Glatshteyn's "Mozart"

Listening to Merle Bachman on Yiddish poetry last week at the Jewish modernism panel in Louisville put me in mind of one my favorite poems by Yankev Glatshteyn. I have only the smallest smattering of Yiddish, and I’ve written about Glatshteyn and his fellow Inzikhists only once, in Not One of the Them In Place, when I compared their work to that of Zukofsky and the Objectivists. Merle’s talk, drawn from her forthcoming book on the Yiddish American poets, was solid literary history, reminding her audience (or informing them for the first time) of the tremendous vitality and diversity of styles to be found among the Yiddish poets of the cafes and tenements below Fourteenth Street during the first half of the twentieth century. Glatshteyn (1896-1971), perhaps the greatest of these poets, emigrated from Poland in 1914. He published his first collection, simply and defiantly titled Yankev Glatshteyn in 1921, and in 1922, with N. B. Minkov and Arn Glantz-Leyeles, produced the astonishing Inzikhist manifesto, which can be found, along with other important documents of the movement, in Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s great anthology, American Yiddish Poetry.

All this by way of introduction to Glatshteyn’s “Mozart,” from his 1946 collection Radiant Jews:

I dreamt that the goyim
had crucified Mozart
and buried him
in Potter’s Field.
Only the Jews
revered him as holy
and blessed his memory.

And I have roamed the world
as his apostle
haranguing every man
I chanced to meet.
Whenever I caught a Christian
I converted him
to a Mozartian.

How marvelous this godly man’s
musical testament;
how radiant with song
his nail-pierced hands.
Laughter
lit the fingers
of the crucified singer.
In deepest despair,
in sadness most bitter,
he loved more than himself
the ear of his neighbor.

How meager a thing, how scant,
compared with Mozart’s testament,
is the Sermon on the Mount.[i]

One hears a good deal of talk these days about transgression in literature, and a lot of it is overinflated or silly. But this is one of the most genuinely transgressive—indeed, profoundly offensive—poems I know. In this poem, Glatshteyn, writing while the Shoah is taking place, literally goes on the offensive in the cultural struggle for Jewish life. As Western (i.e. goyish) civilization descends into barbarism, Glatshteyn claims a pinnacle of that civilization for the Jews, some of whom were being herded to their death while hearing the very music that the poet deifies. Part of the poem’s manifold irony and transgressive force lies in its gentle sadness, especially in the third stanza. The figure of Mozart as Christ attains an uncanny sort of comic pathos rarely found in lyric poetry. It is a pathos and divine beauty that the poet claims is recognized only by the Jews. Just as the Christians claimed that Jesus was killed by his own people, so too Glatshteyn, turning the tables, claims that the Christians have denied and murdered their own godlike son. Thus the notion of Christians being “converted” to Mozartians—and by a Yiddish-speaking Jew!—is truly outrageous.

Of course, the poem is also disturbing for Jewish readers, given that an appreciation for German kultur, including the music of Mozart (along with that of Beethoven—and Wagner!) was regarded by assimilated European Jews as de rigeur for full acceptance into mainstream bourgeois society. The fact that this acceptance never came to pass, the fact that many of these people ended up as “Cloud-Jews” (to borrow the title of another Glatshteyn poem) along with the more devout members of their “race,” is undoubtedly a fact of which Glatshteyn was equally aware. In the end, assimilated European Jewry’s worship of Mozart, however much that faith needed to be spread among good Christians, helped them not at all. And these were the same Jews who tended to turn up their noses at Yiddish and its literature, who regarded the language as mere zhargon.

The remarkable complexity of Glatshteyn’s ironic vision marks him as one of the most important modernist poets. Both American and international in his vision, he remains undervalued and underread. As far as I know, he is included in none of the prominent anthologies of modern American poetry. He and his colleagues remain ghettoized, a predicament about which they were already complaining in the nineteen-twenties, when they were immersed in and responding to modernist literature in a number of different languages. But then, the author of a poem like “Mozart” would fully understand this historical irony too.

---

[i] from Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, trans. Richard J. Fein (Jewish Publication Society, 1987). This one of a number of poems in the volume which Fein translated with the help of Henry Weinfield.

Just Out...

...The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, edited by Roy Sellars & Graham Allen, a new collection of works about and in honor of the Falstaff (or is that the Zero Mostel?) of modern literary criticism (including a poem by yours truly). I have been reading Bloom since my undergraduate days and have written about him on a number of occasions, mainly in the context of Jewish literature. Whether our precursors are absorbed into our superegos or our ids (a fine point of psychopoetics debated in The Anxiety of Influence), I know he's lurking around in my psyche somewhere. Critical trends come and go, but for me, he remains a Great Original. Once again, Salt Publishing deserves our thanks.

Ran Across This This Morning

...by Howard Nemerov

A Song of Degrees

Though the road lead nowhere
I have followed the road
In its blind turnings, its descents
And the long levels where the emptiness ahead
Is inescapably seen.

