A Big Jewish Blog

The Chicago / Zukofsky Connection

2008-05-27T12:48:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this and live in the Chicago area, there's a poetry event coming up this Sunday, June 1, that will be more than worth your time.

Poet / critic / blogger / biographer Mark Scroggins, whose "splendid" biography of the modernist poet Louis Zukofsky got a rave review from Michael Dirda in the Washington Post (and cudos from the New York Times, etc., etc.), will be speaking at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies on "Louis Zukofsky: The Modernist Poet as Jew."

I helped put this event together, and a good turnout will do a lot to help me bring more poetry events to this gorgeous new space. I hope that you'll be able to come--and, in addition, that you'll help me spread the word about the talk!

Here are the details:

Louis Zukofsky: The Modernist Poet as Jew
Mark Scroggins, author of "The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky"

Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies, 610 Michigan Ave.

Sunday, June 1 at 2 pm
Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members, and $10 for students.
Call 312.322.1773.

As the unbelieving child of immigrants, Louis Zukofsky (1904 – 1978) sought to study his way out of his father’s Lower East Side sweatshop and to write his way into Western literary history. He did so by placing himself among the "high modernist" poets, whose conception of culture was often covertly or explicitly anti-Semitic. Dr. Mark Scroggins’ new book explores Zukofsky’s growth into one of his century’s most fascinating and complex poets, growth paralleled by his navigation of poetry and Jewishness, and his discovery of Jewish-inflected modernist poetics, which continue to influence and inspire contemporary poets.

Mark Scroggins holds an MFA and PhD from Cornell University and teaches literature and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. A widely published author of poetry, essays and reviews, he has written on a broad range of writers, including extensive writing on poet Louis Zukofsky.

"terrific new biography"
—The New York Times

Harvey Shapiro on Poetryvlog

2008-05-18T12:33:00.002-05:00

The one and only Harvey Shapiro is the featured poet this week at Michael Mart's estimable video blog Poetryvlog. Check him out at http://www.poetryvlog.com/.

Jewish American Lit in the Sixties

2008-04-29T09:46:00.003-05:00

For the second year in a row, I'm going to be teaching a 3-week summer course at Hebrew Union College, mainly to rabbinical students. This time the topic is Jewish American Literature of the 1960s, with "the sixties" stretching a few years back into the fifties and on into the seventies. Here's my course description:

“The Sixties” in Jewish American Literature: Assimilation & Rebellion

The decade of the 1960s was a period in which Jews entered the mainstream of American society and contributed to American culture to an unprecedented extent. At the same time, Jewish Americans were also instrumental in the formation of the counter-culture which stood as a critique of mainstream American values. Torn between assimilation and rebellion, the generation of Jewish American writers which came of age during this period reflect their historical situation in a great range of literary genres and styles. This generation, largely the children of hard-working first and second generation Jews who anxiously sought to fit into American life, both acknowledge and reject the drama of their parents’ struggle for middle-class status and social acceptance. They seek to redefine their Jewishness in relation to the turmoil and promise of the sixties. This course will consider a variety of texts and authors of the sixties (give or take a few years), and attempt to situate them in terms of their Jewish identity and cultural impact. Authors will include Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan.

As you can see, it's going to be quite a mix. I'll be starting with Goodbye, Columbus and moving on to Ginsberg's Kaddish, including the various responses of other Jewish poets to that poem (most notably Allen Grossman's great review). The Malamud stories will probably include "The Angel Levine" and "Black Is My Favorite Color," for a consideration of Jewish / African-American relations during that period. Paley's feminist perspective is likewise crucial, and Dylan, well, it's a no-brainer, especially given "Highway 61" ("God said to Abraham / Kill me a son..."). Does anyone have any other suggestions? I'd really like to show a good film...

Spanked!

2008-04-21T20:29:00.002-05:00

I've been meaning to post something here about why I haven't been posting here, which would lead me into a whole long riff about Jewishness and middle age and eating BLTs during Pesach. To be honest, though, I've been preoccupied most recently with a different sort of ethnic issue.

