Life that swirls in the scraps of swallows in the early evening,
reaching out red from within the flower,
sprawling lazily along the entire length of the cat,
barking and then listening for a moment to itself within the dog,
fluttering in the gecko's transparent belly,
hiding behind the appearance of separate forms
moving inside the wheat or frozen in a trampled badger's body
on one side of the road
all, all of this -
life that defines itself and deconstructs in philosophers' minds
twisting in the bodies of spring vipers
or whispered by a cold carp,
its mystery glistening in the geometry of spider webs,
endlessly gushing, green, from the earth
or wandering restless in the bodies of storks
all -
rustling in thickets,
strangling the lovely homes with clutching ivy,
steaming through the window from the pots of barley soup,
dispersed in the semen scent of flowering carob
rising in bellies and in poems the length of a cigarette,
Life that exhales now between the ribs
in the heart's harmonica
all of this --
inside you -- blood and bone
inside me
now.

Continue reading...

I read this book mostly with welled-up eyes, and I cried hard when I finished the book. That heavy, deep cry we do sometimes when moments of the unimaginable and unchangeable are revealed to us. A Wall of Two, is a book of poems written by two sisters, Ilona and Henia Karmel, while first in Skarzysko-Kamienna and then later in HASAG-Buchenwald and recently translated by Fanny Howe. The poems are beautiful, heartbreaking and written with such a sense of care and love, and, in moments, simultaneous selflessness and dread, like in The Mark on the Wall:

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia

why did you write your name all over the walls?

Is this pain written down

or resistance to life’s passing?

Were you, too, afraid to disappear?

Without a sound? No one to miss you

because you belonged to no one?

Is your name all you owned, Praxia?

I understand you, little Russian one.

Such a sweet stem of a name.

For a girl so familiar though never known.

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia.

(more here)

The synopsis goes like this: Ilona and Henia Karmel were 17 and 20 years old in 1943 when they entered labor camps from the Krakow ghetto. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Krakow, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months.

Get A Tissue: and cry your heart out for and with the Karmel sisters. This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

After the war, the sisters immigrated to the United States and continued to write. Henia Karmel is the author of two novels written in English including Marek and Lisa, and Ilona Karmel is also the author of two novels written in English including An Estate of Memory.

So my friend Adam sent me to this awesome blog by a chick who has insightful things to say about all kinds of things she’s learning from various Jewish texts. I really know nothing about her, but I loved this post about a playa-rabbi in Talmudic times. My favorite, though, are limericks she wrote that summarize a masechet of Talmud:
There Was An Old Man: from Pumpedita...

(2a)
All are obliged to appear
Before He-Who-Instills-In-Us-Fear
Unless you are not
Let me tell you, we've got
A long list of exceptions. Come, hear!

(2b)
A person half-slave and half-free
Says, "I serve both my master and me."
But he hasn't a mate
So he can't procreate
Thus says Shammai, "It simply can't be!"

(3a)
Can a mute learn? Well, it came to pass
Two mutes started attending a class
And when Rabi beseeched
That God heal those he'd teach
They gained speech, and their learning proved vast.

(3b)
Words of Torah are like cattle goads
That prevent cows from veering off roads
Thus with Torah we stay
On God's path, and don't stray,
Bringing life (not death) to our abodes.

(3b)
How to detect the insane?
Those who wander on dark lonely lanes,
Lie atop graveyard dirt,
Or start ripping a shirt.
Otherwise, you can trust he is sane.

There are a bunch more, so head over to D'yo Ilu Yamey to read them. There are also sonnets. If this chick was a guy living in Nashville I would totally date her.

I always knew there were two Norman Finkelsteins.

But I was not quite positive about which was which until last week, when this Norman Finkelstein came to Purdue University to give a talk and to read some of his poetry. Yes, I said poetry. This Norman Finkelstein is a poet--and a good one, at that.Norman Finkelstein: ProvocateurNorman Finkelstein: Poet

After the lecture, I was fortunate enough to join the poet Finkelstein and another professor for coffee and a lively discussion. Somehow, I also managed to score a free copy of Finkelstein's newest book of poetry, Passing Over, which is a gem.

Below are a couple of exquisite excerpts from two of the poems.