I have cried for justice, I have cried
For mercy, now I desire neither.
A man may grow strong in his wandering,
His foot strong as a wheel
Turning the endless road.

Foot and hand hardened to horn,
Nose but a hook of bone, and eyes
Not liquid now but stone--I
To myself violent, fiercely exult
In Zion everywhere.

(1950)

Oppen Conference CFP

This just in, and of interest:

CFP: 'George Oppen: A Centenary Conference', conference, Fall/Autumn 2008,
Edinburgh University.

2008 marks the centenary of the birth of the American poet George Oppen. From his early "objectivist" volume Discrete Series (1934) to the spare and enigmatic meditations of Primitive (1978), Oppen's work consistently interrogated the relationship between poetry and sincerity and the ground of political and ethical value. This conference will include major scholars from both sides of the Atlantic in order to celebrate Oppen's centenary and to consider key aspects of his artistic achievement and legacy. An edited volume of specially commissioned essays arising out of papers given at the conference is also planned.

Possible topics for consideration include: Objectivism and the literary object; style and sincerity; literary and philsophical modernism; the cold war; the idea of America; poetry and the polis.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to Lee.Spinks @ ed . ac. uk. (take out the spaces, natch--ES). The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2007.

Poetic and Prophetic Inspiration

What used to be called the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference but which is now known as The Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1990 is coming up later this month, and will include a panel organized by Daniel Morris on “Historical Contingencies and Jewish Modernism.” Dan will be presenting on Marjorie Perloff’s Vienna Paradox, Merle Bachman will be discussing literary cafés and Yiddish poets in New York, and yours truly will be addressing the subject of Charles Reznikoff and biblical prophecy. This is a rather long paper I wrote several years ago for a guest appearance at UNLV, and the time has come for me to whittle it down to the conventional 20-minute length to which all presenters must promise to adhere, lest they be dragged bodily from the podium in utter humiliation. Since part of the paper involves a quick introduction to Reznikoff (at UNLV, I think maybe three people in an audience of about fifty had even heard of him), I can probably get to the main argument without too much trouble, though I also may have to dispense with discussions of some of my favorite Rezi poems, like “Samuel” and the breathtaking piece originally called “A Compassionate People,” which opens Inscriptions: 1944-1956 (“Where is that mountain of which we read in the Bible…”).[1]

In the light of my poetry and my present criticism (I’ve been writing a book for years now on what I call, for lack of a better term, religious revisionism in postmodern serial poems), my Reznikoff paper is still intriguing to me because of a passage I discovered in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s monumental study’s The Prophets. Heschel devotes a chapter of his book to the relation between prophetic and poetic inspiration, and I apply his comparison to Reznikoff. This proves useful enough: I conclude that Reznikoff’s poetry does not meet the Jewish criteria for prophecy but is ironically powered by his deep awareness of an absence of the prophetic vocation. Having written the essay, I remain haunted by Heschel’s analysis: “The poet’s inspiration seems . . . to be a subjectless experience, a condition in which no personal agent is apprehended. The source he is exposed to is unknown, devoid of personal identity, and his own role is one of passive receptivity, of being a receptacle, a mere object.” Heschel mentions the impersonality of poetic inspiration, and one is reminded not only of T. S. Eliot and his idea of an impersonal tradition moving through the poet, but of Yeats and his wife receiving messages from the spirits, and of Jack Spicer, who insists that poems come from an unknowable outside, from the “Martians.” The poem, coming from beyond, is seeking itself through the poet; it is the form becoming itself that is primary. On the other hand, the prophet is concerned primarily with the message, a message, Heschel reminds us, that comes from God: “In prophetic inspiration . . . the knowledge and presence of Him who imparts the message is the central, staggering fact of awareness. There is the certainty of having experience the impingement of a personal Being, of another I; not an idea coming from nowhere or a nameless source, but always a communication reaching him from the most powerful Subject of all.”

I appreciate how straightforward Heschel’s distinction is, though of course, I also realize that this is just the tip of the iceberg. In English poetry alone, the distinction is already blurred in the Renaissance with figures like Spenser, becomes much more complex with Milton, and simply explodes with the Romantics. In the figures of Whitman and Dickinson, American poetry may be said to have its origins in the problematic of prophecy. Reznikoff, steeped in both Judaism and the Anglo-American poetic tradition, worked out a unique and (to my mind) very unstable “solution” to the problem, which must partly determine any further discussions of his poetry. This instability or volatility is one of the qualities I find so important and moving in Reznikoff.

