tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129751822024-03-07T18:54:37.869-06:00A Big Jewish BlogNotes on Jewish Poets, Poems, Poetics, and PrayersE. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.comBlogger234125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-17774143767810213562013-04-26T09:00:00.001-05:002013-04-26T09:00:14.577-05:00Arthur Green Coming to Town<br />
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PLEASE JOIN US FOR A TREAT FOR THE MIND AND THE SPIRIT!</div>
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Come learn with an extraordinary teacher (on a rare visit to Chicago),</div>
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Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green</div>
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Sunday, May 5, 2013, 7:30 p.m.</div>
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“Re-Reading Revelation: A New Approach For Shavuot”</div>
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At Ezra Habonim, the Niles Township Jewish Congregation<br />
4500 Dempster Street, Skokie, IL 60076<br />
(http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Skokie&state=IL&address=4500+Dempster+St)<br />
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Dr. Arthur Green is the Rector of the Rabbinical School of and Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Hebrew College. He is Professor Emeritus at Brandeis University, where he occupied the distinguished Philip W. Lown Professorship of Jewish Thought. He is both a historian of Jewish religion and a theologian; his work seeks to form a bridge between these two distinct fields of endeavor. <br />
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Educated at Brandeis and at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he received rabbinic ordination, Dr. Green studied with such important teachers as Alexander Altmann, Nahum N. Glatzer, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory. He has taught Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, and theology to several generations of students at the University of Pennsylvania, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (where he served as both Dean and President), Brandeis, and now at Hebrew College. He has taught and lectured widely throughout the Jewish community of North America as well as in Israel, where he visits frequently. He was the founder of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1968 and remains a leading independent figure in the Jewish renewal movement. He was the founding Dean of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School.<br />
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Dr. Green is the author of over a dozen books. Best-known among his scholarly works are <i>Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav</i> and <i>Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism</i>. <i>In Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology</i> and <i>EHYEH: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow</i> he turns to the mystical tradition as a key source for a religious language that will speak to the many spiritual seekers in our generation. Dr. Green is also well known for his translations and interpretations of Hasidic teachings, including <i>The Language of Truth: Teachings from the Sefat Emet</i> by Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger. One of his best-known works is <i>Radical Judaism: Re-thinking God and Tradition</i>, published by Yale University Press in 2010. His most recent book is <i>Hasidism for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin</i> (Paulist Press, 2012).<br />
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No charge. Refreshments will be served.<br />
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R.s.v.p. to dan "at" kaplancenter dot org<br />
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Presented by The Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood<br />
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E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-39104203224532229752012-11-30T10:09:00.000-06:002012-11-30T10:09:01.197-06:00'Tis the Season...<div style="text-align: right;">
--Eric Selinger</div>
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Well, technically it's not Purim yet, but I'm busy writing songs for the festivities, and yesterday's vote at the UN calls for one, surely. Hit it, Buddy!<br />
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<i>I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be:</i><br />
<i>You’re gonna dig my dignity.</i><br />
<i>Everything will be really great!</i><br />
<i>I’m a Non-Member Observer state.</i><br />
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<i>Chances slimmer than a cigarette.</i><br />
<i>Don’t really have any borders yet.</i><br />
<i>Not much room to negotiate.</i><br />
<i>But soon I’ll issue a license plate</i><br />
<i>That says “Non-Member Observer State.”</i><br />
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<i>Settlers rooted deep as palms.</i><br />
<i>Gaza’s popping with Qassams.</i><br />
<i>Tonight we’ll party like it’s ’48,</i><br />
<i>In a Non-Member Observer State,</i><br />
<i>In a Non-Member Observer State.</i><br />
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E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-14858721454226672032012-07-27T09:45:00.003-05:002012-07-27T09:45:59.370-05:00Jews in SolitudeWoke up this morning with a line from Adrienne Rich in my head: "What is a Jew in solitude?"<br />
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That's the opening line of her wonderful poem "<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240472" target="_blank">Yom Kippur, 1984</a>." Haven't read it in years, but it haunts me. To borrow a phrase from Molly Peacock, it's one of my <i>talisman poems</i>, although I hadn't really realized that until now.<br />
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I'm feeling "in solitude" now for any number of reasons, but they're personal, which means I'll write about them (if I do) over at <a href="http://intherainblog.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">In the Rain</a>. Poetically speaking, what interests me here is the coincidence that followed an hour or two after breakfast.<br />
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Still thinking of Rich, I opened a package from the poet Benjamin Hollander: a padded envelope containing two of his books, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vigilance-Benjamin-Hollander/dp/1892184176/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343399900&sr=1-1&keywords=vigilance" target="_blank"><i>Vigilance</i> </a>and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rituals-Truce-Israeli-Benjamin-Hollander/dp/0963932179" target="_blank">Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli</a></i>. (I've never read him, but he contacted me out of the blue, and seems like an interesting guy.) Opened the latter, and what did I read? This, from Edmund Jabes:<br />
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<i>I only know that, due to circumstance, solitude has become the profound destiny of the Jew. The State of Israel not only doesn't break that solitude, it often aggravates it</i>. <span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
