than those of hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who suffered the same injuries. Here, in fact, lies the main trouble with Hoffman’s book: she is writing about one man, but she is really interested in what she calls, with polemical exaggeration, “the Palestinian century.”

Thus she devotes much of the first half of the book to recounting the Jewish-Arab clashes of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in Israel’s War of Independence. By focusing on Saffuriyya and its people, Hoffman makes the human costs of this conflict come to life, and she clearly means to confront American and Jewish readers with the facts of Palestinian suffering. But this Saffuriya-centric approach also allows Hoffman to neglect the larger history of the war and the period, and to portray Israel as the aggressor in what was in fact a war in defense of its very existence. Her retrospective indignation is not the best lens through which to view this complex history.

The more original and valuable parts of My Happiness deal with Palestinian literary culture. Hoffman shows how Palestinian writers dealt with obstacles from every side—they were cut off from foreign books and magazines by the Arab boycott, and subjected to censorship by the Israeli government—and how they evolved new institutions and forms in response. The poetry festivals of the 1950s and 1960s brought poets face to face with their audiences, thus making “poetry the most important means of political expression for the hemmed-in, cut-off Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The publications of the Israeli Communist Party, the only one to welcome Jews and Arabs equally, were another important venue for Palestinian writers. Hoffman shows how, despite these meager resources, poetry became central to Palestinian culture in a way that poets in America can hardly imagine.

It is a problem for Hoffman’s book, however, that Taha Muhammad Ali played little role in this story. An autodidact with just a few years of formal schooling, he spent many years teaching himself to write classical Arabic and exposing himself to modern literature from around the world. While his shop in Nazareth became known as a kind of open-door salon, and he befriended many Palestinian writers, he seems to have been shy about writing or publishing until he was in late middle age. When he read his work at a London festival of Arabic literature, in the late 1980s, another writer exclaimed, “How is it that we didn’t even know you existed?”

And while Hoffman knows the poet well—she refers to him as “Taha” throughout—and has conducted years of interviews with him and his acquaintances, he remains a rather abstract and guarded presence throughout My Happiness. Hoffman warns the reader of the poet’s tendency to embellish his stories—his formidable storytelling gifts tend to involve fanciful improvisation on more-or-less true themes”—but she is constrained by the political barriers and cultural differences between them from challenging Muhammad Ali’s self-presentation.

Indeed, she is clearly uncomfortable speaking critically about any aspect of Palestinian life. She writes sentimentally about the relationship between Taha and Amira, for instance, when it would make more sense for her, as a secular liberal, to question the sexist archaism of promising a girl to a husband at birth. But then Hoffman is not trying to be impartial, and she is not really writing a biography. She is, rather, confronting the almost unbearably difficult history that binds and divides Jews and Arabs in Israel; and she does this with a courage that the reader can only hope to emulate.

251      Assimilation is not hard,

252      And once the Faith’s askew

253      I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew.

254      I’ll read their Donne as mine,

255      And leopard in their spots

256      I’ll do what says their Coleridge,

257      Twist red hot pokers into knots.

258      The villainy they teach me I will execute

259      And it shall go hard with them

260      For I’ll better the instruction,

261      Having learned, so to speak, in their colleges.

Who was this young poet, making a bold stab at the “great men” of Anglo-American poetry, while slyly echoing Shylock’s most bitter lines? Louis Zukofsky was born in January 1904 in New York’s Lower East Side to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania six years earlier. He was the baby of the family—12 years separated him from his next older sibling—and the only one of his parents’ children to be born in America. His parents were already in their 40s when he was born, and Zukofsky, like many first-generation Americans, was growing up in a world vastly different from the one his parents knew. His mother died when he was in college, and his father toiled for years in low-paying jobs.  In a section from “A”, Zukofsky’s epic poem, he recalls his father’s hardscrabble existence:

The miracle of his first job

On the lower East Side:

Six years night watchman

In a men’s shop

Where by day he pressed pants

The elder Zukofsky was an observant Jew—“His own business,” Zukofsky wrote, “Is to keep Sabbath”—but as a young man Zukofsky was drawn to secular culture. As a boy he attended Yiddish theater productions of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Strindberg, and he knew passages from Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” by heart—in Yiddish translation. Though Yiddish was Zukofsky’s first language, he never wrote in it, and after learning English in grammar school, he dove into English literature, reading through all of Shakespeare, who was to become a lifelong passion. At 16, he entered Columbia University, immersing himself in literature and philosophy, and becoming part of a loose coterie of intellectually precocious students, some of whom Columbia English professor Mark Van Doren featured in a 1927 essay entitled “Jewish Students I Have Known.”

Just as calculus could provide an equation that quite literally defined motion, so too should the poem become a kind of equation that might capture something essential in the world.