Furthermore, I continue to worry over the problem in regard to contemporary poetry at a time when many poets, with a tremendous variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds and experiences, are raising the issue of “spirit” in their work. “Whose spirit is this?” we might ask, echoing Stevens. Given his prophetic faith, Heschel speaks for “the impingement of a personal Being, of another I…the most powerful Subject of all.” I suspect that this won’t work for most poets, even the relatively rare ones who consider themselves devout in some orthodox way. As for me, I’m ambivalent about Heschel’s formulation for poetic inspiration (“a subjectless experience, a condition in which no personal agent is apprehended…”) though it also speaks very strongly to many instances of my own composition (or is that dictation?). What we can call modern poetry’s “Jewish Question” (cf. Allen Grossman’s great essay “Jewish Poetry Considered as a Theophoric Project”) complicates matters even more.

Oh well. I just write what the voices in my head tell me to write…

---

[1] The poem was first published in The Menorah Journal in 1944.

Coming Fall '07 from Marsh Hawk Press

Some Local Literary History

A couple of weeks ago, I went out to Rockdale Temple, “the oldest congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains” and the fourth oldest congregation in the United States. Rockdale, a venerable Reform congregation now located in suburban Cincinnati, has been going through some changes in the last few years. Its membership has gone down, and it is currently in the midst of a major restructuring and renovation, having sold its buildings and property to Cincinnati’s Jewish Foundation. The Temple will become part of a campus that will also include the new Cincinnati Jewish Community Center, all slated for completion later this year.

At Rockdale, I met with Rabbi Sigma Faye Coran to discuss what I’ll be doing as the Temple’s latest scholar-in-residence. This will entail three talks over the last weekend of April: one on Jewish American fiction, one on poetry and midrash, and one on the relationship of the sacred to the secular in the Jewish literary imagination. (No doubt I’ll have more to say about these as the date gets closer and I begin to panic.) As we were winding down our discussion and I was looking at the Rabbi’s bookshelves, I noticed a volume called (I think) The Poet and the Rabbi, which turned out to be a book about Rockdale’s Rabbi Victor E. Reichert (1897-1990), who had a long friendship with Robert Frost. Reichert had a summer home in Vermont near Frost’s place, and the Rabbi, as it turns out, was something of a poet himself. Reichert, who served as Rockdale’s rabbi from 1938 to 1962, published his poems in a volume called Tower of David in 1946, presenting copies to the entire congregation. An expanded edition was published in 1964 and again presented to the Temple’s membership. Reichert was also an active scholar: he wrote a commentary to the Soncino Press edition of the Book of Job, and translated classical Hebrew texts.

Learning about Reichert’s interest in poetry, I couldn’t help but be curious about the work. Rabbi Coran delicately indicated that I shouldn’t get my hopes up; she was more enthusiastic when telling me about Reichert’s widow, Louise, who is a hundred years old and still lives in North Avondale, which for much of the last century was one of Cincinnati’s big Jewish neighborhoods (and still one of the city’s more successfully integrated ones). Nevertheless, I borrowed the two editions of Tower of David and started browsing. Rabbi Coran proved to be an astute reader.

I knew I was in for trouble when I noted a quote from a review of the first edition, reproduced on the cover of the second: “It’s a joy to turn from the obscurantism which dominates contemporary poetry and delve into this.” Oh, that contemporary obscurantism! And as Rabbi Coran told me, Reichert may have been friends with Frost, but he really didn’t get what Frost was up to either. The poetry had none of the freshness of Frost’s imagery, none of his sly voicings, and certainly none of his dark and for me, truly frightening scepticism. (I just finished teaching him in Modern American Poetry, and once again was led to appreciate poems like “Design” and “Desert Places.”) But what is interesting to me about Reichert’s verse is not merely its utter conventionality, its sentimentality and total lack of risk, but the way in which it proceeds as if modernism never happened. The poems are pure American Fireside. Even the poems on Jewish subjects sound like “The Jewish Cemetary at Newport,” only not as deeply engaged with history, and without, of course, Longfellow’s belief that “the dead nations never rise again.” I couldn’t help but think as I leafed through the books that many of Reichert’s themes were similar to those of Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), who was Reichert’s almost exact contemporary. Both, for instance, were fascinated with King David. This is Reichert’s “David’s Harp”:

Above the couch of Israel’s poet King
There hung a harp unfingered through the day
And silent in the first watch of the night.
But with the midnight hour, our sages say,
Soft through the open door of David’s tent
A northern wind would blow, waking the strings
To such celestial song no ear had ever heard
Before or since. Then would the poet King
Arise, and while the music lingered on,
Weave wondrous words to song whose majesty
Has voiced the faith, the longing of mankind.
Thus David labored with the Psalms. But when
The eastern sky flamed with the pillar of the dawn
The breeze was gone. The harp was mute again.

And here is Reznikoff giving voice to David in his “King David”:

The Lord tookk me from following the sheep
to be ruler of Israel,
and now He ha given me rest from all my enemies.
Who am I, my God, and what is my house
that You have brought me so far?
I was surrounded
by the sorrows of death,
and the flood of ungodly me
frightened me;
I cried to my God!
He shot out His lightnings;
He took me
and drew me out of the deep waters.
By Him
I have run through a troop,
and jumped over a wall;
He teaches my hands war,
to bend the bow
He has given me my enemies:
I made them as dust before the wind;
I threw them away as dirt in the street.