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--<i>From the Desert to the Book </i>(tr. Pierre Joris)</blockquote>
Don't know much about "destiny," don't know much theology, don't know much about a holy book, don't know much about the Hebrew I took, but that last sentence? <br />
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It's the <i>emess. </i>True dat, as they say.<br />
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Back to my Fortress of Solitude, folks. More on the books as I read 'em.E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-47724747510977104542012-07-18T17:59:00.003-05:002012-07-18T17:59:46.362-05:00A Big Jewish RebootLike most blogs, the Big Jewish Blog had a life-cycle. It started strong, it petered out, it got some new blood from new contributors, it petered out again, and for the last year or so, it's been more or less sincerely dead, as the Munchkins say. <br />
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This year, I'm giving it either a Big Jewish Reboot, or just a Big Jewish Boot. We'll see.</div>
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I've written the "various hands" that I brought on board a few years back, and asked who wanted to continue contributing on a more or less regular basis, and I quietly culled the names of folks who haven't contributed in several years. I'll continue to prune and add voices, and see what mix seems to work here, to <i>get the job done</i>, whatever that "job" may be.</div>
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(If I took you out, and you want back in, let me know.)<br />
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I'll be going through the links to your right and testing them to see what's still live and what's gone, daddy, gone. Might even add some more, if the mood hits. <br />
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(If the mood hits, bear it.)</div>
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The other thing I've done, after much hemming and hawing--I do that a lot; it gets noisy 'round here--is start up yet <i>another</i> blog for my various religious misadventures: the Alte Rockers Purim spiels, the angsty posts about synagogue membership, etc., the sermons and musings and so forth. <br />
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That blog is called "<a href="http://intherainblog.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">In the Rain</a>," after a Stanley Moss poem I quite like. If you want to see what I'm up to on that front, take a look.</div>
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My hope is that by separating the more personal Jewish (and non-Jewish) me into its own separate blog I'll be able to take a more curious, agile attitude towards the poems, poets, and poetics issues that will make up the Big Jewish Blog. ("Poesis, not religion," as Rothenberg says in <i>Exiled in the Word</i>.) <br />
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If that doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen--now that I have my Promotion to Full (trumpet fanfare, please), what goes on here in the blogosphere is pretty well meaningless, professionally speaking, so I won't worry one way or the other.</div>
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The one question I have--and it's an open one, for now--is whether to turn off the comments here entirely, rather than leaving them on and moderating. The comments you get on a Big Jewish Blog can be awfully upsetting, even when I delete or reject them: political hate, religious venom, trolling of various kinds. <br />
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I just don't want that in my head, and I'm not sure that the potential for conversation here is worth the cost. <br />
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For now, I think I'd rather have the comments and conversations over at Facebook and Twitter and so forth than here. If you don't like that idea, find me and let me know. We'll see what we can do.<br />
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Wish me luck, and welcome back A Big Jewish Blog.</div>E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-43643493993512499072011-10-31T09:52:00.000-05:002011-10-31T09:52:26.983-05:00Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg's Work – Forward.com<a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/144598/#.Tq62CSCK578.blogger">Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg's Work – Forward.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-78385065391138817372011-10-02T17:14:00.001-05:002011-10-02T17:16:03.848-05:00Tikkun review of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture<a href="https://jacket2.org/commentary/tikkun-review-radical-poetics-and-secular-jewish-culture">Emily Warn's review from Summer issue of Tikkun</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-9854069852436276972011-08-24T09:29:00.003-05:002011-08-24T13:39:52.686-05:00Should I Stay or Should I Go?Every year about this time, I stare at my synagogue dues sheet and wonder: <span style="font-style: italic;">should I stay or should I go<span style="font-style: italic;">?</span></span>
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<br />On the "stay" side, I love the house bands I perform in: the house klezmer ensemble, Heavy Shtetl, and the house Purim parody band, the Alte Rockers. I love my cantor, who is the sweetest man imaginable, and I love my rabbi, whose position on the board of Jewish Voice for Peace makes me immensely proud.
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<br />If I leave, it might give aid and comfort to those at the congregation who oppose his political work, and I don't want that on my conscience.
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<br />On the "go"? Well, I'm not exactly drawn to the the weekly services: neither the bar / bat mitzvah oriented service in the main sanctuary nor the weekly minyan downstairs. Aesthetically, they can't compete with the masses at my wife's church, where people actually sing out with gusto and soul. And in order to make it to shul in time for either, I'd have to miss my Saturday Zumba class, where people dance with gusto and soul. Not going to happen, my friend.
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<br />(Of course, I could go to shul after I dance, but then I'd get there just in time for the Torah service--and frankly, the older I get, the less patience I have with the celebration and cerebration that surround that particular text. The earlier part of the service speaks to me; the Torah, not so much.)
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<br />So, what are my options? Find another shul, or a havurah? I have plenty of options, at least on a map--but realistically, between theology and politics and aesthetics, I don't know of any, and there's the whole "aid and comfort" thing. Go back to being a free-range (i.e., "unaffiliated") Jew? I'd feel awkward playing and singing at the shul after I'd left it, and those bands--and the friends I have in them--mean a lot to me. Join some other faith community? Believe me, I've thought of it. But what would be a better fit? And the other problems crop up here, too.