A couple of weeks ago, you see, the Latino Poetry Review went live on line. In its inaugural issue, my big essay from Parnassus: "Gringo with a Baedeker, Cortez in Kevlar." Just go to the main page and click "essays"; you'll find it. After you do--or maybe before--click on "Letters to the Editor." There you'll find a long response by Javier Huerta, a poet and graduate student who was deeply offended by my dismissal (on aesthetic grounds) of the seminal Chicano poem I am Joaquin by Rudolfo "Corky" Gonzales. Huerta's letter began as a post to his blog, which you can find here, followed by 20+ comments. He's since posted another meditation sparked by the piece; more blog responses to the essay-review show up at the Blog of Many Names by C. S. Perez, and I've gathered them for you (the ones so far) here.

[PS: just found this, another blog response, considerably more pissed off. "Save your empty gestures," this poet says of my apologies. Sorry, Mr. Corral--still a few of those to go.]

Now, as you'll see in the comments on each of those posts, as well as in the Letters page and over at Romancing the Blog, I've responded several times to the controversy, each time with an apology. Huerta, you see, has me dead to rights: I did a lousy job writing about the Gonzales poem, failing not only to question my own first impressions of it, but also to be the sort of "chameleon critic" that I've always tried to be. (I have some quotes from him, and comments on them, over at Say Something Wonderful.)

What I can't help but wonder, though, is how much of this fracas might stem from my bringing a particularly Jewish (secular, resistant, sketpical) sensibility to bear on some of these poems. Is my hesitation before, and my impulse to scoff at, certain kinds of identity poems rooted in my embrace of a certain version of goyish aesthetics? Or does it blossom from a "Debate with the Rabbi" impulse that assumes all group identities to be problematic, ripe for unsettling or complication?

Reading white? Or reading Jewish?
Eccovi! Judge ye! I'm all ears.

Recovering 'Yiddishland' Now Available!

2008-03-18T09:53:00.000-05:00

I don't wish to be totally self-serving (considering I forgot how to access this blog & have just stumbled on it, right now!).... but I do want to let y'all know that my book is out from Syracuse University Press, and -- it is very pretty, if I do say so, myself.

"Recovering 'Yiddishland': Threshold Moments in American Literature" (2008).

If any of you have a chance to look at it, I'd love to hear your response.

Best to you all,

Merle Bachman

Finkelstein on Cross-Cultural Poetics

2008-02-02T09:20:00.000-06:00

FYI, my radio interview with Leonard Schwartz and reading from Passing Over is now up at Penn Sound here. Happy listening.

Burton Hatlen

2008-01-23T17:05:00.000-06:00

Burton Hatlen, Professor of English at the University of Maine, and director of the National Poetry Foundation, died on Monday, January 21st. Serious readers of the Objectivists and of modern American poetry in general are bound to be familiar with Burt's work. His essays on Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff remain fundamental to the field, and he edited a number of major critical collections. His criticism is remarkably wide-ranging: from Renaissance literature to Bram Stoker to Philip Pullman to his former student, Stephen King. He was a gracious and gentle man, immensely supportive of younger critics. I first got to know Burt when I was a grad student finishing my dissertation at Emory: having learned of my work on Oppen, he asked me to contribute to George Oppen: Man & Poet, which he was editing at the time. I was thrilled that such an accomplished scholar was giving me serious attention. According to his students, he was an extraordinary teacher too. As Robert Creeley would say, Burt was a true member of the company. An account of his life and career can be found here.

BIG JEWISH PETRY READING THURS JAN 31

2008-01-21T07:20:00.000-06:00

A BIG JEWISH POETRY READING coming up at the 92nd st Y in NYC Jan 31--the poets will be in NY for the annual AWP meeting.
They are (modesty aside) a brilliant group. Note the discount if you order with code ZEEK.

8:oo PM Thursday Jan 31

Praise, Grumble, Shmooze, Lament: The Voices of 21st Century Jewish Poetry
Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street
Cost: $26.00 / $12.00 with discount code "ZEEK"
Co-presented with Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. Hear some of today's most eloquent, provocative and meaningful Jewish poets. The program features readings by established and emerging poets, including Alicia Ostriker, Rodger Kamenetz, Robin Becker, Jacqueline Osherow, Dan Bellm, Patty Seyburn, Philip Terman, Scott Cairns, Jay Michaelson and Richard Chess. Reception follows. Get your tickets NOW at 92y.org or 212-415-5500.