The currents of literary history move in odd directions, and the engagement of poets with their cultural heritage likewise produces some ironic twists and turns. I could do a close comparative reading of these passages, but most readers can probably guess what I’d have to say. Besides, it would be unfair: Reichert was, apparently, a beloved religious leader; no one made great claims for him as a poet. For me, as a reader of Jewish American poetry, what we have here is less a matter of sentimental imagery or completely conventional form, and more a matter of piety, which, I think, has no place in poetry, even poetry that sincerely seeks to express religious devotion. It leads me back not only to Reznikoff, but to many of the other Jewish American poets I admire. They treat their Jewish source material with respect, but what counts for them (ah, modernism) is their devotion not only to culture, not only to the Text, but to language.

Art Based on Celan

The Poetry Foundation has posted an on-line exhibit of art by Anselm Keifer, based on poems by Paul Celan. There doesn't seem to be a separate page for it; just go here and look for the all-too-chatty headline "Take That, Adorno."

More on this, and other things, anon!

More on Michael Heller

Norman's post (below) reminds me that last month I finally finished a review of Michael Heller's most recent collection of essays, Uncertain Poetries, for Shofar, the well-known journal of Jewish Studies. I have no idea when the piece will run, and it was so overdue that I'm in no position to pester them for news (not that they return my emails, sniff!), but you all might take an interest.

Here are a couple of paragraphs to hold you, then:

When poet and critic Michael Heller wrote his first book of prose, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (Southern Illinois UP, 1985), the Objectivists were the neglected stepchildren of American modernism, overshadowed by the far more famous poets who influenced them (Pound, Williams) and by the bravura public careers of the poets that followed (Robert Lowell, W. H. Auden, and the New American Poets of the 1950s and 60s). Twenty years later, the core group of Objectivists are routinely anthologized, with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Neidecker—all but the last of them Jewish—seen as major figures in their own right and in the history of American verse. Heller, too, has finally begun to receive the attention he deserves, not least as the lead-off figure in the “Objectivist Continuities” chapter of Norman Finkelstein’s Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. Uncertain Poetries, a selection of Heller’s essays, talks, and reviews from the past twenty years, shows how far the range of this poet’s interests have carried him beyond the Objectivist tradition—and how thinking deeply within this tradition, as well as outside it, has carried him into a distinctive, appealing account of the relationship between poetry and “tradition” more generally.

Heller strikes a keynote for the collection in the opening sentence of “The Uncertainty of the Poet,” a meditation on the painting of that name by the Italian modernist Georgio de Chirico. “I am here,” he declares, “investigating the floating filigree of doubt and fear, that feeling of being on the edge, which often accompanies poetic composition” (p. 3). With phenomenological precision, Heller’s essays pursue the “edgy” encounters incumbent upon writing poetry: encounters with oneself, one’s culture, one’s imagined future readers, and most profoundly with what Gershom Scholem described, in a passage Heller cites, as “the abyss in which the freedom of living things is born” (230). This sounds daunting, even angst-ridden, in the abstract. But as Heller brings the process to life in meditations on paintings and on modern poets (Federico Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, and Stephane Mallarme, among others) and postmodern figures (among them William Bronk and Armand Schwerner), poesis looks less fraught, and more inviting. Indeed, to borrow a metaphor from “The True Epithalamium,” his essay on the myth of Cupid and Psyche in Robert Duncan, poetry begins to resemble a marriage between the “interrogative cliché-destroying precision” of well-crafted verse and the “lightening up about our purported certainties,” which leads, after doubt and darkness, to the birth of a daughter named Pleasure (231).

The rest should appear in Shofar--speedily, in our day!

E

A New Book from Michael Heller

Michael Heller, whose work is familiar to many readers of this blog, has just published Earth and Cave, a memoir which includes both prose and poetry, drawn from the writing Heller did while sojourning in Nerja, a little town on the southern coast of Spain, in 1965. Heller was 28 years old; he had left New York City and much of his old life behind, determined to transform himself into a poet. His encounters with the peasant culture of the town, his visits to the pre-historic caves in the region, and his growing awareness of his Jewish heritage in a country that both fostered and sought to extirpate Jewish life, makes this required reading for anyone who has followed Heller's work in poetry and criticism over his long career.

Earth and Cave is 45 pages perfect bound, and represents a big step forward for Dos Madres Press, which has previously published fifteen small, beautiful poetry chapbooks. Edited by Robert Murphy and designed by his wife Elizabeth, this is one of liveliest and most eclectic chapbook series going. So check out Earth and Cave and Dos Madres.

