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.

Paul McCartney, who might be a genius but definitely isn’t really a genius-genius, claimed that the song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Handel, who was a genius-genius, said the last movement of his Messiah arrived in the form of a dream, and Wagner, also a genius-genius, dreamt the opera Tristan and Isolde. Robert Louis Stevenson (genius), Poe (crazy genius), Charlotte Brontë (genius), and D.H. Lawrence (genius-genius) all claimed that dreams fueled the inspiration for their work. Goethe (genius-genius) said he was guided by his dreams, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge—the story goes that he dreamt the poem “Kubla Khan,” sat up to write it down, and was interrupted by a knock on the door. When he attempted to finish transcribing it, it was gone. The poem remained unfinished.

Two years ago, roughly speaking, I had a dream.

I was at a book festival—somewhere impressive, like Paris or The New Yorker Festival—in this dream, and I was seated behind a long table, signing my books. I recognized the covers of my previous books, which were stacked on the table in front of me, but there was a book propped up whose cover I couldn’t see—it was my next book, the one I hadn’t written yet. It was thick and black, and it looked very serious. Eight hundred pages, at least—it had to be good. A pound and a half of genius. Maybe two.

It was quite a lucid dream, the type of dream where you are aware you are dreaming, and the Actual Me watching Dream Me wondered, desperately, “What is the title? What is the title?” I had been struggling with my work at the time, uncertain what to do or which way to go. At last a man approached the table, and he picked up the book—“Is this your most recent book?” he asked; “Yes, yes,” I said, reaching for it—and he handed it to me, and I took hold of the book and turned it over and there it was: the title.

The title of my next book.

It was a good one.

A really good one.

Actual Me forced myself to awake, fumbled in the dark for a pen and piece of paper, and hurriedly scribbled it down.

It was great.

It was genius.

It had to be.

I fell back on my pillow, a smile on my face, and drifted off into a deep, genius sleep.

I have now wasted, roughly speaking, two fucking years on that stupid dream. Twenty-four months of my miserable life, gone.

Why we have this need to make writing somehow mystical, spiritual, beyond our understanding is more interesting to me than why the dream title never worked. We are all, I suppose, like the biblical Pharaoh, dreaming of seven cows and seven ears of corn and insisting there must be something to it.

“It was a prophecy,” said Joseph.

“Of course it was!” said Pharaoh.

Maybe.

Or maybe it was just the chimichangas Pharaoh scarfed down before bed.

It’s interesting to me, too, that the book in my dream was a thick one. I suspect the two details are related. Writing is lonely, difficult, uncertain work. There’s a lot of sitting involved, hours and days filled with failure, punctuated by occasional moments of masturbation, and even less occasional moments of success. Nobody who has done it can honestly say how they did it, which is why the next book is never any easier than the last. So, lost at sea, we look for land. For markings. Something we can judge it by. Size is a good one. If it’s 800 pages, it must be good. If it’s a thousand, it’s even better—a whole quarter better than the 800-page book, so there. Somehow, though, Voltaire (genius-genius) fit everything there is to know about life and love and the world into Candide, and that barely breaks 200 pages. (A well-known American lit crit once declared that Candide couldn’t be considered a great book because it wasn’t long enough; perhaps a link here to penis pumps would be appropriate.)

Time is another common marker. Eight years seems to be the standard genius claim these days. I can’t remember the last book that didn’t take eight years for the author to write. Some say they worked for 10 years, some say more. You have to be careful, though—if you claim you worked on it for too long, you go right over the genius cliff into weirdo/obsessive/failure territory.

Inspiration is the other marker. God. Visions. Prophecy. It doesn’t really matter what the idea is; if it came in a dream, it’s a pretty damn good one. It might even be genius.

Or it might just be chimichangas.

The book I’m working on now didn’t come to me in a dream. It came to me at my desk, while typing on a laptop computer. “Well,” you might say, “that doesn’t sound very genius to me.” That’s because you don’t know two things I do: it’s going to be 4,000 pages, and I’m telling everyone it took me 11 years. No, 12. No, wait—11.

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.

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.