From "inscription of the body on the text":

Something I know of bodies and something of texts, / how lines are inscribed and how they curve, / how they mingle freely and how they are forbidden, / how they articulate their wonted and unwonted fires.

And, from "Elegy":

Let the Angel of Death stay in his dressing room / forever redoing his makeup, / and let our hopes flourish falsely into flowers / for our lovers, who will laugh and throw them away.

Let the old world remake itself / into a sequence of lights. / There will be crowns in the sky and we will look up amused, / for we were told that the past / could be cleansed of all its imperfections. / Yes, we will laugh and turn the switch; / the lights will be extinguished and we will embrace in the dark, / thinking, before we give up on thinking, this is how it was meant to be.

The other Norman Finkelstein, the political theorist of the recent DePaul tenure scandal (and the subject of recent Jewcy discussions), does not write poetry. Both Finkelsteins, however, do publish books and articles on Jewish-American culture--though one is more politically-inclined, while the other relegates his critiques to the world of the literary, metaphorical, and poetic.

It is funny, though, no?

I wonder if, somewhere, there is also another Alan Dershowitz.

I used to hang out with a bunch of slam poets. They were much much cooler than me, as indicated by their rockin’ hair (this was before the era of Tamar with purple hair) clothes with chains, and one of them had a really big wooden hand carved walking stick that he carried around with him everywhere. I know that makes them all sound like tools, but in 1999 I thought they fuckin’ ROCKED.

You Cannot Ignore: Slam poets. I decided that I couldn’t be a slam poet because I wasn’t angry enough. I mean, I’m angry, but I’m more funny than angry most of the time. Anyway, my favorite thing about the slam poets was how they could just stand up and whip out a proverbial soapbox and people actually listened. I mean, at the time I was writing all kinds of short stories, and I guess some of them had some kind of social commentary (if, “I wish I had a boyfriend” counts as social commentary) but mostly I was just blathering. But slam poets—they had shit to say, and they said it LOUD and with GESTURES and people literally stopped in their tracks to listen to this group of teenagers rant about everything from health care to public transit. It was amazing, and almost always spiritual in some way.

I bring it up because Jewlicious alerted me to this group called Sacred Slam Poetry, creators of the Middle East Poetry Project. Their mission, according to their website:

The Middle East Poetry Project is an artistic bridge made out of innovative technology and supported by the personal narrative and the aspiration to bear witness. Using video-conferencing technology, the Middle East Poetry Project will connect an American University to a Palestinian Cultural Center and an Israeli University. These connections will be the artistic bridges that carry real-time interactive poetic performances.

Our intention is to use poetic expression and celebration to:

• Raise awareness of interconnectedness on a personal (i.e., the relationship between thoughts, emotions and actions), inter-personal and global level

• Bear witness to the personal narrative

• Dispel fear and misunderstanding

• Realize the potential for reconciliation and peace

Pretty sweet, huh? Visit the Middle East Poetry Project website for info on where to donate, and how to bring it to your school or organization.

In his memoir A Margin of Hope, the great Irving Howe named two key influences on his adolescent development into political radicalism: Marx and Shelley. Growing up in the working-class and ethnic Bronx of the 1930's, this was a fine pair on which to model one's outlook if boroughs and cities, not to mention kith and kin, felt too constricting. The romantic impulse to change the world arose as much from the brick-and-mortar ghettos of the new hemisphere as it did from the Lake District and Rhineland of the old. ("Arguing the World" was the title of the documentary made about Howe and his fellow contemporary intellectuals, who, for the sake of convenience, always had their geographic origin -- New York -- stamped, like an immigrant visa, on their permanent identities.)

The personal is the political but never quite as much as it is with firebrand antagonists of the status quo. Marx lived a yawning private life, but you can't scan his observations about the wife-swapping, adulterous bourgeois without recalling that, even as a catchpenny hack whiling away the hours in the British Museum, he still got around to humping the help.