Joseph Donahue's Terra Lucida and "Jewish" Poetry

At the risk of this blog becoming a mutual admiration society, I’d like to recall a passage in Eric’s essay “Shekhinah In American,” which he and Jonathan Barron include in their Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections. At an important point in the essay, Eric discusses Allen Grossman’s call for Jewish American poets to engage in deeper study of traditional texts (back to the sources!), including kabbalah, in order to escape the parochialism of ethnicity. For Grossman, “Judaism is an ahistorical religion” (a truly contrarian notion), and the return to the texts he calls for will, as Eric puts it, “make every Jewish age simultaneous.” What would this retooled Jewish American poem sound like? “Might such a poem sound something like this?” Eric asks—and then, in a brilliant move, quotes “What Do I Know of the Old Lore?,” the opening poem in Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches!

I often think of this moment when I reflect (as I have interminably for many years now) upon what makes a poem “Jewish.” Eric’s point is well taken: the Jewish knowledge (more—the Jewish wisdom) of Robert Duncan—gentile, theosophist, syncretist, gnostic—makes “What Do I Know of the Old Lore,” among a number of Duncan’s works, into an uncannily “Jewish” poem. So if you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye (oh, the subway ads of my lost youth!), maybe you don’t have to be Jewish to write a Jewish poem.

This is a matter which deserves much further consideration in itself, but I raise the issue here as an opening into Joseph Donahue’s serial poem Terra Lucida, which he has been publishing in magazines and chapbooks for over ten years. I’ve always been an admirer of Joe’s work, which tends toward a post-New York School apocalyptic fluidity (see, most recently, Incidental Eclipse), creating in turn a fractured, comic, even crazed sensibility (not “voice”) which, to use the title of another of his serial poems, is that of “A Servant of God Without a Head.” But Terra Lucida is composed in a different register. Written exclusively in terse but flexible couplets, its engagement with the sacred, and with theological discourse, is more direct. Donahue draws from a number of religious traditions, and part of the poetry’s strength lies in the intertwining, sometimes conflicted patterns of allusion, a kind of overdetermined revelation that is actually hidden by an overabundance of truths.

In In This Paradise: Terra Lucida XXI-XL, this sense often arrives with a particularly Jewish inflection. Here are two passages from XXII (in this paradise):

The souls left in the Garden
roam at every full moon.

They bow before the towers of
Jerusalem, bathe in that radiance.

They return to the Garden, and go out.
They fly at night, and wail before

the gates of the fallen cities.
They see the bodies of those

suffering in punishment.
They push on, remembering

The agony of all they see.
They fly back to Eden.

They tell the Holy One, who
grieves there, in the Hall of Illness:

The world is a hollow,
a ghost of water in a ditch...

*

Orders, Songs, Laws,
have been hidden away.

We must try to find them.
We must, we say, go find them.

But we hide, even more deeply,
clinging to an unreal glitter,

as these perfections
struggle to reach us...

Perhaps someone more deeply read in kabbalah than I am can identify the imagery in the first passage, though my guess is that, as in the case of Duncan, Donahue has assimilated and transformed kabbalistic discourse, creating a vision of loss and exile that is perfectly in keeping with Jewish mysticism’s—and Donahue’s own—gnostic impulses. I am moved by the pathos of the Holy One grieving in the “Hall of Illness”; the idea of the Almighty’s helplessness in the face of human wretchedness and cosmic disaster is expressed with wonderful tact and restraint. The second passage, with its vision of ambivalent students of the Law, reminds me of the great debate between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem over the status of tradition and transmissibility in Kafka. Benjamin asserted that Kafka’s “students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ,” while Scholem countered that these students “are not so much those who have lost the Scripture…but rather those students who cannot decipher it.” And then there is Kafka himself, who, in “An Imperial Message,” imagined the dying Emperor sending a messager to “his pathetic subject” through the incalculable distances of the Imperial Court. “But you sit at your window,” the parable ends, “and dream of that message when evening comes.”

The suggestiveness of Donahue’s work, its invitation to metaphysical speculation and religious hermeneutic, is in productive tension with its sheer audacity. Terra Lucida XXIX (The Adoration of the Sign) conflates Jewish and Christian apocalypticism to give us a vision in which “God has leased the world to Satan / …A world dark as anthracite / & lit by flames of an invisible war.” XXXIX (secret Jews), appropriately enough, draws on the unsettling historical phenomenon of the crypto-Jews of New Mexico, with their hidden Jewish practices and their ritual of washing away the Catholic baptism when a child turns twelve. XXVI is a probing midrash on Cain and Abel, in which the dead brother speaks “deep within the sleep of Cain.” And XL ironically celebrates Esau, “Denier of Denial / Patriarch of Craving.”

Donahue is obviously interested in the frightening underside of religious experience—heresy, nihilism, mystical infatuation. Yet there is also great charm in Terra Lucida. Again, from XXII:

In the shade of a tree children
string nouns to verbs.