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<br />Cue The Clash. Sigh.
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<br />E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-83552948832247948442011-05-10T09:15:00.004-05:002011-05-10T09:38:02.887-05:00Shapiro, Moss, Heller, and MeThe latest issue of <a href="http://www.parnassuspoetry.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Parnassus: Poetry in Review</span></a> is out--and, with it, my long essay-review (13,000 words or so) about Harvey Shapiro, Stanley Moss, and Michael Heller.<br /><br />Here's a taste of the opening:<br /><blockquote>In the closing pages of <span style="font-style: italic;">Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen</span>, Michael Heller recalls the way a line from the older poet saved his literary life. “It was 1965,” he muses. “I had won a small poetry prize from The New School for Social Research in New York City, resigned my well-paying job as head technical writer for a major corporation and, with my first wife, had taken a Yugoslav freighter from New York to Europe where I planned to live for an extended time.” The pair settled in the Spanish village of Nerja, east of Málaga, where under the Mediterranean sky Heller trudged through a slough of despond. “Here, nearing thirty and on the whim of a minuscule prize,” he realized, “I had thrown a whole career away.” <span style="font-style: italic;">Tolle, lege</span>, came the impulse—and what he took and read was Oppen’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Materials</span>, flipping first, as was his wont, to the final poem in the book. The involuted opening of “Leviathan,” “Truth also is the pursuit of it,” hit with a visceral wallop. “I read the line over and over,” Heller confesses, “like a chant, feeling a raw ache in my chest. What did the words mean to me? I had only the vaguest idea, but also a sense of wanting to weep.”<br /><br />As a middle-aged father pushing fifty, I choke up a little myself. You gave up your job to do <span style="font-style: italic;">what</span>? In a few years, that could be one of my kids lighting off for the Costa del Sol. The middle-aged teacher and scholar in me gets weepy for different reasons....</blockquote>It's a jam-packed issue, with fine looking pieces by Zukofsky scholar Mark Scroggins (writing on Guy Davenport), Lewis Hyde, Langdon Hammer, and others. Worth a look<br /><br />***<br /><br />On an unrelated note, I'm thinking of starting up a new blog--more or less anonymous, with no comments section--in which I can think through my vexed relationship to all things Jewish, and not just poetry. Congregational tsuris, political sorrow, grumbles about the weekly portion, commentary on prayers, etc. And poetry, probably.<br /><br />I'll get the word out, when it's up and running.E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-54805337027100527772011-04-30T08:36:00.002-05:002011-04-30T08:42:50.849-05:00Paul Celan's The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials<span class="author">Edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull<br />Translated by Pierre Joris<br /><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1236">Stanford University Press<br /></a></span><br />The Meridian speech is one of Paul Celan's key works. This meticulous, fascinating, and, finally, compelling edition begins by unlocking what seems to be the work's multifoliate nature. Ultimately, though, and with the help of Pierre Joris's eloquent translation, we discover that that under the many surfaces of this magisterial essay is an abyss of poetic thinking struggling to emerge into the light of our encounter<br /><br />*<br />I've moved my "web log" to <a href="http://jacket2.org/commentary/charles-bernstein">Jacket2</a>:<br /><br /><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/CharlesBernsteinWebLog.xml" title="Feebruner RSS"><img src="https://jacket2.org/sites/jacket2.org/files/commentary-images/RSS-icon.png" class="mceItem" height="24" width="20" />Feedburner RSS FEED</a> | <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CharlesBernsteinWebLog&loc=en_US">Email sub to Bernstein@J2</a><br /><http: org="" commentary="" bernstein=""><br /></http:>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-46831991651231441222011-02-20T07:59:00.000-06:002011-02-20T07:59:14.728-06:00Concrete Poetry or Shiviti? Four Works by Hank Lazer – The Arty Semite – Forward.com<a href="http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/135510/">Concrete Poetry or Shiviti? Four Works by Hank Lazer – The Arty Semite – Forward.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-89569898659609034562010-10-12T14:17:00.002-05:002010-10-12T14:21:27.398-05:00From "A Tel Aviv Notebook"From Harvey Shapiro's "A Tel Aviv Notebook" (<span style="font-style: italic;">A Day's Portion</span>, 1994):<br /><blockquote>In the days of Alexander<br />when the Torah was translated<br />into Greek, on the island of Pharos,<br />as a light to the world<br />(or at least to the Hellenized Jews<br />who could no longer read Hebrew),<br />the world was plunged into darkness<br />for three days,<br />according to the Rabbis,<br />who knew what followed:<br />the fall of Rome,<br />you, me and Irving Berlin.</blockquote>E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-48510426232665663532010-07-09T12:22:00.001-05:002010-07-09T12:22:53.680-05:00Review of Rachel Blau DuPlessishttp://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/38722/midrashic-sensibility/Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-69735662395244033962010-06-16T06:44:00.001-05:002010-06-16T06:46:13.154-05:00Some Good WordsAryeh Cohen in March/April 2010 TIKKUN:<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, verdana, tahoma, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; "><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; ">The practice of Talmud -- the documentation and interrogation, reading and constructing of legal difference and distinction -- is not mythic storytelling, but it is grounded in this mythos. This practice, which splits hairs and has caused the hair-pulling of many mystics, is exactly what Akiva taught. The practice is grounded not only in the mythic encounter of Moses with God and Akiva but in Creation itself. Creation is separation and distinction -- light from darkness, upper waters from lower waters, land from sea. This is the practice of law -- distinguishing categories, creating new categories, creating the world of pure and impure, forbidden and permitted, just and unjust. It is in the practice of the <em>shakla ve-tarya</em>(the give and take of legal and intellectual discourse) that the Kingdom of Heaven, the province of the just and The Just, is created. The God of a talmudist, or at least this talmudist, is the God that generates and is claimed by law, the God that is implicated in and is therefore open to be judged by the categories of law writ large.