A New Book by Henry Weinfield

2008-01-20T16:29:00.001-06:00

Henry Weinfield's Without Mythologies: New & Selected Poems & Translations has just been published by Dos Madres Press. Readers of this blog who are familiar with Henry's poetry, criticism and translations will understand the significance of this book. It contains work from 1967 to 2006, including most of The Sorrows of Eros (1999) and a generous gathering of earlier work, including poems from In the Sweetness of the New Time (1980) from the press I ran long ago, House of Keys. Henry is one of my oldest friends and it would be a bit redundant of me to sing his praises, but for those interested in my thoughts on his work, I wrote a substantial review of The Sorrows of Eros which appeared in Denver Quarterly 35.2 (Summer 2000). Henry's new work has turned increasingly toward contemporary political events, and as I have noted here, such pieces as "Praise and Lamentation" are some of the most important and provocative Jewish poems to come along in some time. As usual, Robert and Elizabeth Murphy of Dos Madres have produced a beautiful book, a perfect complement to Henry's inimitable lyricism. This book is a must.

Praise for Z in the NYT

2008-01-19T07:58:00.000-06:00

Charles asked about reviews of the new Zukofsky bio by Mark. There's a big one out tomorrow--already, on-line--in the New York Times Book Review, by Dan Chiasson. Here's a sample paragraph, from early in the piece:

“The Poem of a Life,” Mark Scroggins’s terrific new biography, never strays far from Zukofsky the poet. Though he treats all of Zukofsky’s writing respectfully, Scroggins, who teaches literature at Florida Atlantic University, keeps his focus on “A,” the first seven parts of which were published in 1932. Free of megalomania, touchingly invested in his wife’s work as a composer and in the care of his son, Paul, now a pre-eminent violinist (both of whom contributed, Celia substantially, to “A”), Zukofsky nevertheless uncompromisingly devoted himself to the composition of his enormous poem. His reputation rests today partly in the hands of the so-called Language poets, who find in Zukofsky’s brilliant subversions of syntax, word games and indeterminacy (his poem, after all, is called “A,” not “The”) an augury of their own methods. But “A” is not about anything as simple as “language” or “life”: it is a poem about working on “A” — about the daily elations and impediments of an artist who sought, over the course of decades, to make something really hard really good. Since it takes its own composition as the measure of living, it is a more personal poem, and often a more moving one, than either of its main models, Pound’s “Cantos” or William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson."

A lot to be talked about in the piece--we're at a third reception-moment for Zukofsky (a fourth, maybe? A new one, anyway), and it's quite fascinating to watch the terms of debate laid out here. (Ain't it good to know, for example, that language and life are "simple"?)

Still, hats off to Mark, to Zuk, and to Chiasson for his praise of them both!

Zukofsky reviews

2008-01-11T10:38:00.000-06:00

Two reviews of the Zukofsky selected --

Jewish Exponent (Robert Leiter)

Poetry Bay (Jack Foley)

I would be interested to know about any reviews of Mark Scroggin's biography.

Two By Harvey Shapiro

2007-12-19T10:14:00.000-06:00

Not much action here recently, other than YouTube videos. Tomorrow I head west for vacation; while I'm gone, here are two poems for you, both by the remarkable Harvey Shapiro.

The first I've been meaning to type in and blog about for, I don't know, a year or so; it's pretty mordant, even bleak, but the shifting tones and ideas in it are brilliantly modulated, I think. The second is on a facing page in The Sights Along the Harbor, and will leave a sweeter taste in your mouth, perhaps more appropriate to the season. (Although to be honest, my kids have had a blast this Hanukkah singing scraps of our family-composed, more-accurate translation of "Ma-Oz Tzur." "You prepare the slaughter / We'll supply the altar," or "We'll dust off the altar, / You supply the slaughter": which do you think? It's really quite a song, when you think about it.)

Anyway, more soon, when I get to sunnier climes!

The News

The Muslims in London are screaming,
Kill the filthy Jews.
I heard it on the BBC.
I agree, and call my brother
in Israel to give up the settlements.
Also, while he's at it,
what about the grandchildren?
Maybe the world is getting ready for another
big bonfire. You bring the marshmallows.
I'll bring the Jews.

The Generations

His son stood, holding and rocking the baby,
swaying back and forth, combined
with a little sideways shuffle,
which he had never done in shul,
since he never went to shul,
though his father had and his father had,
so the prayer that bound them all
was still being said.

At My Son's Request

2007-12-14T15:59:00.001-06:00

This, so he can find it easily.