The earth's all burs, flowers, and hills.
The children go wild with words.

Sky and earth are about to be
bound, are bound already,

in the shade of a tree,
bound in a sentence where

children will read about the letters
that spell the world: fire & water, earth & air

will dream a book with a picture
of the field where they are.

Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge; Book of the World, World of the Book. Donahue puts yet another spin on Tsvetayeva’s “all poets are Jews.”

Happy Hannukah, a Commentary (part 2)

Here again is the passage from Track that Norman posted for Hannukah:

#

First night
first light
a gift
to the
shammes

an o
pen gift
for you
to re
member.

As we reach the second stanza, the two-syllable prosody of the passage grows more visible; after all, for the first time, words begin to break across the line. Break? Division begins creation here, as each line invites its own reflections:

an o: An "Oh," of wonder or delight, as the light is lit; an "o," or circle, as the year swings round to this holiday once more (hence the pun on "ano"); the "o" is without beginning, without end, a figure, if we linger on it long enough, for the prolific, fertile void itself, perhaps.

pen gift: a delightful twist! The "o" of delight turns out to be the pleasure of opening a gift--in this context a Hannukah gift, I suppose, although the light itself has been the first gift, according to that first stanza. That the gift should be a pen seems multiply appropriate: a pen to write with, naturally; the pen as straight line (penis, natch, Dr. Freud) answering the circle (ahem!) of the o. "Pen gift" might also be an imperative, as though calling for something--this poem, perhaps--to be "penned" as a "gift" in response to the "gift / to the / shammes" in the first stanza.

for you: the "you" who receives the poem now (the reader); the "you" within the fiction of the poem, whoever that might be; the self of the poet, addressed here as in the imperative reading of the previous line.

to re: the second broken word in the poem, or a "torn" one (given how "to re" suggests "tore"), again in the second stanza. The poem starts with unities in pairs, we note, and then multiplies by division--and has now multiplied to produce a near match for "toyre," or "torah." Or, at least, a visual match; to the ear it remains "too ree." More could be done with this division between the aural and the visual, but time is short!

member: The division between "re" and "member" calls our attention to the true etymology of the word, and the folk etymology that accompanies it. In truth, the word derives from re + memor, to be mindful of something. By sight, in English, it would derive from re + member, thus "to supply with a new member." The phallic pun is both obvious and subtle. Obvious, in that the gift of a pen is a phallic one, suggesting new male agency--creative in whatever sense--on the part of the shammes, and linking him to Yesod, or Foundation, the Kabbalistic sephira associated with the phallus, among other things. (For a quick sketch of this sephira, check here, although I cannot vouch for the scholarship behind the site. It's suggestive, in any case, of where a deeper reading might head.)

The subtler phallic pun emerges when we think of the task of "re-membering," of putting severed body parts together, faced by Isis as she gathered the limbs of Osiris. ("I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" is, of course, a famous essay on poetics by Ezra Pound.) Is the shammes, the Jewish poet, lit by a gift and task that echoes hers? Is he--and it seems a "he" in this context--now blessed with the one piece of Osiris that Isis could not find, but had to fashion herself from clay? (Oh dreydl, dreydl, indeed!) The syncretism seems particularly delicious in a Hannukah poem, and will certainly infiltrate my celebration next year.

Thanks for this opportunity, cher Norman! Let's do it again some time.

Bernstein Review at the Forward

Does anyone out there know David Kaufmann of George Mason University? He's living one of my alternate lives, reviewing Jewish poets in the Forward. A nice little piece on Charles Bernstein's Girly Man to be found here; money quote:

By his own account, Bernstein grew up watching television in the late 1950s and early ’60s — that is, at the moment when a certain unabashed Jewish sensibility went mainstream. And Bernstein learned his lessons well. His choppy, chopped rhythms are both nervously, if not nervily, Jewish. He is, as everyone who has ever written about him has noted, a funny guy. But poetry is not supposed to be funny — it is about serious things, after all — and so it is tempting to dismiss Bernstein as something of a merry prankster, a man who is daring his audience to accept jokes and aleatory noise as real poetry.

Not so fast there, buddy. The genius of Jewish comedy — hell, the genius of Yiddish, if we follow Michael Wex — is that it puts linguistic invention at the service of a militant deflationary zeal. The wiseass Jewish waiter whom Bernstein sometimes resembles devotes his deadpan wit to exploding pretense and false comfort. When that waiter reads the papers, this demolition work can take on a markedly political edge.

Bernstein most definitely reads the papers. If “Girly Man” is both focused and approachable, it is, in large part, because it is sustained by the poet’s horrified reaction to the events of 9/11 and its aftermath. Here are some lines from “War Stories”:

War is never having to say you’re sorry.
War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.
War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged.