By the time Harriet Monroe’s invitation arrived, Zukofsky had decided on his life’s course, but recognition and publication were slower in coming. With Pound’s encouragement, he wrote an introductory essay for the special issue of Poetry that sought to lay down some core principles of a new poetics. Like Pound, Zukofsky rejected metaphor and symbolism as ineffectual and outmoded forms of writing. “Writing occurs,” Zukofsky wrote, “which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” Metaphors provided false and misleading images—mirages. True poetry didn’t rely on superficial metaphor, just as it refused to follow artificial impositions such as regular meter or rhyme schemes. Instead, the poem sought to get at the core of an experience or of an object, to “think with the things as they exist.” Zukofsky’s ideas were inspired by the model of mathematics and science. Just as calculus could provide an equation that quite literally defined motion, so too should the poem become a kind of equation that might capture something essential in the world. The resulting “school” was called Objectivism, to suggest that poetry, like physics, might be an objective means of rendering the world.

Heady stuff, and, in fact, it didn’t go over well, perhaps because it was somewhat vague and obscure, or perhaps because, by 1930, people were impatient with literary manifestoes, or at least those that were not overtly political. The trend was toward more accessible, socially-engaged writing. Though Zukofsky had Marxist leanings, his work was too abstract and not political enough to please Marxist readers. Mike Gold, the author of the classic proletarian novel Jews Without Money and editor of the journal New Masses, invited Zukofsky to serve as poetry advisor to his journal, but Gold was promoting a poetry of engagement, while Zukofsky thought that the true Marxist poet had deeper aesthetic and intellectual commitments that might bring about a revolution in thinking and expression. Gold, Zukofsky wrote to Pound in 1936, is a “confused shit-head.”

Throughout the 1930s, Zukofsky was developing a reputation among a small group of poets, even if he wasn’t exactly having great success as a poet. There were fellow travelers in the short-lived Objectivist group, many of whom were Jewish, including Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. Zukofsky also met William Carlos Williams in 1928 and the two quickly developed a deep friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. Williams, by far the more famous and successful poet, had deep admiration for Zukofsky’s work and valued him as an editor of his own writing. In 1941, after reading the latest installment of “A,” Williams wrote to his friend: “Your poem is a beauty, you are fast becoming the most important and neglected poet of our time and place.” But the admiration of fellow avant-garde poets did not translate into regular publication. And then there was the business of making a living. Zukofsky spent an unhappy year teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1930, and then returned to New York, leaving academia for a series of jobs, mostly technical writing in industry. In 1933, he met Celia Thaew, and the two began a protracted courtship, waiting to marry until they reached some measure of financial stability. They finally did so in 1939, and their only child, Paul, was born in 1943. (Paul Zukofsky would go on to have a highly successful career as a concert violinist.) In 1947, Zukofsky left technical writing for a job teaching English at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where he remained until retiring in 1965 at the age of 61.

Zukofsky’s life was quiet on the outside, centered on writing, family, and work obligations. After World War II, his world shrank further. Ezra Pound’s increasing anti-Semitism, paranoia, and fascist sympathies created a rift between the two. The Marxist dream that Zukofsky, like so many, thought might be an answer to capitalist excesses, was discredited by the crimes of Stalin. Zukofsky continued on with his writing. He was a reserved, gracious, and formal man. In photographs he is often seen wearing a suit and tie on his thin frame. His round, dark glasses made him look a little bit like the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd.  But underneath this placid exterior, Zukofsky was passionately devoted to the epic poem—“A”—that he worked on for close to fifty years. As early as 1927 or 1928 he had sketched out a plan for the work. It was to have 24 sections, with certain themes repeating. The earliest sections—Zukofsky preferred to call them “movements” borrowing the term from classical music—were composed in 1928 and the last ones were written in 1974. The last “movement” is, in fact, a musical setting of some of his writings, composed by Celia Zukofsky, who was herself an accomplished musician.

It is impossible to sum up this varied, wildly ambitious, and experimental epic poem. Like Pound’s cantos, “A” references a wide range of subjects, including history, myth, economics, philosophy, and literature. The amount of erudition on display is daunting, and Zukofsky does not stop to explain or identify sources. Zukofsky thought of his work as a kind of modern music, the idea being that a poem is something one experiences, like a symphony, rather than an essay whose goal is to instruct. “I’ll tell you / About my poetics—” he writes in the 12th movement of “A”: “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.” The “integral” is from the same model of calculus that inspired his Objectivist poetics. Like music, poetry seeks to provide an aesthetic experience that is at once wholly other to the world, and also captures something essential about the world, translating experience into art.