Tip of the kipa to Jewschool, as so often. The lyrics, if you want to read along, go like this:

Oy Vey, the toevah [abomination] is here
He said Oy Vey
Now the detail’s so clear
YES brought HD
Groise Tate [Father in Heaven] please help
It’s a broch [curse] this HD on YES

Gevald it’s Sodom and Gemorah
HDTV- it’s against the Torah
HDTV- oy voi voi voi
Now the shiksas look well
You will all go to hell
Or in Hebrew “yishmor HaKel” (God save us)

Cause the HD is now on YES

Busy, Busy!

2007-11-28T11:54:00.000-06:00

I'm supposed to be catching up on things, but somehow the pace has never slowed down. I have fun books on my desk I haven't read yet, among them a New and Selected from Adam Schonbrun in Israel and a copy of our own Alicia Suskin Ostriker's For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book--and of course I've been meaning to blog about the U of Chicago conference and about Maeera's book... Oy, oy, oy, it's hard to be a Jewish Poetry blogger!

To give you all something to tide you over, here's a link to the review I wrote for Shofar of Michael Heller's wonderful collection of essays, Uncertain Poetries. It hasn't come out in print yet, evidently, but they've posted the full text to their website, so go read it there!

My kids like this--enjoy--

More soon,
E

Kafka

2007-11-20T13:38:00.000-06:00

Teaching The Metamorphosis tonight. Well, not teaching it, exactly: talking about it with adult readers at the Wilmette Public Library, where I am leading discussions for a "Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature" series sponsored by Nextbook. We're doing the Jewish Tales of the Supernatural sequence--they choose the books, I just talk about them!--and it's already been something of an education for me.

My favorite book in the series so far has been S. Y. Ansky's play The Dybbuk, which is utterly wonderful; two books from now we'll do another play, Kushner's Angels in America, which I've taught a half-dozen times and love more the more I read it. Singer's Satan in Goray? Bleak, but brilliant, or maybe brilliant but bleak. Next month: The Puttermesser Papers. I really didn't like that one. Really, really didn't like it. (What Ozick do I like? Not much comes to mind. Anyone out there able to make the pitch, close the deal? I have a month. Help me, somebody!)

Kafka? Meh. Not a writer I love. I'm too optimistic, too happy, too American (perhaps) to feel that way, although I did my best to love him at 16 and 17. (Never could pull off that broody, angsty thing.) Still, he's not a writer I actively dislike, either, and I am actually rather proud of the take-home questions we handed out last month to prepare for tonight.

I'm off to reread the text itself--not much of the criticism satisfies me just now, so let me pass those questions along and pat myself on the back for posting something today.

Here they are: steal at will!

1) Unlike the first two books in this series, Satan in Goray and The Dybbuk, Kafka’s Metamorphosis does not explicitly deal with Jewish characters or Jewish subjects. What might be gained or lost by reading the book as a Jewish novel? How does it seem different if we read it this way, rather than as a Modernist or Central European text?

2) Readers who approach The Metamorphosis as a Jewish book often refer to one or both of the following passages from Kafka’s letters:

“Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Jewishness behind them, and their fathers approved of this, but vaguely (this vagueness was what was so outrageous to them). But with their posterior legs they were still glued to their fathers' Jewishness and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground. The ensuing despair became their inspiration. . . . The product of their despair became their inspiration. . . . The product of their despair could not be German literature, though outwardly it seemed to be so. They existed among three impossibilities, which I just happen to call linguistic impossibilities. . . . These are: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might also add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing. . . . “

"The disgusting shame of perennially living under protection. Is it not self-evident that one should leave where one is hated so much? (Zionism or ethnic feeling is not even needed here.) The heroism of staying under these conditions is that of cockroaches in the bathroom one cannot get rid of.”

Do these passages help us understand Gregor Samsa’s transformation? If so, what meanings or implications might we find in the rest of the novel’s plot—especially in its ending?

3) Historian Gershom Scholem once wrote his friend Walter Benjamin that “I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which I regard as the sole subject of Kafka’s production.” Benjamin took a different view, and wrote that “the most essential point about Kafka is his humor…. I believe someone who tried to see the humorous side of Jewish theology would have the key to Kafka.” Do either of these suggestions help us read The Metamorphosis? Is there any way to understand the book as concerned with divine judgment? Is it theological in a particularly Jewish or humorous way?

4) The Metamorphosis begins with Gregor’s transformation, and ends with a focus on his sister Grete. How does Kafka’s portrayal of Grete compare with Singer’s and Ansky’s treatment of female characters in Satan in Goray and The Dybbuk? Why might the novel end with a focus on her, rather than on her brother?

Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America

2007-11-03T10:08:00.000-05:00

Not a whole lot of action on this blog recently, but I guess I can't complain: I've been as preoccupied with other matters as our other contributors. But as some of you may know, the University of Chicago is hosting a conference next week on Multilingual Jewish Literature and Multicultural America, organized by Jan Schwarz and none other than Our Founder, Eric Selinger. The keynoter is Werner Sollers; participants include Maeera Shreiber, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and yours truly. For details, go here.

And just for a little forshpaytz, here's a discussion of a poem by Harvey Shapiro--a bit of my "Ghosts of Yiddish in American Avant-Garde Poetry":

Consider, for instance, Harvey Shapiro’s poem “For the Yiddish Singers in the Lakewood Hotels of My Childhood”:

I don't want to be sheltered here.
I don't want to keep crawling back
To this page, saying to myself,
This is what I have.

I never wanted to make
Sentimental music in the Brill Building.
It's not the voice of Frank Sinatra
I hear.

To be a Jew in Manhattan
Doesn't have to be this.
These lights flung like farfel.
These golden girls.

This is a remarkable poem, not least because of the way it collapses, in a few lines, a great deal of Jewish American social history of the first half of the twentieth century. Affectively and thematically, it is a poem about cultural ambivalence. Shapiro makes it clear that he wants to resist sentimentality, despite the fact that the entire utterance is premised on nostalgia, which includes the Yiddish culture of his childhood.

Shapiro was born in 1924. During his childhood, Lakewood, New Jersey was a well-established Jewish winter resort. In the 1890s, when a leading gentile hotel had turned away the department store magnate Nathan Straus because he was Jewish, Straus “promptly built next to it a hotel, twice as large, for Jews only. In a few years other Lakewood hotels sold out to Jewish operators, and kosher establishments multiplied on all sides” (Higham 243). In the heymish Lakewood hotels, like those of the Catskills, one could still hear Old World Yiddish entertainers, along with more contemporary American popular music of the sort produced by Jewish American songwriters working out of the Brill Building, a Manhattan center of the music industry from the thirties through the sixties. Yet whether the “sentimental music” is sung in Yiddish by Jewish singers in Lakewood or in English by Frank Sinatra, crooning a hit written by Jewish American song smiths, Shapiro still feels trapped in memory, ironically “sheltered” by his past and continually “crawling back” to the page on which he inscribes his early history.

A proof text: in Portnoy’s Complaint, it is to a Lakewood hotel that the young Alex Portnoy is taken on a weekend vacation with his parents and their Gin Rummy club, and Alex is given a taste of nature and its poetry, walking with his hardworking, semi-literate, constipated father and breathing “Good winter piney air” (Roth 29). The phrase in Shapiro’s poem, “crawling back,” connotes both defeat and infantilization, a problem, of course, that haunts Portnoy as well. The poet asserts that “To be Jew in Manhattan / Doesn’t have to be this,” but everything in the poem indicates otherwise.

What, we must ask, is another way to be a Jew in Manhattan—and more specifically, an adult male Jew? The obvious answer has to do with the last line of the poem, not even a sentence but a descriptive assertion, a finger pointing at a new world of possibility: “These golden girls”: shiksa goddesses of the type Portnoy also perpetually pursues. Farewell, Lakewood and its Yiddish singers; welcome, the sexual conquests of the fully assimilated, cosmopolitan Manhattanite. But wait: it is the penultimate line on which the poem turns. Looking down on the city at night, dreaming of love, does the poet see the Great White Way? No, he sees “These lights flung like farfel.” Farfel? Farfel: “Yiddish, from Middle High German varveln; small pellet-shaped noodles, made of either flour mixed with egg or matzo. Farfel is most prevalent in Jewish cuisine, where it is a seasonal item used in Passover dishes.” Those golden girls, those city lights, shine, in the poet’s imagination, like Mama’s cooking on Pesach. This, then, is to be a Jew in Manhattan, haunted by the Yiddish language and the Yiddish past.