Bernstein does not usually engage this directly, and in a section called “Some of These Daze,” Bernstein takes an uncustomary turn. In a short series of blogs and letters written on and after 9/11 (here Bernstein is obviously thinking of the diary entries that Whitman published as “Specimen Days”), he confronts the event more or less head-on:

Tuesday morning I rouse my friend Stu from a profound slumber to tell him what has happened to the twin towers. — “They’re ugly,” he says, after a pause, “but they’re not that ugly.”

Nadelberg's Names

[While I modestly but eagerly await the second installment of Eric's commentary, here's my take on Isa the Truck Named Isadore.]

Amanda Nadelberg’s Isa the Truck Named Isadore has received a number of notices since its publication earlier this year, most of them very positive. I think it’s one of the best first volumes of poetry to come along in quite some time: immensely readable, it yields a great many immediate pleasures. The poems are smart, generous, welcoming and often very funny, beautifully poised, nicely lineated, graciously timed. The book is wholly composed, that is to say, it is a "book" in Jack Spicer’s sense of the term (indeed, Nadelberg sometimes sounds like Spicer in his lighter moments), and the poems cleverly resonate against each other in all sorts of ways . There are sixty-three poems, each with a name as a title, in alphabetical order, from Adelaide to Zeb. Drawn from many languages (Welsh, Polish, Hebrew, French, Hungarian…), the names would suggest a multicultural agenda, but that turns out not to be case. Instead, all the poems are instances of current American speech, common vernacular, conversation oddly angled into art. Readers will think of Stein, Williams, O’Hara and other masters of demotic speech acts. Phrases teeter at the edge of cliché, back up into idiosyncrasy, and suddenly pitch themselves, tongue in cheek, into pop culture myth, morals and manners (“Tell her I want to apologize / like the talk show with the / four ladies said…”). The poems praise, complain, bless, narrate, explain, invite, argue, demur. They are in the voice of the named person, in the voice of an interlocutor, in the voice of the poet herself, in a voice from inside, from outside, all of the above, and none of the above.

All of this is reason enough for any poetry fan to be given this book as a Christmas or Hannukah present. Maybe especially a Hannukah present, because what most reviewers haven’t noticed, or have remarked only in passing, is that Isa the Truck Named Isadore is a wonderful addition to whatever it is we call Jewish American poetry. The Jewish fascination with the kabbalistic magic of naming is powerfully at work here. Invoking the name unlocks the mystery of the everyday, as we see in the often outrageous Jewish American scenarios. “Clelia,” for instance, tells of a wedding taking place in a bay on “floatable benches,” after the guests leave their shoes on the dock “Like that episode where Carrie loses her / 400-dollar Manolo Blahniks.” Here is the last part of the poem:

…So
we were exchanging the niceties we
had written for the ceremony and one
of our friends, Marilyn, fell in. She
was sharing a bench with our friends
with larger asses. Marilyn is tiny she
was barely holding on. Marilyn’s
husband couldn’t swim so he didn’t
go in after her but the Rabbi did—he was
an excellent swimmer and a good Rabbi.
A slight delay in the service but
we were all just so happy
that Mar was okay. Her
husband was especially happy he
told the Rabbi if he ever needed
life insurance he should
call right up—he sold it and
could get him a good price.

I could go on about the line breaks and Nadelberg’s strategic lack of punctuation, but what really tickles me is “we were all just so happy / that Mar was okay.” But if this sounds too much like surreal Jewish standup, then try “Elijah,” which I quote in full:

When you open the door
he humps the banister. He drinks
so little from the cup so little so
everyone can’t be sure if
he’s really there or not but
it doesn’t really matter. You don’t
see him climb the chimney, slide
down the roof, it is slate, and into
the open window upstairs. He looks
so pretty in your dresses while
you help wash the dishes
downstairs. He waits for you to
come up, brush your teeth, climb
into bed and onto him. You
crush his arm and it doesn’t
matter either. Next year he will be
elsewhere but tonight this night
you’re the winner. It’s a big night
when you’re sleeping with Elijah.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Don’t ask! Making great claims or offering deep analysis of this poem may spoil the fun, though this is also a serious poem and a sinister one. It confirms my long-held suspicion that I was not the only kid at the seder who was terrified by opening the door for Elijah, and even though I never thought of the ritual in sexual terms (well, not consciously), I now understand the truly uncanny nature of the whole business. After reading this poem, I have learned something new about Passover, something that has been there all along.

One of the longer poems in the book is “Feivel,” which, as some readers may recall, is the name of the little Jewish immigrant mouse (last name Mousekewitz) in the animated movie An American Tail (1986), directed by Don Bluth, with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. The poem grows increasingly phantasmagoric as it proceeds, which is no mean feat given its resolutely conversational mode. Here is a sample from midway through:

If my mother’s best friend were a doll
with a string to pull for a repetition
she would say I hate Florida. Many
people in Florida have had face lifts and
breast augmentations. It is fantastically
scary. An American Tail is also scary
because this little mouse named Feivel
is separated from his family on their way
from Russia to America. They had to leave
because of anti-Semitism. Maus I and II
are also stories in which mice face
anti-Semitism. There are many
Jewish people in Florida. I am
Jewish but I haven’t had any breast
augmentation. If I haven’t had
any breast augmentation or a
face lift then I am not from Florida.