To take but one example, Zukofsky liked inserting snippets of “translations” of other works into his poetry. But these are no ordinary translations. Instead, they seek to render the sounds of the original language into English characters, so that what we are seeing, or hearing, are really transliterations, or so-called “homophonic” translations. The result, in English, is of course nonsense, but Zukofsky, always attentive to the inherent magic of language and utterance, claimed that these kind of translations let a reader “breathe the ‘literal’ meaning” of a text. So we have in the 15th movement of “A” a bizarre string of lines that turn out to be “translations” from the Book of Job:

He neigh ha lie low h’who y’he gall mood

So roar cruel hire

Lo to achieve an eye leer rot off

Mass th’lo low o loam echo

This can be either maddening or exhilarating, depending on how a person chooses to approach what poetry is supposed to do or mean. But even as we prepare to dismiss it as utter nonsense, Zukofsky shifts ever so slightly, allowing something of the original “sense” to enter into the lines:

Wind: Yahweh at Iyyob

Mien His roar ‘Why yammer

Measly make short hates oh

By milling bleat doubt?

With an awareness of the story of Job, of Job’s suffering and his pleading with God to explain the reasons for his suffering, we can start to “hear” in this translation the suffering and confusion of Job, of his thwarted desire to crack the mystery of God’s ways. And in reading this aloud, we become Job ourselves, unknowingly speaking the words Job himself says.

More than any other poem in English, “A” seems deliberately to court an oscillation between resistance and revelation. This rejection of straightforward “meaning” thwarted many opportunities for publication, although Zukofsky did live to see most of his work published before he died in 1978. After his death, the literary critic Hugh Kenner published an appreciation in the New York Times Book Review, in which he predicted that “they will still be elucidating [him] in the twenty-second century.” The attention to the vagaries and mysteries of language, however, had made Zukofsky into a hero for a new generation of poets, the so-called Language poets who first came on the scene in the late 1970s. They, too, wanted to break through conventional syntax and language corrupted by politics and capitalism. For these poets, Zukofsky became a sort of bridge between their own radical aspirations and the innovations of Pound and Eliot—who, because of their reactionary politics, were not always easy models to revere.

In recent years, a mini-revival of Zukofsky seems to be taking place. Wesleyan University Press has published his prose writings in a series of volumes, and a number of academic studies have appeared, including a recent biography by Mark Scroggins. If Zukofsky remains a “difficult” poet, there is, throughout his work, a palpable sense of joy at the play of language, the way words bounce off and echo each other, resonating through time and space. And there is also an appreciation of love that pervades so much of his work. Zukofsky had a theory about how love functions in Shakespeare’s plays—the evidence is always before the eyes, but the mind plays tricks on understanding. True love was equivalent to clear-sightedness, to an attention to the beauty of the world and people around you. This sense of love comes through in many small poems, in “valentines” that Zukofsky wrote to Celia and friends. Not ordinary love poems, these short poems use punning language to reveal the “one” that can emerge from two. In “To My Valentines,” he writes:

From one to two

is one step up

and one and two

spell three

and we agree

three is a sum

a run

of two and one.

The joy of language, of the interplay between sound and sense, is everywhere in Zukofsky. It’s a music that takes some getting used to, but we are starting to hear it more clearly.

Jonathan Ivry is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He writes more about Louis Zukofsky in the June 2009 issue of Texas Studies in Literature & Language.

Pinsky was about to read “Ginza Samba,” a poem named for a little-known jazz number. “The tune is played by a Jewish-American saxophonist on the recording I have,” said Pinsky, referring to composer Stan Getz. He added that its title “reveals the beautiful hybrid nature of America, and of the saxophone: a European instrument that was made a black American instrument by geniuses who used it to play their music.”

Then, with the band playing a samba behind him, Nextbook author Pinsky—himself a Jewish-American saxophonist who once aspired to be a professional jazzman, and who found himself performing that night alongside a trio of African- and Indo-American jazz musicians—recited the piece, which neatly places both Getz (“this great-grandchild of the Jewish Manager of a Pushkin estate”) and Charlie Parker (“a great Hawk or Bird, with many followers”) in the same imaginary family tree, distant cousins related through European immigration, the African slave trade, and a 19th-century Russian poet. Seeing Pinsky do this live, I felt as if I were watching a man recite a poem and act it out at the same time. The whole tableau was as striking an illustration of the “hybrid nature of America” as the tune that inspired it.

Robert Pinsky

Jazz poetry itself offers a pretty good example of that hybridity. The phenomenon originated in the 1920s, when Langston Hughes began giving private recitations with musician friends in Harlem. Kenneth Rexroth, who claimed to have done something similar at around the same time, helped bring it into the public sphere in the 1950s. He and a handful of other poets, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, performed with musicians like Charles Mingus and David Amram in nightclubs and coffeehouses. (Both Rexroth and Ferlinghetti can be heard on the re-issued recording Poetry Readings in the Cellar.) The practice of pairing poetry with popular music never went away—Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets picked up the torch in the 1960s and ’70s, updating the sound with R&B and soul; and hip hop is really vernacular poetry dressed up with beats and samples—but the particular combination of poetry and jazz did.