Shelley's poetry was messianic and revolutionary; so was his boast (somewhat insincere, as it turns out), that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But he wasn't quite the freedom fighter in his domestic routine and, as Adam Kirsch recounts in this New Yorker review of a new imaginative Shelley biography, the author of "Adonis" and "Ozymandias" rather envied the Catos and Caesars of the planet:

Throughout his adulthood, he considered himself a serious radical—even claiming, “I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science”—whose purpose in life was to advance the cause of liberty in England and Europe. But he consistently displayed an indifference to reality which went deeper than his propaganda techniques. Shelley’s ineffectiveness as an agitator we could dismiss with a smile. But his political beliefs demonstrated the same contempt of consequence, the same elevation of pure motive over practical effects, the same lack of self-awareness. These qualities helped to make Shelley a genuinely illiberal thinker, whose politics verged at times on the totalitarian.

The essay that gave us the "acknowledged legislators" line appeared in a short-lived journal, edited by Byron and Leigh Hunt, called The Liberal. (It's since been revived in Britain as a highly engaging quarterly.) But of course, no conservative critic today can write about the radical litterateurs of the 19th century without seeing them, somewhat prosaically, as germinal totalitarians in the line of Stalin and Hitler and Mao. Yet Byron and Shelley only ever terrorized their own households and, not without good reason, public opinion. The beat Kirsch misses in the above paragraph is that Shelley's "contempt of consequence" -- most of all for his own behavior -- is precisely what made him incapable of anything other than a domestic tyranny. He lacked cunning and calculation. Though his self-involvement may have led him to become a lousy husband and a delinquent father, one can't quite envision him administering a Committee on Public Safety, or orchestrating a show trial. He was a frustrated man of action, a dilettante who probably resorted to poetry in the first place, and then made grandiose pronouncements about its possibilities, because he knew he'd never make a proper general or prime minister or king. He seems to have been hurt into poetry by his own practical limitations. (Compare this to the equally Romantic Benjamin Disraeli who wanted to be a writer, and was, but then realized his immortality lay in other realms.)

For good reason did Byron expire in Greece trying to fund a nationalist liberation army, all the while adopting an aristocratic hauteur about his efforts and aiming at martyrdom. It was the closest he ever came to making a sort of political difference he thundered about in his verse.

The ominous consistency of thought, said to be the hobgoblin of little minds and surely a necessary condition for dictatorship, was noticeably absent in the Romantics. Nor could they properly be described as "Manichean" for the simple fact that they declaimed the existence of God, but idolized his opposite, Satan -- if that isn't having it both ways, I don't know what is. Most of them also admired two wholly antithetical earthly figures, Napoleon and George Washington, the one the most radical counterrevolutionary, and the other the most conservative revolutionary. It was their Promethean natures that the poets loved. Ideology didn't enter into it.

Jesus is Everywhere

Jabes: Asks questionsBefore I go, I want to point you to a Jewish poet I love, Edmond Jabes. To begin with, you should crack open a copy of his Book of Questions...

Although I've never studied Jabes in any formal way, and it makes me nervous to stumble into the language of Postmodernism...

Derrida called the question ‘our freedom’ from God, which is what allows us to speak and to write, making Jabes’s intractable Book of Questions ‘a book on the book.’

And a lot of people read Jabes' with a lens of Postmodernism.  But Jabes was also very much a Jew and a theologian, and I find the bridge he builds between God (with a special interest in Kabbalah) and Postmodern Poetics to be really really useful.  He knew:

"The name of God is the juxtaposition of all the words in the language, Each word is but a detached fragment of that name"

But he knew this as both a Jew and a poet.

This Kabbalistic idea means that breaking open words and recombining their letters is neither just fun nor impious. It is not even just the Kabbalistic tradition of "traveling inside the word." (12) For Edmond Jabes, this method "permits a rediscovery, a rereading of the word. One opens a word as one opens a book: it is the same gesture" (DB 95). More, it is creation in the sense of enacting the possible. The motor of this process becomes, as Joseph Guglielmi has realized, the single letter. It at the same time interprets and creates

And as both a  poet and a Jew I find his work to be inspiring and complicated.  Which is a good thing. I like the marriage of inspiration and complication.  I'm a beleiver in the question.

Some words:

What if the book were only infinite memory of

a word lacking?

    Thus absence speaks to absence.

    "My past pleads for me," he said. "But my fu-

ture remains evasive about the assortment in its

basket."

    Imagine a day without a day behind it, a night

without a previous night.

    Imagine Nothing and something in the middle

of Nothing.

    What if you were told this tiny something was

you?