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; ">The God of the Talmud is also God in Exile -- mourning, unable to end the Exile, living in the brokenness. God's absence is very present. It is in this space that justice can happen -- that people can act justly and create just societies. These are the four cubits of the law. This is the space within which one not only responds to the Other in front of one, but also in which, with the mediation of the institutions of law, one responds to the call of the Stranger whom one has never actually met.</p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-75072054417207484552010-06-13T16:02:00.001-05:002010-06-13T16:02:58.534-05:00Review of Heller's BECKMANN VARIATIONSMy review is up at<div><br /></div><div>http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/35174/prefigurative-art/</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-18631604845136500962010-05-26T03:54:00.003-05:002010-05-30T10:18:13.731-05:00Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture<span class="rss-content"><p>Norman Fischer & Charles Bernstein<br />on<br /> <i><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Radical-Poetics-and-Secular-Jewish-Culture,24.aspx">Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture</a></i><br />(University of Alabama Press)<br />a conversation at<br />The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco<br />May 11, 2010<br />co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic<br />full program (1:18:47): <img style="border: medium none ; margin-right: 4px; cursor: pointer;" title="listen" src="http://static.delicious.com/img/play.gif" height="12" width="12" /><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bernstein/radio/Bernstein-Charles_Norman-Fischer_SF-Jewish-CC_5-11-10_full.mp3">MP3</a><br />edited podcast (55:49): <img style="border: medium none ; margin-right: 4px; cursor: pointer;" title="listen" src="http://static.delicious.com/img/play.gif" height="12" width="12" /><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bernstein/radio/Bernstein-Charles_Norman-Fischer_SF-Jewish-CC_5-11-10.mp3">MP3</a></p> <p>Robin Tremblay-McGaw gives a report and our talk and the book at her blog:<br /><a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/05/charles-bernstein-and-norman-fischer.html">xpoetics</a><br />with follow up post <a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/05/more-on-radical-poetics-and-secular.html">here</a>.<br /></p><p>I will be continuing this discussion with Norman Fischer<br />at the <a href="http://normanfischerandcharlesbernsteinatjmc.eventbrite.com/">Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn</a><br />on Monday, June 7, 2010<br /> 8:00pm at BZC - 505 Carroll Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenues</p> <p> & the next day in Manhattan<br /> <b>a reading from<br /> <i><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/">Shadowtime</a></i></b><br /> at Jewish Art for the New Millennium<br /> Avant-Garde Poetry and Music<br /> Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Jamie Saft<br /> Curated by Jake Marmer<br /> Tues June 8th, 8:00 pm<br /> <a href="http://www.eastvillageshul.com/2010/05/17/millenium_gig/"><b>Sixth Street Synagogue </b></a><br /> 325 East 6th (b/n 1st and 2nd Ave)<br /> cover: $8</p> <p><br /></p></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-24474030146166760442010-05-13T19:53:00.001-05:002010-05-13T19:54:55.605-05:00<span class="breadcrumbs pathway"> </span> <div class="Post"> <div class="Post-body"> <div class="Post-inner"> <h2 class="PostHeaderIcon-wrapper"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/1110-norman-fischer" class="PostHeader"> Masking and Unmasking: On Jewish Identity (Purim / Makor Or)</a></span> </h2> <div class="PostHeaderIcons metadata-icons"> Norman Fischer <span class="metadata-icons"></span> </div> <div class="PostContent"> <div class="article"> <p> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Feb 21.10<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">@ <span style="font-style: italic;">Sibyl</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Sibila</span>'s English language portal)<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><em>an audio recording of this talk is on-line <a href="http://edz-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/MakorOr/01_MaskingAndUnmasking-OnJewishIdentity_MakorOr_2010-02-21.mp3">here</a>.</em></p></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-15950796332845338352010-04-16T09:38:00.004-05:002010-04-16T09:56:12.818-05:00Forward review of All the Whiskey in Heaven / SF talk"Fussing on the Cliff: Is This What You Call the Jewish Avant-Garde?"<br />(on <span style="font-style: italic;">All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems</span>)<br />by Jake Marmer<br /><a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/126663/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Jewish Daily FORWARD</span><br /></a><a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/126663/">March 26, 2010</a><br /><br />**<br />Norman Fischer and I will be giving a talk responding to <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture </span><br />8pm, Tuesday, May 11 at the<a href="http://jccsf.org/programs/jewish-culture-thought/text-thought-culture/radical-poetics-and-secular-jewish-thought/"> San Francisco Jewish Community Center</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-32623300867511576352010-03-29T16:51:00.002-05:002010-03-29T16:59:44.307-05:00Jasmine Donahaye<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238870">Daisy Fried reviews a new collection</a> by Jasmine