That’s a pity. Jazz poetry often evokes images of self-consciously hip bohemians reciting bad rhymes in front of equally bad bands; more often than not, bongos are involved, and not in a good way. But as Rexroth pointed out in a series of articles 60 years ago (a prolific essayist, he also wrote about kabbalah and Hasidism), jazz and poetry can in fact complement each other nicely. They also share certain similarities.

Simic’s colloquial language, which the poet delivered casually, hand in pocket, was earthy and sly; the poems he chose to read—“Crepuscule with Nellie” (another poem named for a jazz tune, this one by Thelonious Monk), and “Mummy’s Curse” (an homage to the horror films Simic watched as a child)—often had punchlines, and might have passed for exquisitely crafted jokes if they weren’t so loaded with meaning and memory. In a way, they work on an audience in much the same way that jazz does: to those who know the music, its traditions and history, it is jam-packed with allusions, inside jokes, and wry, self-referential moments that can elicit smiles of recognition and even outright laughter.

Then there’s the issue of rhythm. Rexroth claimed that a good poet could swing as hard as any jazz vocalist. That’s certainly true in Pinsky’s case, though he did more than just swing. Bobbing in place as he read his lines, he displayed all the rhythmic finesse of a fine jazz instrumentalist, varying his accents, feinting to the left and right of the beat, sometimes delaying and sometimes anticipating an expected cadence. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Pinsky is a far better jazz saxophonist than he lets on. He clearly has a performer’s instincts, bounding onstage and declaiming his verse with an actor’s enunciation in an urgent, rhythmic voice.)

Pinsky read the same lines that he did at a similar event last year, but I’m willing to bet that a careful comparison would reveal all kinds of shifts in rhythm and phrasing. That, too, is something that jazz musicians do, altering the delivery of their favorite licks to keep them fresh. They also delight in quoting from standard tunes and from their peers, something Pinsky did while trading fours with pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Andrew Cyrille, reciting both his own couplets and some of his favorites by other poets (John Donne, J.V. Cunningham) and then listening to the musicians’ improvised responses. Both variation and quotation are part of the beautiful hybrid nature of jazz, an art form whose practitioners walk a fine line between improvisation and composition, invention, and imitation. Apparently, poets tread the same path. They ought to work together more often.

It is a paradox of Judaism, then, that a religion that honors such independent and active women should have evolved a code of law that sharply restricts women’s independence and activity. True, as Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton note in the introduction to their new edition of Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, the role of women in traditional Judaism is hardly peripheral: Since much of Jewish religious life, including the celebration of the holidays and Shabbat, was home centered, women were undoubtedly aware of the extent to which the continuation of Jewish life depended on them.”

Kashrut, the keeping of the Sabbath, the ritual purity laws concerning sex and menstruation—these were the major responsibilities of women under Mishnaic law. And some of the earliest documents in this rich anthology show how Jewish women turned these domestic duties into religious occasions. The genre of tkhines—Yiddish-language prayers, many written by women—makes an ordinary activity like baking challah an occasion for worship: “Lord of all the world, in your hand is all blessing. I come now to revere your holiness, and I pray you to bestow your blessing on the baked goods. Send an angel to guard the baking, so that all will be well baked, will rise nicely, and will not burn, to honor the holy Sabbath.”

Other tkhines were more abstract, such as a prayer written by the woman, the rabbi’s wife, Mistress Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah, daughter of the “brilliant and famous rabbi Yokel Segal Horowitz.” Appropriately enough, this writer invoked her namesakes: “Sarah, for whose sake You commanded and said, ‘Touch not my anointed ones’…Rachel, to whom You promised that by her merit, we, the children of Israel, would come out of exile.” The matriarchs, in these prayers, take on something like the role of Catholic saints, or even the Virgin Mary—benevolent intercessors with a stern God.

But until the 19th century, women were “exempted”—the rabbinic euphemism for “excluded”—from the more public and prestigious realms of Jewish observance: synagogue attendance and Talmud study. The now-notorious prayer in which Jewish men thank God for not making them women is meant to express gratitude for the greater obligations laid on men in Jewish law—the more mitzvot, the more chances to please God. By the 19th century, this segregation of women from the core of Jewish life took a definite toll, as the Sourcebook shows, perhaps despite itself. Umansky and Ashton mean to honor all expressions of women’s spirituality equally. But the poems and essays they gather from 19th-century Jewish women—mostly English speaking, mostly Reform Jews—have an anemic, abstract quality that betrays an increasingly remote connection with actual Judaism.

Take “Religion,” one of the hymns by Penina Moise, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina and published the first American Jewish hymnal in 1842:

“To smile when we on life’s breakers are tossed
And serenely its tempest survey;
To say, though the beacon of hope is lost:
Mercy’s star will direct our way;
Such trust in trial’s hour,
Springs from Religion’s pow’r.”