I was going to reply in kind to BeccaB's excellent comment to my earlier post, but I think I've wound up with another post altogether. Here she is on my chivvying of Robert Pinsky's endorsement of "difficulty" in poetry:

Michael -- I'd just forwarded your recent props to Kipling to my father (a big fan, who's had us stay at Naulakha)--and though I enjoy "Barrack-Room Ballads" I also love Wallace Stevens and James Joyce. I have no desire to make a fetish of difficulty for its own sake, but I don't see that as being what Pinsky is doing here...

I can't read that paragraph from Pinsky as saying the reader be damned -- quite the else. As I take it, he's saying that many human beings take pleasure in surmounting various kinds of difficulty (why climb Everest?)--and thus, for readers who like this particular kind of challenge, difficult texts can be a source of pleasure (rather than some sort of sick joke perpetrated by the writer at the reader's expense -- which is how some of my students have tended to regard them). If you like the challenge of making a hole-in-one or dancing on point and I like reading Ulysses, we both enjoy the challenges of difficulty in different realms--and there's nothing wrong with that. But it wouldn't make any sense for me to say that you shouldn't enjoy them because I prefer putt-putt with windmills and a bit of waltzing, and can't see the point of devoting all that time and energy on the green or at the ballet barre.

I certainly wouldn't say that all sorts of literary difficulty are equivalent or are equally beloved by all readers: me, I'll take Gerard Manley Hopkins over Ezra Pound any day. (Though if you put Penmaen Pool up against Sestina: Altaforte or In A Station of the Metro, I think GMH may get smacked down.) But after I've said "that was a bloody good poem," I might well like to have a go at figuring out how Hopkins's "expert use of caesura or spondee" helped to make it so good.

I guess my gripe with Pinksy's thesis is that poetry derives from an oral and musical tradition, which to my mind means it's supposed to be memorable. I tend toward conservatism in my appreciation of it, although I will say my lyric hero Auden had his moments of airy-fairy difficulty, too. Though even these were enthralling in I think the way you say you find Joyce to be: "The pillar dug from the desert recorded only / The sack of a city." Lovely, but what fucking pillar and which bloody city, Wystan?

Joyce's best stuff -- "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" -- is usually parsable. Nighttime, an arboreal universe. Got it, James. But as Martin Amis has said of Finnegan's Wake, it's an 800 page crossword clue and the answer is "the."

Difficulty in performance is not the same as difficulty in reception. To watch Tiger Woods play golf or Michael Jordon play basketball is to be electrified by a physical prowess that's as beautiful as it is rare. But their achievements are also bound to a seldom remembered and less inspired fact: the adherence to pre-established rules and conventions. Indeed, Woods and Jordan's talents are all about this lucid adherence: This is how you hit a golf ball perfectly; this is how you land a basket perfectly.

In poetry, we are of course wowed by technical proficiency (Larkin was a true master here, as was Hardy before him), and I'll confess I was a touch hyperbolic in my riff about how poets appreciate each other's work. But I still think abtruseness of meaning, anarchic hijinks with form, wordplay for its own sake -- all these traits hinder rather than help the purpose of language. (And you're talking to someone who worships Nabokov because, for all his "I differ from him Conradically" duds, he still managed to wonderfully describe his nymphet heroine Dolores Haze as "dolorous and hazy," among other things.)

Shakespeare's obsessively picked over ambiguities notwithstanding, what does one really come away with when faced with preening, impenetrable symbols? "Making it look easy" is one of the highest critical compliments we can pay to an artist; the execution is so deft because the result is simplicity itself, while still being almost impossible to imitate.

Kipling excels at this: Who has read "making mock 'o uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap" and not been at once stirred by the sentiment while also impressed by the vivid turn of phrase? (Your father's my new best friend.) Or Wilfred Owen, another bard of warfare, whose own corpse-and-trench-strewn verses instantly commit themselves to memory. I know of no one else who could make a piece of artillery sound this almighty and terrifying:

Be slowly lifted up, thou long, black arm,
Great gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
Spend our resentment, cannon, -- yea disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men's sake, whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdraw, dark arm, thy spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast, complete and whole
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

"[W]hom thy vast malison / Must wither innocent of enmity." The first thing I'd do is realize how fine this phrasing is; the second thing is discover that malison and enmity are both Middle English Anglo-French words, perhaps not accidently employed because of Owen's dual postings in Essex and Joncourt in World War I, and a good way to underscore the continental pity of that shattering conflict.