Donahaye, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-portrait-Ruth-Salt-Modern-Poets/dp/1844714594/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269899752&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Self-portrait as Ruth</span></a>, over at the Poetry Foundation. I haven't read the book yet myself, but the review has a great lead:<br /><blockquote>How about a poem that connects anal sex and Jerusalem’s Western Wall? “Fetishes,” in Jasmine Donahaye’s second collection, will make readers run screaming (perhaps in outrage), or else fascinate them. This elegant little poem is in fact a complicated comment on gender, sexism, forbidden things, and access to and uses of sacred places, bodily and historical. </blockquote>Evidently <a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/writers/profile.php?recordID=212106">Donahaye </a>"lives in Wales, is the daughter of a kibbutznik and grew up in England but has spent long periods in Israel and the US." Sounds like a fellow rootless cosmopolitan to me! Former student of Thom Gunn and Robert Hass; has a monograph coming out on "The Wales-Israel Tradition." Published by Salt, I notice, published in the UK; an earlier review from The Guardian is <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/30/poetry-roundup-john-ashbery">here</a>.E. M. Selingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00426524354823232002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-55707833306803895072010-03-27T16:23:00.004-05:002010-03-27T16:29:13.756-05:00Online Addendum to Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Dan Morris (University of Alabama Press, 2010)Dear BJB-ers,<br /><br />The online journal Critophoria has just published a supplement of poems and writings to the volume <em>Radical Poetics and Jewish Secular Culture</em>. The website is: <a href="http://www.critiphoria.org/">http://www.critiphoria.org/</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-54472565699095160062010-03-22T10:17:00.002-05:002010-03-22T10:27:17.249-05:00NEW BOOK<a name="top"></a>from Shearsman Books:<br /><br />Michael Heller: <strong>Beckmann Variations and other poems</strong><br />Published 15 March 2010<br />Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15<br /><br />ISBN 9781848610873<br /><br />Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles's shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.<br /><br />Comments on Michael Heller’s recent work:<br /><br />“At once grave and uplifting, Heller’s poems are serene meditations on time, decay, and loss that recover from the ruin a repletion that is also a recognition of our necessary incompleteness before the world and language.”—Patrick Pritchett in Jacket Magazine<br /><br />“In a poetic generation that has frequently settled for small answers, his work insists upon the largest questions.”—Robert Zaller in Rain Taxi<br /><br />“He accepts that his poetry is a fold in a great conversation of commentary, that linguistic “meeting place” in which he posits his faith. And it is in this belief, inspiring his practice, that Heller’s poetry paradoxically achieves its magisterial power.”—Norman Finkelstein on A Big Jewish Blog<br /><br />Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. His most recent books are Eschaton, a collection of poems (Talisman, 2009), Speaking The Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Salt 2009), and Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study (ahadadabooks, 2009). He is the recipient of many honors and grants including the DiCastagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.<br /><br />To order:<br /><br />Please support your local bookshop by ordering Shearsman titles from them. If you prefer to order online, use the following links:<br /><a href="http://www.shearsman.com/shop/shop.php?action=full&id=309">Order</a> from the Shearsman online store, <a href="http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781848610873/Beckmann-Variations-and-Other-Poems">Order</a> from The Book Depository (UK), <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beckmann-Variations-Other-Michael-Heller/dp/1848610874/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262983806&sr=1-12">Order</a> from amazon.co.uk, <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9781848610873/Beckmann-Variations-and-Other-Poems">Order</a> from The Book Depository (USA), Order from Barnes and Noble.com, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beckmann-Variations-Other-Michael-Heller/dp/1848610874/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262982910&sr=1-10">Order</a> from amazon.com, <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781848610873/beckmann-variations-and-other-poems.aspx?rf=1">Order</a> from Small Press Distribution (USA)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-91453966569900328362010-03-17T16:32:00.001-05:002010-03-17T16:35:42.926-05:00<span style="font-weight: bold;">Jake Marmer, "<a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/126663/">Fussing on the Cliff, Is This What You Call the Jewish Avant-Garde?</a>",<span style="font-style: italic;"> Forward (</span>March 26, 2010)<br />Review of <span style="font-style: italic;">All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems</span><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-27996509648390837802010-03-16T14:40:00.005-05:002010-03-16T20:15:57.887-05:00Review of Eschaton<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO6WOHTk2ccddehw3vwU_sGoROcNZV_bedITWad03yWciFjoFKLW5_6_pVMvwIp3aqSKiAzp-rONuAPYfMIk0R3oE-rxeuo0VotFtVGCppPm_pJHz5-jy8yQEa7X0gFzeG73KEYg/s1600-h/DSCI0012.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO6WOHTk2ccddehw3vwU_sGoROcNZV_bedITWad03yWciFjoFKLW5_6_pVMvwIp3aqSKiAzp-rONuAPYfMIk0R3oE-rxeuo0VotFtVGCppPm_pJHz5-jy8yQEa7X0gFzeG73KEYg/s320/DSCI0012.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449405212835014770" /></a>
<br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Here is a review by Jason Rotstein of Michael Heller's </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Eschaton</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >, which originally appeared in the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Jewish Quarterly</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" > 214 (Winter 2009)