It is hard to see anything particularly Jewish about this; it is the kind of genteel Victorian stoicism that you could have heard in many a Protestant church at the same time. So, too, with the diary of Rachel Simon, whose husband Oswald was a leader of Britain’s Liberal Judaism movement. “My greatest wish,” Simon writes, “is to become perfectly religious; by this I do not refer to matters of form and ceremony, although the outward garb of religion must not be neglected. When I speak of religion I mean I constant inward sense of communion with God.” This is praiseworthy, but again, it nearly disclaims any connection with the substance of Jewish tradition—a tradition which Simon, as a woman, could hardly be expected to know.

The document in the Sourcebook that first announces Jewish women’s impatience with this state of affairs is a 1912 speech by Bertha Pappenheim, the pioneering German Jewish feminist. The Jew was bound by law to exclusively Jewish study in the Hebrew language,” Pappenheim notes, and this very training was the best school for sharpening the mind, and has rendered him, in every age, peculiarly receptive and responsive to other subjects of study. The women remained for the most part (less by law than by ancient custom) in total ignorance.. . . We have sufficient proof of the disregard of the woman in the Jewish service when we see that for purposes of prayer a woman is not counted as a member of the congregation; she is not called up to the reading of the Law, and she does not participate in the public ceremony of coming of age.”

Pappenheim herself was no traditionalist—in the same speech, she insists that Judaism “has and needs no outward forms and authorities to bind its members together.” Yet her insistence that women be admitted into the intellectual and legal heritage of Judaism would be responsible, in the 20th century, for an extraordinary renaissance of Jewish tradition. In the last section of the book, “Contemporary Voices,” covering the years 1988-2007, we see how women are remaking Judaism, not by whittling it down to a universalistic essence, but by engaging with the texts and practices that have always been at its core.

Thus Amy Eilberg, a rabbi in Minneapolis, writes in “The Gift of First Fruits” about how becoming a mother changed her understanding of the Torah’s injunction to dedicate the first-born child to God. She remembers davening for the first time after giving birth to her daughter: “That night, for the first time in my life, I encountered a feminine image of God, who rejoiced in the birth of my daughter and my own rebirth as a mother.” Eilberg turns to Psalm 8 to express her gratitude: “From the mouths of infants and sucklings you have founded strength on account of Your foes.” This is the kind of creative reading of scripture that is the very heart of Judaism. It is sobering to think that it was not until our own lifetimes that women could take part in it, and so help remake Judaism in their image.

In Jeremiah, Ohio, poet Adam Sol seeks to engage this legacy. Sol calls his book a novel and, although it is a bit thin on action, it is indeed a narrative. In it, Sol describes a road trip from Ohio to New York and back again taken by a reconceived, contemporary version of Jeremiah, the fierce prophet who, in the age of the later Jewish kings, preached against the dangers presented by the Babylonian empire. Sol’s Jeremiah is joined on the trip by an alienated ex-graduate student named Bruce, who—by serving as the addled Jeremiah’s companion, secretary, and guardian—embodies a version of the Baruch who was said to have recorded the biblical Jeremiah’s words. After passing through the malls, truck stops, and industrial waste of Pennsylvania, they end up in New York with Jeremiah in jail and Bruce reciting Jeremiah’s words at Ground Zero.

By casting his book as a story, Sol has worked to avoid the essentially tedious part of prophecy: its sheer repetitiveness. After all, the Book of Jeremiah is really a compendium of the prophet’s warnings and expressions of consolation. It covers the same ground in slightly different ways for 52 books. But because Bruce narrates the story-line, and Jeremiah provides the verbal fireworks, Bruce’s travelogue provides relief from the prophet’s exhortations. And by turning his prophet into a fictional character and embedding that character in a traveler’s tale, Sol can have his prophecy and disclaim it too. Jeremiah castigates and cajoles, not Sol. And, what’s more, Sol makes sure that we understand that Jeremiah is indeed out of his mind.

The storyline is maintained by Bruce, a matter-of-fact fellow who keeps things moving along:

I went out and bought a bag of carrots,
something good he could eat without his hands,
which were swollen, raw, and shiny with lymph.
I popped them in his mouth two at a time
while we worked our way back to the highway.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, is allowed to rant, but it turns out that in the early 21st century, prophecy doesn’t sound like it did in days of old. A contemporary poet just can’t get away with “the children of Noph and Tahpanhes will break your crown.” And so Sol retrofits his imagery and work his cadences: “Hear me while I call out my affliction/up in the smelly belly of this Greyhound Express.” Jeremiah goes on to offer up this peroration:

Therefore must we rake
our fingers across the vinyl seats, my friends,
and readjust the rearview mirrors.
Let us align
the tires and cancel our plans for the afternoon.