So yeah, bring on the difficulty. Just be sure it's easy to understand first.

If you translate the good Robert Pinsky's paragraph on the necessary "difficulty" of poetry out of its academician's Guide to Life-speak --

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

-- you have a rough equivalent to the following: "The reader is not a consideration."

Here's a secret shared by poets who write poetry worth reading and remembering: When they read a good poem they don't talk about dissociation of sensibility or even comment on the expert use of caesura or spondee. They say, "That was a bloody good poem."

T.S. Eliot is a briar patch of pretension wherein a few odd roses gasp into existence. Ezra Pound? Not just "difficult," but unintelligible, wrongheaded and scholastically disastrous (his translations of ancient Greek were on par with his politics).

As for the manufacturers of contemporary verse, that collective workshop of rhyme-less, rhythm-less insecurities, Philip Larkin got their number long before they were a number:

“Kingsley [Amis] and I used to read other people’s poems, and seriously planned getting a rubber stamp made – or rather two rubber stamps made, one for each of us – reading ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘What makes you think I care?’”

All Alone: Most of all… in a crowdJosh Corey might be surprised to find himself quoted at Faithhacker (as he doesn’t often self-identify as a terribly affiliated Jew), but this morning I cannot stop thinking about a recent post from his blog… so I’m directing you there now. I think it might lead to an interesting conversation.

Josh was at the same conference I attended this week, but he managed to attend a panel I was sorry to miss (chock-full of the poets I linked on Monday), “Nu? What’s New About Jewish Poetry?”

He begins his description like this:

At first I was irritated with what I took for the panelists' devotion to a Jewish identity heavily invested in a kind of perverse (but all too common) nostalgia for the immigrant experience and even the Holocaust. Since for me what's most difficult and alienating about my Jewishness has to do with the disintegration of the legacy of the Jewish left—the fact that names like Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin have been succeeded by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Ariel Sharon—I was impatient with what seemed to be their preoccupation with the past.

But then his thought process shifts. He continues a little later:

By panel's end, I was actually feeling surprisingly warm and fuzzy about the panel and my Jewishness, because we are all united in complex layers of self-estrangement and attachment. One of the panelists, I can't remember who, used the example of the Jewish mother who embraces and criticizes at the same time. I did ask a less angry version of my question and got some good answers—Ilya's was brief and to the point: "I choose diaspora, a new diaspora," and I think that comes close to expressing my own position vis-a-vis my Jewishness. One is never entirely unconscious of difference, and there is a special difference in the difference you feel from your fellow Jews—a difference that unites us…

And this is very very interesting to me. In many of my posts here, there is this idea (which I sometimes think of as a chip-on-the-shoulder) of being “outside” the Jewish mainstream. Typically, I consider this “my” issue and not a trend.

But it attaches to issues of affiliation, denomination, observance, and intermarriage. It connects to how I relate to the non-Jewish world. It pushes me to be critical of myself and other Jews. It compells me to seek out other fence-sitters, and individual ways of practicing my faith. It causes me to approach Judaism in a pretty academic/thinky way.

But what if this isn’t such an extreme and unusual position? What if it isn’t just me? What if this is a new Jewish identity? What if this is an overwhelming reaction/relationship young Jews have to the nostalgia of previous generations, the tropes and stereotypes, the political climate?

What if we feel most Jewish… when we feel most alone?

You Hate Poetry: Based on the boring cover of this book, so do I.

Since Tamar did a Jewish fiction rundown on Friday, and since I’m a poet, I feel the need to represent my own neglected genre (slight chip on the shoulder over here), even though I know that a very very very small number of you actually buy and read poetry books. But just in case, here’s a short list of good

young Jewish poets whose work you might enjoy…

As I said this morning, Jason Schneiderman is hot shit.

Ariel Greenberg’s first book blew me away, and her newest is more than a little Jew-ish.

Dan Beachy-Quick is (like me) from an intermarried home and does not always identify himself as Jewish, but I’d be remiss if I left him off the list. He’s brilliant and his work reflects the kind of philosophical thought that touches my faith-bone.