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<br /></span><meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link style="font-family: times new roman;" rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5COwner%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:none; mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="">ESCHATON<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="">Michael Heller<o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="">Talisman House, 2009</b></span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /><b style=""><o:p></o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="">Jason Rotstein</b></span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>The appropriateness of Messianic hopes in an era pronounced as violent and bleak can seen to touch the nadir of madness or near the course to insanity.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, it is precisely at these times that the appeal to the Messianic seems more intense, real and credible.</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Michael Heller in his new collection of poetry, <i style="">Eschaton</i>, writes: ‘Impossible for me to write of other topics, mathematics and language or / mathematics and Zion’ (<i style="">Letter and Dream of Walter Benjamin</i>).<span style=""> </span>He takes heart in a new hope of ‘after-selves’ or the co-ordinate—‘reliev[ing,] the self-awareness of non-self’—which he alludes to in <i style="">A Terror of Tonality</i>.</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>Throughout a collection which immerses itself in the devastation of September 11<sup>th</sup> and in the ruined landscapes of Sarajevo and Somalia—to name just a few of the massacre sites included—the word that occasions mentions most frequently is ‘surcease’, a word that suggests overarching disaster but that also foreshadows some relief.</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span><i style="">The Age of the Poet</i> considers both the decline of the poet but also of the age in which he breeds.<span style=""> </span>There sounds one possible note of relief: ‘but for surcease, for stillness / for not thinking.’<span style=""> </span>‘Not thinking,’ can mean two things in Heller’s symbology: the relief from ‘garrulousness’ (<i style="">Finding the Mode</i>), and the reliable possibility of metaphysical end-points—‘Wasn’t this how looking out was to become looking in, one’s ghosts no / longer blocking reflection?’ (<i style="">In the Studio</i>).</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""> </span>What bespeaks the heartfelt nature of this collection is only apparent in its deliberate organisation.<span style=""> </span>By placing the most epiphanic material in the first two sections of the book, the effect is one of high to low tension rather than ascending arc.<span style=""> </span>The descent into the nether-reaches of the sepulchral <i style="">thanatos</i> and <i style="">eschaton</i> are tinged still in this framework with embraces and remembrances of those ‘small ceremonies of life,’ left behind; ultimately I think affirming life and the will to live, while facing harbingers of death.<span style=""> </span>In the midst of devastation, Heller exhorts an unorthodox vision;<span style=""> </span>of life the way it would be after the facts of history, of a rejoining spirit of play after death and catastrophes:</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">Often, I am swamped with incredible pleasure<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">by the wild connection a thing makes between<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">my thumb and finger, as though desperately alive<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">in some galvanic dance.<span style=""> </span>(<i style="">A Dialogue of Some Importance</i>)</span></p><p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:georgia;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >The image has the function of ‘primitive’ importance, of man grasping at the very marrow of life in the wild leap that the creation of tools or craft specialisation meant in the history of humankind.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" > </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >It is this kind of hope and faith in a better future in life or in death that Heller leaves us with.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" > </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, human progress is still alive.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-62594149127960300982010-03-09T10:06:00.005-06:002010-03-11T08:49:22.974-06:00Ostriker: Announcement and reviews<span style="font-family: courier new;">My announcement is that I have been awarded the 2009 Jewish Book Award in Poetry, for my collection The Book of Seventy. The ceremony is in NYC tonight.</span>
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<br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">Also:</span>
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<br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">I hope I am not violating any copyright by posting this, but in truth, I think it's important for readers to know about these books. So:</span>
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<br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">My review of Poets on the Edge is </span><a style="font-family: courier new;" href="http://www.jbooks.com/fiction/index/FI_Ostriker_Keller.htm">here</a><span style="font-family: courier new;">: http://www.jbooks.com/fiction/index/FI_Ostriker_Keller.htm</span>
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<br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">My comment on With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry is on the Amazon site</span>
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<br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">My review of Maeera Shreiber's Singing in a Strange Land was published in Shofar spring 2009:</span>