The mixture of biblical diction (“Hear me while I call out my affliction”) with the incongruously contemporary is intentionally odd, and has more than a touch of the hipster about it. It is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s classic “Supermarket in California,” in which the poet has a vision of Walt Whitman interrogating the stock-boys: “Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” Like Lord Buckley—another Beat hero who was famous for telling the story of Jesus in a jiving form of bohemian scat (“The Nazz never did nothin’ simple/When He laid it, He laid it.”)—Sol is not really kidding.

Sol’s Jeremiah might be crazy, but he is no fool. His sections of the book inveigh against the kind of mindless devastation that has produced our aging and ailing Rust Belt, against the loss of community, against consumerism. And it is hard to say that he is wrong. But perhaps he is too easily right. In spite of his verbal surprises, Sol’s Jeremiah’s tirades and injunctions are too friendly to the reader and too easy on the community. This Jeremiah does not attack the nation for its harlotry and its backsliding, but instead tries to cajole it. Biblical prophets reprimand us, remind us of the hard duties we are supposed to perform. What use is a prophet that most people would agree with? What fun is a prophet you actually like from the get-go?

All this does not mean that a poetry of community conscience is impossible, that it cannot arise, as so much of our poetry does, from the first person. It will just have to use the plural. It will not only talk about “I.” It will have to speak not about “you,” but about us.

The work of Joseph Lease , author of two well-received books, is a case in point. In his recent poem “America,” he reminds readers that “the sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of the widow and the orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor.” And he ends the poem like this:

We’re going back home to every vote
counts we’re changing the rules we’re
expecting disaster funding the nightmare
sure starve the poor try our new prayer try
our new blue Sunday try our new football
game turn off the shooting try our new
daydream and
try our

new rights

What is striking is the ambiguity here. Is Lease resorting to an indignant satire to attack us for the self-delusions that creep into our finer sentiments (“sure starve the poor”)? Or is he indeed saying that we can and perhaps will return to the better angels of our American Jewish natures? Perhaps we can actually make sure that every vote counts, that we can “turn off the shooting,” that we can actually change the rules and exert new/old rights.

Lease is doing both at the same time. He is both berating us and exhorting us while not claiming to be any different from us. By juxtaposing our Jewish ideals with our performance as Americans, he asserts that we can be a coherent community, one whose Judaism makes real demands on us as citizens and whose citizenship makes demands on us as Jews. “America” assails our blindness and our contradictions but it avoids the sweeping rhetorical gestures of prophecy.

This is probably just as well. Lacking the confidence of all assurances, we might just want to settle for such humility.

Off the Tunisian coast, the small island of Djerba is home to a tight-knit community of Kohanic Jews. Only about 1,000 remain, living among a Muslim population of about 100,000. For centuries, the two communities coexisted peacefully, but relations began to become strained in the mid-twentieth century. They reached a low in 2002, when terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda blew up a gas truck near the community’s synagogue, known as the Ghriba, or the Stranger.

A year later, Nomi Stone, just out of college, went to Djerba in the hope of getting to know the people who call the island home.

She kept copious notes on the friends she made there, on their unique religious customs, and on their changing attitudes toward each other and her. She later turned those thoughts into poetry. Nomi Stone spoke with Nextbook about The Stranger’s Notebook, her new collection of poetry chronicling her stay on Djerba.

Photo: El Ghriba Synagogue, Djerba, Tunisia
by andycarvin / Andy Carvin; some rights reserved.

Sarah is a poet who majored in creative writing at San Francisco State, then went on to get her MFA from the University of San Francisco. She recently completed her credential in early childhood education and works with autistic children. She’s also a human rights advocate, working with organizations devoted to such issues as AIDS in Africa and universal access to education. Sarah grew up in a typically lefty family in (as she calls it) “The People’s Republic of Berkeley.” When Sarah was in junior high her parents split up. Sarah says her father had always been “devoutly Marxist,” and her use of a word usually associated with faith is no accident. When Sarah was a teenager, her father had an epiphany, went through a conversion, and became a zealous Republican. Having observed her father and his radical swings, Sarah grew up to be wary of ideology and dogma.

And yet, when she was in her midthirties, Sarah herself went through a dramatic change. She found herself drawn to Judaism, and finally, inspired by a friend’s conversion, began attending Friday night services at a Reform synagogue in San Francisco. She discovered, though, that she wanted an experience that was more connected to the past, to tradition. She met the Conservative rabbi Alan Lew, who would become her mentor. Now, at forty-four, religious observance is at the center of her life. She moved to be within walking distance of the synagogue, and goes to morning and evening minyan throughout the week.

Sarah is a striking personage. She’s diminutive (shorter than my own five feet), clearly brilliant, and a little ferocious. Severely hearing impaired and suffering from arthritis in her hips, she fights against these impediments with intensity.