Josh Corey is smart as hell, and is blogging today about Jewish poetry (and several of the other poets mentioned here… which will give you a sense for just how small the poetry-world is)

Sabrina Orah Mark writes intense, strange poems. I love them.

And of course, there are a kazillion other people I should include, but I’m supposed to keep these posts short…

I should say that though none of these people confine themselves to Jewish subject matter, they are all Jewish writers. (If I want to learn about the immigrant experience or kosher cooking, I’ll read fiction or nonfiction).

But not poetry… in poetry that kind of “subject feels wrong to me. It feels too heavy, like a caricature. In poetry I look instead for a subtle touch of faith, a vague context of culture. I want to be challenged and inspired by poetry… to learn and think and develop ideas about language and the metaphysical or spiritualor mechanical or logical/legal aspects of the world (which can absolutely be Jewish). I want to find myself approaching belief from odd angles.

I want the inner workings of things. Not descriptions I’ve heard before.

(Full disclosure: some of these people are people I know, but it’s a teeny-tiny world, poetry-land)

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Written in indignant response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

My 11-year-old nephew wrote the poem below. Read and be amazed and then search within yourself for such depth. I dare you.

by Joshua Hollander

Glistening in the sunshine,
Half hidden in the trees,
Toressent’s Pond’s murky, moldy green waters
Still gleamed miraculously and beautifully on that distinguishing never-ending day
The emerald liquid revealed her reflection
She was so somnolent-looking,
With the light satchel consistently drooping to her waist.
Her name was Urea
An ethereal name,
as ethereal as the woman that was emerging from the water.
For the past seven years she had been trying to get out
To see the glorious world around her
And that day just happened to be today.

Anna AkhmatovaClive James again today. What a happy Monday this is shaping up to be:

Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful. The ban on publishing new work was relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journeywork in prose. (As a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers' Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his "lyrical wealth," was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. It was permissible to value a poet's specifically poetic gifts as long as the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin's case, heralding—the correct political direction.

Now old Clive is paying occluded tribute to his fuzzy Marxist background with those two opening sentences, whose inversion of direct and indirect objects (x may not do something to y, but y will surely do something to x) is borrowed from Trotsky's famous apothegm that:

You may not be interested in the dialectic. But the dialectic is interested in you.

Quite clever of Clive to use the prosody of the author of Literature and Revolution to vindicate one of the most beguiling artist-victims of revolution.

Incidentally, here's what the founder of the Red Army thought of the "very talented" Akhmatova, whose poetry he lumped into the pre-Revolutionary category of versifying "Islanders," an archipelago of which stationed itself in the Moscow Art Theater:

One reads with dismay most of the poetic collections, especially those of the women. Here, indeed, one cannot take a step without God. The lyric circle of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Radlova, and other real and near-poetesses, is very small. It embraces the poetess herself, an unknown one in a derby or in spurs, and inevitably God, without any special marks. He is a very convenient and portable third person, quite domestic, a friend of the family who fulfills from time to time the duties of a doctor of female ailments. How this individual, no longer young, and burdened with the personal and too often bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, can manage in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe, is simply incomprehensible. For Schkapskaya, who is so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic (Schkapskaya's talent is real), God is something in the nature of a go-between and a midwife; that is, he has the attributes of an all-powerful scandal-monger. And if a subjective note may be permitted here, we willingly concede that if this feminine wide-hipped God is not very imposing, he is far more sympathetic than the incubated chick of mystic philosophy beyond the stars.

Anna Akhmatova, assessed. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

Greetings Jewcy!

In December I saw Judy Gold's show and
laughed and cried my head off. Really good and it's
good you're helping to get the word out.

I loved browsing through your site -- as a writer and
perfomer, yoga teacher, college teacher, I like the
tone and look of Jewcy very much. I've been active in
the poetry community in NYC for many years and wonder
if you are interested in introducing some more
literary work into your pages. I see your slant is
more essay writing, current events like Slate, but I
think poetry is hot right now and it might work.

I've pasted one of my performance pieces below, and
have plenty more poems and writings relating to Jewish
themes. If you'd like to talk about setting up a
literature/poetry department, I'd welcome the
opportunity to sit down with you over coffee.