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<br /><meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link style="font-family: courier new;" rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/jpo/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:documentproperties> <o:template>Normal</o:Template> <o:revision>0</o:Revision> <o:totaltime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:pages>1</o:Pages> <o:words>1168</o:Words> <o:characters>6660</o:Characters> <o:lines>55</o:Lines> <o:paragraphs>13</o:Paragraphs> <o:characterswithspaces>8178</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:version>11.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:donotshowrevisions/> <w:donotprintrevisions/> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:usemarginsfordrawinggridorigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--StartFragment--> <p style="font-family: courier new;" class="MsoNormal">Maeera Y. Shreiber, S<i>inging in a Strange Land: A Jewish-American Poetics.<span style=""> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;">Stanford </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p>University Press, 2007.<span style=""> </span>287pp.</p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Those of us who write as Jewish poets commonly have reason to notice that critics and teachers of<span style=""> </span>“Jewish Literature” typically neglect Jewish poetry.<span style=""> </span>What, we often think, are we chopped liver?<span style=""> </span>For Maeera Shreiber, this marginalization is no accident. As she sees it, the elided status of Jewish poetry (as against narrative) parallels that of the Jew-in-exile, women within Judaism, and the sacred in a secular world, and for a parallel reason:<span style=""> </span>poetry is disruptive, subversive, troubled and troublesome.<span style=""> </span>Where fiction gives us the tale of the tribe, poetry is (she quotes the poet-critic Charles Bernstein) “an agent of turbulent thought.” (2)<span style=""> </span>In this long-awaited, powerful and layered study, she is herself such an agent.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Shreiber is both an acute close reader of poems and a theorist fascinated by questions of tradition and modernity, of individual versus collective identity, and of the place of poetry in history.<span style=""> </span>She is also a feminist.<span style=""> </span>Structuring her work less on individual poets than on interlocking issues of genre (psalm, lyric, lamentation, elegy, prayer, as they play out in contemporary esthetics) and gender (looking at ancient and modern configurations of masculinity and femininity), Shreiber makes an amazing and persuasive case not only for seeing “exile and alienation” as crucial marks of the Jewish poem, hence the book’s title taken from the 137<sup>th</sup> psalm, but for connecting this motif with “the emergence of the Shekhinah as a shaping esthetic force” speaking to and for “a culture in flux.” (25)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Among the early delights of this book is an account of rabbinic disapproval of poetry in the late ancient and medieval world.<span style=""> </span>Arabic-inflected meters?<span style=""> </span>Not kosher! But this is not simply an ancient problem, for debates over Jewish purity versus contamination (aka “assimilation”) and religion versus culture, ethnicity and secularism continue to rock the Jewish world, and continue to be reflected in its poetry.<span style=""> </span>And the poetry continues to engage in shaping the culture.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Demonstrating the complexities, ambiguities, and discontinuities of American Jewish poetry is a major aspect of Shreiber’s work.<span style=""> </span>Thus she<span style=""> </span>pairs the very different poets Emma Lazarus, author of the socially-conscious poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty,<span style=""> </span>and Jacqueline Osherow, author of the witty theological-midrashic poem “Moses in Paradise.”<span style=""> </span>Both poems negotiate ethnic borders;<span style=""> </span>Lazarus’ “Mother of Exiles” is an<span style=""> </span>avatar of the Shekhinah while Osherow boldly posits a feminized Moses and an embodied God replacing the “disembodied voice” (32) of Scripture and rabbinic dogma.<span style=""> </span>Another pairing is that of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg, as poets of the maternal Muse.<span style=""> </span>Following a superb examination of the various versions of the maternal in Henry Roth’s <i>Call it Sleep, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">the film </span><i>The Jazz Singer, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and Cynthia Ozick’s story “Virility,” Shreiber demonstrates how the figure of the Mother in Reznikoff and Ginsberg, in “a world of boundless violence” (73), is simultaneously foundational and demonic, rejected and inspirational, personal and collective, sacrificial victim and cultural critic—and how both these poets in the shadow of the Mother overturn traditional liturgy in their treatment of the Kaddish prayer.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Other pairings follow, each thematically/generically bound.<span style=""> </span>How to re-imagine history is the issue<span style=""> </span>when<span style=""> </span>Shreiber looks at Louis Zukowski and George Oppen as they challenge modernist fetishizing of the (classical, Christian)past—Zukowski turning to the maternal story and the possibility of a future, Oppen’s “counternarrative” (127) negotiating “the relation of the individual to the collective,” (132) which for a Jew involves the tension between choosing and being chosen.<span style=""> </span>Lamentation, with its biblical models in the 137<sup>th</sup> psalm and the Book of Lamentations, undergirds Shreiber’s discussion of two firmly secular poets, Adrienne Rich and Irena Klepfisz.<span style=""> </span>Here again gender becomes central, as Shreiber reminds us that the sacked city of Jerusalem in Lamentations speaks in the voice of a violated woman, and that images of helpless and even cannibalistic mothers proliferate in the poem.<i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""> </span>Instead of the anonymous male poet of Lamentations, however, we have Rich’s circumstantially personal voice and personal agon in “Atlas of a Difficult World,” where “a patriot,” Rich writes, “is one who wrestles for the/soul of her country/ as she wrestles for her own being.”(154).<span style=""> </span>But Shreiber finds Rich lacking, except in the poem “Tattered Kaddish,” a counter-vision of healing.