Postscript, March 10, 2008: Sarah died the day before this interview was posted. None of us knew until the day after. My conversation with Sarah had started with a discussion of how to deal with sudden, shocking loss spiritually and psychologically; I know that the people who knew and loved Sarah are working to do just that right now. I’m glad that some have used the comments section following the interview to talk about Sarah, and I hope that those who didn’t know her will read the words of those who did.

You and your aunt Barbara were very close. I’m wondering if your religious practice helped you in the aftermath of her death.

I think it did. I’m very comfortable with the fact that Judaism doesn’t have this highly developed idea of what happens after you die, like Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity. I pursued Judaism very much to find meaning, and I think at the heart of that pursuit is the fact that we all walk around with the knowledge that we’re going to die. After my aunt died I discussed it with my rabbi. He was talking about how there are some things that are gone—I’m not going to smell her or have back-and-forth conversations anymore. But he also said, “Pay attention to the ways in which your relationship continues.” Initially I think that the first part made much more sense to me than the second part. But as time went on, I did come to feel that she’s still with me in some way. I can feel her presence sometimes.

What do you understand the Jewish idea of the afterlife to be?

Some of the ideas contradict each other. There’s Olam habah, which means “the world to come.” This one is closest to the Christian idea of heaven, but I think the notion of heaven is a metaphor for communion with God, and hell is basically separation from God. Then there’s the idea that when the Messiah comes the dead will be resurrected. I say the prayer, “Blessed are you, God, you resurrect the dead,” every morning over my coffee. Gilgul hanefesh, the transmigration of souls, makes the most sense to me. It’s basically reincarnation. There is also a belief that the souls of the wicked are tormented by demons of their own creation, or are destroyed at death, ceasing to exist. I very much like the idea of the wicked being tormented by demons of their own creation.

You grew up in a pretty unreligious family and yet you were sent to Hebrew school. How did that come about?

My brother, Jonathan, became of bar mitzvah age. My grandfather was never a religious man, but as he was dying he got more religious—or he started to feel that it was important—and he wanted Jonathan to have a bar mitzvah. And my mom had been feeling like we were not going know what being Jewish was because we were living in Berkeley and not New York. So she sent us to Hebrew school. I got a kind of Judaism 101 out of it. But more than that, when I studied for my bat mitzvah, I got a sense of how Jews study text. I think that really stayed with me. I learned that we have stories about the stories. I learned that sometimes the stories interpret things in ways that are different from the texts themselves; it was like this ongoing conversation. I think that experience had a lot to do with why I started practicing Judaism later.

What do you mean by stories about stories?

Well, my bat mitzvah portion was about the Jews crossing the Sea of Reeds, and having this very celebratory kind of song—which in some ways is a little bit disturbing. They escaped and are about to go into the Promised Land, so it’s very joyous, but at the same time there are all these Egyptians that have died. And there’s a Talmudic story that is often told about how the angels started singing and celebrating with the Israelites and God got very angry with them. He said, you know, my people just died, you shouldn’t be celebrating. So the rabbis were disturbed by the same things that we might be disturbed by.

Do you think the understanding you gained about Judaism as a kid was an intellectual one or a religious one? Or maybe those aren’t separate things at all.

When I was a kid I had a very sort of intuitive connection with God, or whatever language you want to use. And as I got older, it’s not that I lost it, but my idea of what religion was became very overlaid with more fundamentalist ideas that didn’t resonate with me.

You mentioned that you pursued Judaism in order to find meaning. Were there questions that always haunted you?

How do we live an ethical life? How do we live a meaningful life?

Then how, in your search for meaning, did you wind up back with religion? For a lot of people, living ethically and being religious aren’t necessarily tied up with each other.

Judaism is really great for literature geeks because it is like living inside a metaphor. Like on Shabbat, you literally create this stillness before the lights go on, and you have this creation after the stillness. And on Pesach we live out the story of going from constriction to freedom. First, we do this compulsive cleaning, which puts us in a very narrow mind-set. Then we sit down to the Seder with our friends and family, and all this good food—and there’s this sense of liberation. Of course, the Seder itself is a reenactment of the Exodus story: we’re asked to tell the story as if we ourselves were brought out of Egypt.

I’d been living in the Mission [District, in San Francisco], writing poetry and reading it at open mics, really trying to find meaning through literature and sort of living the boho life. And I was writing a lot of letters for Amnesty International, specifically on the death penalty. I got very good at giving the secular explanation of why we shouldn’t have the death penalty. But I started to realize that what I really wanted to say is that it’s bad for the soul of the nation. And there’s no real traditional political language for that, the collective soul. At some point, I read this amazing sermon by Martin Luther King; he wrote it right after the Montgomery bus boycott. Basically he said don’t get on the bus full of braggadocio, because you still have to live with these people. And I kind of realized that that was the sort of political action that I wanted to be a part of. I wanted to recognize the dignity of living. I started exploring synagogues, and then I was very lucky to connect with a rabbi who had things to say that really resonated with me. This was seven or eight years ago.