I'VE GOT A LITTLE LIST

2007-10-12T19:54:00.001-05:00

for library recovery--a little list of books of midrashic poetry:

MIDRASH (SELECTED POETRY & A LITTLE PROSE) BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Atwan and Laurence Wieder, eds., CHAPTERS INTO VERSE (English & American poetry--traditional and modern)
Enid Dame, LILITH AND HER DEMONS (poetry)
_________, STONE SHEKHINA (poetry)
Enid Dame, Lily Rivlin and Henny Wenkart, eds., WHICH LILITH? (poetry, fiction, essays)
Lorna Crozier, APOCRYPHA OF LIGHT
David Curzon, ed., MODERN POEMS ON THE BIBLE
____________, MIDRASHIM
Jill Alexander Essbaum, HEAVEN
Diana Hume George, A GENESIS (poetry)
Pamela White Hadas, IN LIGHT OF GENESIS (poetry)
Jill Hammer, SISTERS AT SINAI: NEW TALES OF BIBLICAL WOMEN (fiction)
Shulamit Hareven, THE MIRACLE HATER, THE PROPHET (fiction)
Naomi Hyman, ed., BIBLICAL WOMEN IN THE MIDRASH
Laurence Lerner, ed. CHAPTER AND VERSE
Alicia Ostriker, THE NAKEDNESS OF THE FATHERS
___________, “Jephtha’s Daughter,” in BRIDGES 8.1-2 (2000)
___________, “Lilith to Eve,” in FEMINIST REVISION AND THE BIBLE
Peter Pitzele, OUR FATHERS’ WELLS (midrash/bibliodrama)
Marie Ponsot, SPRINGING (Adam and Eve poems)
Lynn Powell, OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
Norma Rosen, BIBLICAL WOMEN UNBOUND; NEW COUNTER-TALES
Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, eds., VOICES WITHIN THE ARK (the best anthology of 20th c Jewish poetry--international--many midrashic poems included.)

Reading in Chicago

2007-10-10T07:48:00.000-05:00

Michael Heller & Norman Finkelstein

Powells North Reading Series

Powells North Bookstore
2850 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago IL

Thursday, October 18th, 7:00 PM

for more information, go to http://powellsnorth.blogspot.com/

October

2007-10-04T08:18:00.000-05:00

If it's October, it must be time for this, by our own Norman Finkelstein:

October

Who shall have rest and who shall go wandering . . .

At the sound of a horn he almost turns back,
more than once he almost turns back,
until his head whirls with the memorious leaves
and his hands grow calloused raking the yard,
piling up dissatisfactions,
considering handfuls of world, their sameness,
and the way they crumble as he clenches his fists.

Neither anger nor joy
but something akin to pleasure
moves him about, sets him on his path,
plays loving airs around him
and finally passes him on.

Why can't he be a fool
with a tame hare and a stool by the fire,
piping his little tunes?
Surely he gave his consent,
but he has no memory of the books arriving,
of years sheltered from the weather,
of studying all the codes.

There among the visitants
packed close between armchair and desk,
he honors the dead in small rituals,
puts out chocolate for them to savor,
sweetening the poverty of hell,
where costumes are not permitted
and all wear the same stuff of death.

He shuts and locks the door,
and the house disappears as he walks away.
It is another of his losses,
like the leaves falling, marking another year,
sealing another book.

How marvelous is that, eh? From Norman's latest, Passing Over. A book you ought to own.

P.S. An astute reader, Dan C--, spotted the source for that little riff about the fool. It's from Yeats:

Two Songs Of A Fool
I

A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.

I start out of my sleep to think
Some day I may forget
Their food and drink;
Or, the house door left unshut,
The hare may run till it's found
The horn's sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering-witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

II

I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire.
The speckled cat slept on my knee;
We never thought to enquire
Where the brown hare might be,
And whether the door were shut.
Who knows how she drank the wind
Stretched up on two legs from the mat,
Before she had settled her mind
To drum with her heel and to leap?
Had I but awakened from sleep
And called her name, she had heard.
It may be, and had not stirred,
That now, it may be, has found
The horn's sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

Norman, feel free to edit or add to this!

Sui Genius

2007-09-26T08:04:00.000-05:00

This Just In: Peter Cole Wins MacArthur "Genius" Grant

Very good start to year! Peter Cole, whom we've mentioned here many a time before, has won a MacArthur. Evidently he got the call just before the Hi-Hos. Gives a whole new meaning to that Leonard Cohen line: "and who / shall I say / is calling?"