By the end of this poem, Jews and mice and breast augmentation and anti-Semitism are swirling about so that it too has becomes, as Nadelberg says, “fantastically / scary.” But don’t worry:

…In the end Feivel and his
family are reunited. I haven’t found
my family yet but Feivel has and he
taught us all never to stop looking
even if we aren’t looking for
mice. It works for everything.

Thank you, Amanda Nadelberg. This wandering Jew will keep that in mind.

Happy Hannukah! (A Commentary)

Like so much of Norman Finkelstein's poetry, like so much that is either Jewish or poetry, this selection from Track invites commentary.

"First night / first light," it begins: an easy, almost inevitable rhyme in English, although not (say) in Hebrew, and thus perhaps a mark of the poem's diasporic nature. A rhyme across opposition, as though night inevitably produces, leads to light: a hopeful implication, surely. An echo, on reflection, of Genesis: and there was evening, and there was morning: one [or, the first] day. I've never thought of this holiday having any particular echo of creation in it, but evidently it does, or does now.

"First night / first light / a gift": lovely how the silent "g" in the first two lines now steps into the consonantal spotlight. The pairing of night and light could be the gift, or the light as a riposte to the night. R. Cohen says: "there is a crack, a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in."

"First light / a gift / to the": to what? to whom? Grammatical suspense hints at a pun: "to the" as "to thee."

"A gift / to the / shammes": Finkelstein's freeze-frame lineation reminds us that there is a light before the first light of Hannukah, an ohr kadmon, if you will: the light that lights the shammes, which then lights everything else. A poem about inspiration, then? R. Stevens: "We say, 'God and the imagination are one.' / How high that highest candle lights the dark." Every previous line has had two syllables divided into two words; this, two in one, as though that equation, that illumination, had been achieved. "Shammes" is an awkward word, a break from the diction of the first three lines, an interpolation from the Yiddish, and the Hebrew before that: a beadle, a sexton, a servant. On this night, and indeed all through the holiday, the servant gets the first, unnoticed gift. (When they sing "Bo'i b'shalom,' the back-benchers stand in front.)

"Shammes": in it we see "shame" transfigured ("Lo tevoshi velo tikalemi..." / "V'lo nevosh, v'lo nikalem..."--is that right? quoted from memory), also "sham" ("if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise"). The poet here as servant alit, and able to pass on light.

More tomorrow, on stanza two. A present to you, Norman!

Happy Hannukah!

from Track:

#

First night
first light
a gift
to the
shammes

an o
pen gift
for you
to re
member.

This, Via Jewschool

The inimitable ShaBot lives here.

Davidic Verse

Working up my talk on King David, I compiled a handful of poems that mention or deploy him. I'll post them over the next few days, just to keep things moving along here before the late-December break.

Here's one by Charles Reznikoff. I love how he embeds a line of iambic pentameter in the free verse of the poem as a whole, precisely at the moment when David (or his equivalent, in this case) declines the weapons of King Saul. What a fresh, surprising figure for the (Jewish) (American) modern poet's relationship to (British) (Christian) prosodic tradition!

from the sequence "Autobiography: New York"

X

I do not believe that David killed Goliath.
It must have been---
you will find the name in the list of David's captains.
But, whoever it was, he was no fool
when he took off the helmet
and put down the sword and the spear and the shield
and said, The weapons you have given me are good,
but they are not mine:
I will fight in my own way
with a couple of pebbles and a sling.

--Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941)

He's Back!

My good friend Anonymous is back, with a new love note:

By the way hymie kike I am a proud Sunni Muslim. You kaffirs are going to hell for not freeing Palestine. Inshallah.

Well, you know--somehow I knew you weren't a Sufi!

I still don't think this guy's entirely for real, but in any case, he's clearly been appointed my Patience Teacher for the next few weeks, and who am I to argue with such dedication to duty? I'll keep deleting his comments as soon as I spot them, and I'll stop boring you with my responses (probably), but let the record show that I appreciate his efforts. If I'm going to deal with anything Jewish, political or no, I'll have to deal with worse than this, so a little advance training will probably help.

Saith the Preacher (or in this case, the Poet):

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt
- I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

Salaam Namaste!

Ran Across This

Ran across this today, by Jerry Rothenberg: the sixth of his Altar Pieces, from Seedlings & Other Poems. I love the poem; anyone know the work in question?

This Mary Magdalene

has hebrew on
her bodice

& a naughty smile

Amsterdam 1993