Three years ago you went to Africa. What took you there?

During my aunt’s last years she lived with the knowledge that her life would probably be shortened. She took up pottery, traveled to Italy—just did all the things she’d always wanted to do, so I took that lesson from her. So now when I have an idea, like “I want to go to Africa,” I don’t put it off until “someday.”

There’s a group called Kulanu, and their mission is finding and supporting Jews in odd places. I went to Africa with American Jewish World Service, and Kulanu funded me. I had gone on shorter trips to El Salvador and India with the AJWS. In El Salvador, which was just a weeklong trip, we helped rebuild houses that had been destroyed in a hurricane. In India, we met with women who were doing amazing things like working on domestic violence and getting children off the silk looms. I knew I wanted to do a longer trip. AJWS has this kind of Peace Corps-like program, and I met someone who had been working with a group called the Abayudayah—which in the Luganda language means “the Jews.”

They’re in a little village outside Mbale in Uganda. They’ve been practicing Judaism since the 1920s. When Idi Amin was in power, they had to practice in secret, so they’re still in some sense rebuilding their community. It’s really inspiring to see, and it was wonderful to be part of it. Africans have this very highly developed sense of hospitality. They’re just really wonderful to be around. When I left, I told them that I hope that they come to America and help us develop hospitality and stronger families and community and vibrant religious life because they’re so rich in those things. I mean, their synagogue rocks. They’ve written African-flavored music to the traditional Jewish liturgy, and it’s awesome.

The ’20s seems fairly recent for a group of Africans to convert. How did that come about?

Initially Semei Kakungulu was the leader of the tribe. I think he was really annoyed with the Christian missionaries. The story is he holed himself up, and he read the Bible very carefully. And he said, “I don’t know about this Christian stuff, but these Israelites, they had the right idea.” So he came out and said, “We’re Jews,” and started practicing. It was kind of a biblical Judaism at first. Over time they met Jews from outside who sort of taught them more Rabbinic Judaism, so they now know what Hanukkah and Purim and things like that are. Recently some Conservative rabbis came and did a formal conversion ceremony. I think we’d actually call it a commitment ceremony because there was a little bit of discomfort with the idea that they had to convert—because they felt like they were born into the religion.

Have they met with any resistance from other Jews?

Yes, in parts of the Orthodox world. The liberal Jewish community has very much embraced them.

Did you find yourself having any resistance to them? Was there something that you think of as being Jewish that they didn’t possess?

It did make me question how much of what I consider Jewish culture is really Ashkenazi culture. A lot of the sort of clichéd things that we say about Jews are not necessarily true about these people. A lot of those cultural things we assume about Jews are really from a particular Eastern European kind of sensibility. I tend to assume that, you know, every Jew has this great library and that they’re voracious readers, but the Abayudayah are subsistence farmers, living a rural, village life. And there wasn’t the love of argument that you find among Jews here. There’s more of that veneer of African politeness.

It seems like you’ve found a religious structure for doing political work.

I think there’s a really fine line, and that a lot of what is going on now in our country around combining religion and politics is actually very dangerous. So it’s not about, you know, “God wants you to vote for the Green Party.” In my mind, it’s more about the way in which you fight the battle. Also at the heart of Judaism is Abraham’s vision of oneness, the idea that we’re all deeply connected. I think that is at the heart of things for those of us who pursue social justice. We feel that we’re not isolated, that what we do affects people across the globe. And as the world changes, that’s truer and truer.

When, in 2004, musician-composer John Zorn approached Dan Kaufman to write something for his Tzadik label, the two quickly discovered their shared admiration for the work of Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan. Three years later comes Force of Light, Kaufman’s eight-song homage to the poet.

Celan’s quiet, sometimes bleak poetry has been set to music before, but never like this; the pieces on Force of Light are played by Kaufman’s band, Barbez, which features the usual rock instruments along with lap steel guitar, clarinet, vibes, marimba, and theremin. On some tracks, poems (or poem fragments) are read by Scottish poet Fiona Templeton, but the compositions, which are mostly instrumental, stray far from any line-by-line interpretation.

Kaufman talks to Nextbook about Celan’s work and his take on it, and introduces a few of his favorite tracks.

Poet Dinah Berland discovered Hours of Devotion—a collection of prayers for Jewish women first published in Moravia in 1855—by accident. Wandering the aisles of a used bookstore in Los Angeles, she noticed a book with an unmarked spine, pulled it off the shelf, and began reading. She was immediately struck by the intimacy of the prayers, which were written by a woman named Fanny Neuda.

Berland went on to research Neuda’s life—she came from a family of rabbis, several of whom were pioneers of the Reform movement—and then to commission and edit a new translation of the prayers, which were originally written in German. Berland speaks with us about these tkhines (supplications) as the prayers are known, and reads one of her favorites, “On the Approach of Childbirth.”