Here's the official announcement off the MacArthur website:

Peter Cole is a translator, publisher, and poet who brings the often overlooked works of medieval Spain and the modern Middle East to English-speaking audiences. His highly regarded translations of the poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Shmuel HaNagid, two of the great Hebrew poets of the Andalusian “Golden Age,” offer readers a lyrical illustration of the extraordinary Arab-Jewish cultural partnership that flourished in tenth- through twelfth-century Spain. A poet himself, Cole’s translations infuse medieval verse with contemporary meaning while remaining faithful to the original text. His renderings of HaNagid’s poems in particular, long regarded as “untranslatable,” retain the subtleties, complexities, and formal elegance of the original verse. Underlying Cole’s translations is an implicit message of cultural and historical cross-fertilization that is also evident in his work as a poet and a publisher. His Ibis Editions publishes little-known works translated from Arabic, Hebrew, German, French, and Ladino, enlightening English-speaking audiences to the thriving literary tradition of the Levant. By fostering literary dialogue in and about the Middle East, Ibis provides an occasion for intellectual and cultural collaboration. In a region mired in conflict, Cole’s dedication to the literature of the Levant offers a unique and inspiring vision of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among the peoples of the Middle East.

In your honor, Peter, this--if only because it started running through my head the minute I heard the news. Hats off!

After the Flood

2007-09-25T09:47:00.001-05:00

My Jewish home base, the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, has been in temporary digs for about a year now, while our new building gets built. Our library was boxed up and put into storage--and, sadly, during the storms that marked this summer here in Chicago, most of the library was destroyed. (Who by water? Now we know.)

Our librarian has asked me to give her a wish list for the poetry section, and for the library more generally: anthologies, single author texts, works of criticism, you name it. I'm passing the question along to you, my colleagues and friends. In the best of all possible worlds, what should we buy? In this world, what should our priorities be?

I'll post my own list as I draw it up--but I'm eager to see what your lists would look like, so send them along, one by one, two by two, or by the dozens!

To thank you (in advance), this, by the Idan Raichel Project:

Out of the depths...

More announcements

2007-09-19T16:39:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of Eric's announcement of Maeera's book (which I'll be reviewing for American Literature), folks might be interested in a couple of other new items. The first is perhaps not news to most people here, but just in case: Jerry Rothenberg's Triptych, just out from New Directions, with brief intro by Charles Bernstein and brief postface by Jerry. The book reissues Poland/1931 and Khurbn, and juxtaposes them with a new serial poem, "The Burning Babe." The second item is a scholarly article that perhaps fewer of us are likely to run across: Eric Hoffman, "A Poetry of Action: George Oppen and Communism," American Communist History 6.1 (2007): 1-28. The second half of the title pretty much tells you what it's about; among other things, it makes extensive use of previously unavailable FBI files.

Maeera's Book (at Last!)

2007-08-19T10:07:00.001-05:00

I can't (won't) tell you how long I've been waiting to make this announcement:

Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics, by our own Maeera Shreiber, is now available from Stanford University Press.

Here's the official description:

This book begins with a silence. While Jewish American fiction has long been recognized as a fit subject for critical inquiry, Jewish American poetry has largely been overlooked. Recently, a few books have started to redress this silence, focusing on some specific Jewish American poets. However, even as these studies begin to identify specific individuals as “Jewish American poets,” the field must be theorized so that we might understand this fascinating occlusion. Poetic forms need to be identified; and the material difference of Jewish cultural practice must be taken into account.

Taking a broad view of the subject, Singing in a Strange Land asks: How does being Jewish-in-America affect poetic production? And how does poetry help shape Jewish American identity? Beginning with a historical inquiry into the status of Jewish poetry as a marginalized kind of writing, and moving on to detailed analyses of poets including Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Louis Zukofsky, Louise Glück, George Oppen, and Allen Grossman, Singing in a Strange Land helps us think about the ways in which displacement, exile, mourning, gender, and prayer contribute to the shaping of the Jewish American imagination and its poetic production.

We have only a handful of books on Jewish American poetry, and Maeera's bids fair to be essential reading. Let's all get copies and get talking about it here, shall we?

But Seriously, Folks...

2007-08-17T08:34:00.000-05:00

--about what Alecia calls "living in the blur," the space between "secular" and "religious":

1) It seems to me that these terms, both Latinate, both based on Christian norms, fail to get at something essential in Jewish, or at least Jewish American, identity. I don't have a copy handy of Daniel Boyarin's brilliant Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity, but his argument that our very notion of "religion" as a category was invented as part of the invention of Christianity in late antiquity struck me as well-founded and convincing. So did his even more intriguing case that this idea ("religion" as a category) was entertained but finally rejected by the men who created and eventually imposed rabbinic Judaism as a norm.

