The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik calls upon his bird to “Sing and tell me, my little bird, / of marvels in distant places.” It’s a bit hard for me to envision the “marvels” of Israel at the moment. Like many Jewish people, I’m distraught about Israel right now. In “To the Bird,” Bialik imagines an idealized place. It’s a “land of the sun,” a place “of wonders from where / spring springs eternal,” a “land where almonds and date palms bud.”
Today we’re more Emersonian than ever. We maintain that everyone is unique, that the primary task of life is to discover and give expression to the singular self each of us is meant to become. But can we define and understand ourselves in isolation, illuminated as though we existed alone? We’re social from the beginning, in networks of relationships, dependencies, affections, and obligations.
Sometimes illumination comes to us from a single word. This recently happened to me when I was reading the Gospel of Luke and encountered this verse from the Passion narrative, about Pilate, Barabbas, and Jesus: “And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.” (KJV 23:25) It’s the deadly precision of “will” that makes the sentence disturbing.
Norman Fischer is an influential American Zen-Buddhist, a poet and writer, and a Jew. He wrote Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms after spending a week with the Trappist monks at Gethsemani Abbey, where he experienced for the first time the Christian monastic practice of daily recitation of the psalms. Troubled by “the violence, passion, and bitterness” expressed in some of the psalms but recognizing the power they held for the monks, Fischer decided to investigate the psalms by creating his own versions of some of them.
If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they’ve written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind.
I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging, are to the experience of being expelled from home.
I’ve become slightly obsessed with a writer named Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi was a Scottish writer born in Glasgow in 1925. He probably should have died of a heroin overdose, since he was addicted to the drug for much of his life and lived as an addict on the streets of NYC for many years. Alas, he died of cancer in London in 1984. The gods are, as ever, cruel and mischievous. The dedicated smack addict perished from smoking too many cigarettes.
Ernest Hemingway said he wrote on “the principle of the iceberg”—1/8th above the surface, 7/8th below. For him, less is more, the meanings more powerful because they’re not stated, but implied. That’s why Hemingway has been praised for his art of omission, knowing what to leave out. It’s why the novelist Anthony Burgess honored him for teaching writers “how to use the silences between words.”
The New Testament is essential reading for me. But sometimes I wonder what it is I’m reading, and that’s because I don’t know Greek. I should have made the effort to learn this language long ago. Now I’m old, and it feels too late. I re-read, study, and think about the New Testament from afar, in multiple English-language versions. Here’s a passage from David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament (2017; 2nd ed., 2023), Luke 5: 1-11, where Jesus speaks to a crowd and then to the fishermen who will become his disciples.
I suggest a sub-genre of dead-cat-in-a-well poems, even though I have only discovered two instances so far. In both poems, a grandfather lowers his young grandson down into a well to clean it, dredging up a dead cat in the process. The recently deceased North Carolinian Fred Chappell, may he rest in peace, provides our first instance, titled “Cleaning the Well,” published in his 1975 collection River . The Alabama-born Paul Ruffin offers a second instance. His poem, also named “Cleaning the Well,” appears in his 1980 collection Lighting the Furnace Pilot.
Our mouths, our words, can be used for good or ill, to liberate or enslave, to bless or curse or encourage, to ask difficult questions. We share our stories, so others might be invited to tell their stories in turn, allowing us to not simply scream at and past each other but to see what values we might hold in common, to perhaps one day even arrive at a place of mutual understanding and esteem.
Some readers have asked: who is the you? I hope it’s not greedy to have “you” mean multiple things! First it speaks to the reader, the “you” who’s invited into the book. In some of the poems “You” addresses the Divine. And in other poems the “you” is addressed to the friend, a character in the book. Finally, “Matters for you Alone”: not only meant for a single person, but also for someone literally by himself: a solitary reader.
It’s not a good time for “organized religion.” “Nones” now comprise the largest single group in the American religious landscape. The dominant narrative seems less one of accelerating secularization than growing disillusionment with institutions and the communal practices they sustain. All the more interesting, then, when thoughtful writers breathe new life into ancient traditions of prayer, learning, and discipline. Two talented poets—one already well-known; another who soon will be—have new books that go against the contemporary grain.
Matthew Porto’s debut poetry volume, Moon Grammar (just published by Slant Books), is an intriguing collection. In three Parts, titled “The Angel,” “The Wanderer,” and “Endings,” Porto engages biblical narratives, travels in space and time, and finalities. All in all, Moon Garden’s poems give us a unique entry into what human life is about: its astonishments, its darknesses, its mysteries.
Enter Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, which explores the Christian gospel through the lenses of three literary genres: tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. In essence, Buechner suggests that serious matters of the gospel are first matters of a human life well lived before they are a logical problem to be solved and systematized.
This year, I’ll place my hope in books—history, poetry, Torah, and that most challenging book of all, the book of my life. Everything is in it—good and bad. I’ll try to catch myself when I’m tempted to skim, skip, cut words, sentences, paragraphs, lines, stanzas, pages, entire chapters that challenge and complicate the simple narrative I’d like my days and nights to tell.
When Karen Armstrong writes “Nature does not figure prominently in Judaism and Christianity,” in a chapter which looks mainly at Islam (she goes on to imply this is not the case in Islam and that in that religion, unlike in the other two, nature is a revelation on par with the Qur’an—which is of course also what Jews and Christians believe about the Bible and nature)—when she makes such a sweeping statement, I balk.
Lo yadanu. “We do not know what has happened to him.” Moses, that is. “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him’” (Gen 32:1).
Recently I pulled some of Lucille Clifton’s poetry off my shelf, because I hadn’t read it for a while—not even since her death in 2010. Opening her books now and browsing in them felt like re-connecting with an old friend. The first thing that always strikes me about Clifton’s poetry is what’s missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines.
God’s reading of us, while rooted in flesh and bone, is not limited to them. Or better said: flesh and bone, in God’s eyes, provide an absolutely reliable witness of our moral health (or lack thereof). No mystery there: God made human flesh and bone that way, as unambiguous representatives of who we are and of what we have made of ourselves.