<span style=""> </span>Klepfisz, on the other hand, writing as a working-class, lesbian Holocaust survivor and Yiddishist, is praised by Shreiber as creating, in her bilingual poetry, “not the lament of perpetual exile but an active claim for a ‘diasporic’ version of home and of identity.” (161)<span style=""> </span>Instead of either an abject feminized exile or a masculine Zionism, Klepfisz asserts a secular communalism centered on issues of social justice using </span><i>mame-loshn, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Yiddish, the mother tongue. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Shreiber’s final two chapters deal with the vexed relationship of poetry to prayer.<span style=""> </span>New prayer-books and additions to prayer-books abound in these days of Jewish liturgical experiment, but most of them, as Catherine Madsen has argued in her essay “Kitsch and Liturgy” and her 2005 book <i>the Bones Reassemble, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">are flat-footed.<span style=""> </span>Shreiber critiques Marcia Falk’s popular<span style=""> </span></span><i>Book of Blessings </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as excessively spare,<span style=""> </span>emotionally flat and lacking a sense of divine Presence, and praises Oppen’s nature-poem “Psalm” as a legitimately liturgical utterance.<span style=""> </span>Louise Glück’s book-length sequence </span><i>The Wild Iris, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">with its repeated painful addresses to an “Unreachable Father,” Shreiber shrewdly sees not as pastoral liturgy but as a modern Book of Job, with the flowers playing the part of Job’s status-quo-accepting friends.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;"><span style=""> </span>“Jewish poetry is still at its troublesome best when it takes on theology, the study of God,” Shreiber writes. (208) Her final chapter deals with Allen Grossman, concentrating on the title poem of<span style=""> </span><i>How to Do Things With Tears </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and on his Holocaust sonnet sequence, “Flora’s ABC” with its admonitory “do not be content with an imaginary God.”(224).<span style=""> </span>Grossman’s “theophoric project” (229) requires clearly dividing the material human world from the divine which is immaterial; <span style=""> </span>but at the same time, Shreiber asserts, the murdered butcher’s daughter becomes yet another “incarnation of the Shekhinah.” (229)<span style=""> </span>If this is a contradiction, and I think it is, it highlights the increasingly strong insistence among Jewish poets in America that holiness is to be sought and found not in transcendence but in imminence, not in the disembodied God but in the physical world.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: 200%; font-family: arial;">Shreiber situates all her poets in a dense thicket of intertextuality.<span style=""> </span>Her prose, equally dense, is slow going and could have used more careful editing, to avoid repetitions.<span style=""> </span>Readers will surely quarrel with some of her positions;<span style=""> </span>for example, the linking of Rich’s many-voiced “Atlas of a Difficult World” with the Book of Lamentations seems forced to me, as if the author needed a biblical antecedent.<span style=""> </span>If “Atlas” has a formal and moral antecedent it is surely Rukeyser’s <i>Book of the Dead; </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Shreiber mentions</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Rich’s quotation of Rukeyser, but doesn’t follow up on this insight.<span style=""> </span>As with any such book, one regrets the poets and topics omitted.<span style=""> </span>I would have liked to see Eleanor Wilner paired with Enid Dame as revisionist midrashists, and perhaps C.K. Williams and Gerald Stern as latter-day versions of Ecclesiastes. I wish, too, that Shreiber had more to say about Grossman’s mother, Beatrice, who plays such a major role in his poetics.<span style=""> </span>But quarreling is part of the game of being a Jew.<span style=""> </span>Shreiber’s nuanced knowledge of religious Judaism and its exegetical traditions, of modernist literature and its complications, of the polyphonies of American poetry, and of the eruptions and disruptions of Jewish poetry, make </span><i>Signing in a Strange Land </i><span style="font-style: normal;">revelatory in numerous ways. </span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-81302922422848088212010-03-06T10:32:00.003-06:002010-03-06T15:29:48.578-06:00Man Ray & Second Wave Jewish Modernism<p><b><a href="http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/manray">Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention </a></b><br />closes March 14, 2010<br />The Jewish Museum, NY</p>I posted this on my site just now ... I'd only add that the frame of Man Ray as a "second wave" Jewish-American modernist is worth keeping mind.<br /><p>This show is especially notable for the collection of work Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890-1976) did while living in the New York area (and especially Ridgefield, NJ) before emigrating to Paris in 1921, when he was just past 30. This include early magazine covers and design as well as documenting his engagement with <a href="http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/ferrer/index.html"> Ferrer's Modern School</a>.<br /><br /> "Tapestry" (1911, from the Pompidou) is made up of fabric swaths from his father's tailor shop:</p><br /><p><img name="" src="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/images/Man-Ray_Tapestry-1911.jpg" alt="" height="576" width="415" /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12975182.post-8932034891377668522010-03-04T12:46:00.002-06:002010-03-04T12:50:36.811-06:00Review of Singing in a Strange LandI have a modest review of Maeera Shreiber's <span style="font-style: italic;">Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics</span> in the latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">American Literature</span>--82.1 (March 2010): 220-22. AmLit's 500-words-per-book limit doesn't allow for the complexity of response that the work warrants, but I guess that's in the nature of reviewing, at least in many academic outlets.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0