2) As a result, the identity documents we Jews have in our pockets ("your papers, please!") are a palimpsest of conflicting and competing terminology. This means, at least to say for us as 21st century American Jews, that they contain a palimpsest of options. Some are "religious," some national, some ethnic, some cultural; some are imposed from outside ("are you a member of The Jewish Faith?"; "how does it feel to be a Question?"; "must you mow your lawn on Shabbos?"), others from within, and others not imposed at all. "Secular observant Jew" is an entirely possible category. Arguments within the self are, therefore, commonplace.

3) Without speaking for anyone else, I'll testify that my own place on a "religious / secular" continuum has shifted many times. On reflection, I'd have to say that this motion has never, never been the result of reason, argument, or anything a Christian would call "faith" or "belief" or the loss thereof. It's all about mood, social context, family dynamics, the vagaries of my literary, professional, or sexual life. (Among the varieties of religious experience, James forgot to mention summer camp kisses--but at 14, they were Sinai, Horeb, a still, small voice all in one. I got your column of fire, baby, right here! "Arise my love, my fair one, and come away": all the rest is commentary. Go and study it.)

4) I live, now, in a neighborhood filled with "religious"--which is to say, shomer shabbos, Jews. I live on the fringes of that world, and must always do so: intermarriage will do that to you, as I've learned. Were I to learn enough Hebrew to chat with my thoroughly secular Israeli neighbors in the schoolyard, or enough Yiddish to chat with the ghosts of their grandparents, or enough Russian to chat with the architect-turned-custodian at my synagogue, I could see their religion and raise them a language. Maybe some day I'll do that, if the mood strikes--or maybe I'll start going to shul with my kids every week. None of that will make me be more or less Jewish, more or less a Jew; it would be about action, rather than ontology.

5) A proposition: The real divide today isn't between "religious" and "secular" Jews, but between ardent, ambivalent, and anti-Zionist Jews. That's where the rubber bullet hits the road. Case in point: the "conservative / reconstructionist" synagogue a couple of blocks from me, the one I could walk to, if I chose, has as the final topic in its conversion-class syllabus a history of the State of Israel. "Palestinians: No 'Right' of Return," one bullet point reads. My own politics are ill-informed and amateurish, but I'm struck here that this is one of the few "articles of faith" in the whole course. No shrimp, no Jesus, no Right of Return, and we don't really care about the shrimp.

6. In no particular order (from Siddur Kol Hevel):

“When he, too, who abhors the name, and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.”
--Martin Buber, I and Thou

"The human mind has all sorts of tricks of consciousness beside rationality, one of which is to address a projected part of the self or the universe as you, and both the 'simple' and the sophisticated take it as seriously as they need to on any given occasion." --Catherine Madsen, The Bones Reassemble

"All deities reside in the human breast."

--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

For liturgy, God is always a moving target: we pray to him and get equivocal answers, or none; we ask to see his glory and are shown only his back. Any assertion we make of God's grace and mercy is at once undercut by the contingency of our daily experience. Any assumption we make of God's indifference or hostility is eclipsed by the appearance of mercy and grace in our lives. The declaration from the burning bush, ehyeh asher ehyeh ("I will be what I will be"), is a promise and a threat in equal measure, and hints at the simultaneous presence and absence of God at the other end of our prayers. Yet whether God is present or absent is not a final or even an answerable question, only a sort of spiritual brain-teaser by which our minds stay alert. With or without God, what is unequivocally present is the human other in need. --Catherine Madsen, The Bones Reassemble.

O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du:

O one, o none, o no one, o you:

--Paul Celan, from “There Was Earth Inside Them” (Es war Erde in ihnen)

7) My own creed? Ani ma'amin b'emunah sh'leyma b'viat hamashgiach. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Kashrut inspector. Someone always shows up to check your work, stamp your papers, keep a watchful eye. But until then, as my son says: "Get your treif on!"

Der Judenfrage

2007-08-15T07:13:00.000-05:00

Who is a Jew?

--No, Who's on first.

What is a Jew?

--Gesundheit!

How is a Jew?

--Fine, thanks! How are you?

Where is a Jew?

--Skokie, evidently.

Why is a Jew? Why, oh why, oh why?

--Because, because, because, because. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

(Or, as we used to say in the '70s, "Jew is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.")