Congratulations on launching Jewcy.

best,
Lisa

Glatt Kosher Deli

It is an ugly blonde sheitel the color of straw
with the texture of a horse similar in hue
to the golden brown potato knish she hands me
on a small round paper plate. A bell resounds
and out of the microwave comes two more plates --
one with Kosher Chinese tofu and vegetables,
the other with vegetarian stuffed green peppers.

“You like soy? I have a delicious soy patty
I made this morning” -- a voice comes over the counter

dripping with yiddish. I knod and chew as I watch her
slice
a slender sliver of gefilte fish from a narrow log.
She looks up from behind the vast glass counter.
“You eat fish?” I knod. Yes, oh yes --
and she hands me the jelled carp on a piece of wax
paper similar
in color to the fish.

“For first time customers you get a dip” --
and she slides open the cooler door as though
raising curtain number two --
“Choose -- whitefish, spinach, humus,”
I say charif, I like charif
and her eyes brighten -- “you speak hebrew?”

“What do I owe you?”

Her tall plump son with the white deli apron
wrapped around his thick waist,
the payess tucked behind his ears
yells something in Yiddish form across the room --
“Vie fuhl ist dis?” and he holds a pound of cholent up
in the air.
“Today? Half price, but freeze it, it’s all fresh --
I use no preservatives, but freeze it, freeze it,
we want no one should get sick, god forbid.”
She turns too me. “I make too much food,
my husband gets upset.”

It is her warmth encrusted by a layer of shrewdness
I like, this religious businesswoman peddling,
pushing,
bargaining, selling her goods.

“You want I should put the mushroom sauce
over the soy patty? This is how it should be eaten.”
Through the window I see her quick, efficient hands
scoop the mushrooms into a small cup.
With her thumbs she seals the top, airtight.

“We hef some-ting for everybody --
you live in the neighborhood?
she asks, curious, suspicious even of this
black-leather clad woman.

In my head I hear bad Jew, lost Jews,
non-kosher Jews, parasitic matza-ball Jews
who are merely fressers, gluttons, Jews
who follow the Dalai Lama, Jews who marry
gentiles, do the rosary -- Jews who nosh
on uncircumcised cocks.

When I go home I promise to say
a brocha as the soy patty heats up
in the microwave.

Dear Lisa,

Thanks for the compliments and submission! Fortunately, Jewcy doesn't have a poetry department. Slam poetry is scary and wacky enough to be hot right now, I suppose, so keep at it and you may just wind up in an off-Broadway show like Judy Gold.

But you seem a little raunchy so I'd picture you in a show more like "At Least It's Pink," in which a fat slut sings for 80 minutes about how fat and slutty she is, only wearing pants part of the time. I can see it now: you on stage "slamming" about slippery Kosher Chinese tofu, easing into an aria about that luscious slice of gefilte fish and a culminating crescendo of "Jews who nosh on uncircumcised cocks."

It will be FABULOUS.

I'll put in a good word to the Judy Gold producers for you.

XOXO,

The Submissions Box Checker

Jewcy welcomes unsolicited submissions. Please send yours to submissions@jewcy.com.

Zeek: Just artsyfartsy enoughPosting about the bookish trip to Israel this morning made me think about ZEEK, a pretty great Jewish literary magazine (in print or online).  There's really nothing else quite like it out there.

That's not to say that there aren't all manner of Jewishy magazine that like to consider themselves literary, but ZEEK actually manages to maintain a fairly high standard of literary quality (I'm something of a snob when it comes to litmags)... but isn't afraid to get into real Jewish topics.   

So for people who like their Judaism to be a little artsy-fartsy, or people who like their contemporary culture to be a little bit shtetl... ZEEK is a good read.  Where else are you going to find new translations of poetry by  Rav Kook (a 19th century Hasidic dude) alongside new poems by Ilya Kaminsky (perhaps the youngest poet-hipster in the USA)?

Their mission:…We welcome the heretical, honor the sincere, and are generally bored by in-jokes, apologetics, and irony. We value independence, courage, and thoughtfulness, and publish stories which say something new about that which is meaningful. Above all, we believe that an intelligent, articulate Jewish sensibility is one that speaks from its place of particularity in a far wider conversation -- and true conversation requires both a fearlessness to create and an openness to change.

Bonus:  for those of you who write, it’s a good place to submit your work!