The Best American Poetry

Two Takes on Torah - Rachel Barenblat

Now the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at his tent’s front door
In the heat of the day. He looked up, and saw three men near him that were not there before.
When he saw them, he ran from the door of his tent to greet them, and he bowed to the ground.
He said, "My lords, pray, if I’ve found favor with you, do not pass by this servant you’ve found.
Pray let water be fetched, just a little, then wash your feet and recline under the tree;
Let me fetch you a morsel of bread to refresh your hearts, then go on with your journey..."

Those are the first few lines of this week's Torah portion, Vayera (Genesis 18), rendered in verse by Seth Brown, who's written a version (not a translation, but a rendering) of the entire Five Books of Moses in rhyming heptameter.

His rendering is called From God to Verse, and it's either chutzpahdik, impressive, or completely insane. Seth isn't a religious guy, but at this point I suspect he knows the Torah better than any of the rest of my secular friends. (He'd have to, in order to do this kind of work.)

I'll admit it, I love this project for its sheer nuttiness. And because I think it's a respectful yet quirky recasting of the Torah text. But I also love it because it feels to me like a sign of the tremendous richness of scripture.

My next book (due in early 2011) will be a collection of Torah poems, many of which appeared in early draft form at Velveteen Rabbi. (You can find them linked here.) My poems and Seth's have very little in common, stylistically, but they arise out of the exact same material. And that fascinates me.

It's a little bit like the way that Shakespeare's plays have sparked renderings as diverse as Kiss Me, Kate and Ten Things I Hate About You. It's not just that these foundational texts are deep, though they are; I think it's also that they're beloved, and have been so deeply-loved for so long. We can't help wanting to respond to them with our own creativity, our own transformative works which take them in new directions.

Ultimately I suspect that our transformative works say as much about us as they do about the sources from which they ostensibly spring. Seth writes Torah poems which are witty and literary and a little bit over-the-top because he is all of those things. (I'll leave it to readers and reviewers to figure out how to describe my Torah poems when that collection comes out.) And on that note: shabbat shalom, dear Best American Poetry readers!

Sitting in the darkness waiting for something to burst - Rachel Barenblat

In my post about Dave Bonta's poems a few days ago I mentioned Qarrtsiluni, the literary journal which Bonta co-edits (with Beth Adams of The Cassandra Pages.)  The journal's name comes from an Iñupiaq word which means "sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst." I think Qarrtsiluni is one of the best journals on the internet, not only because it makes good use of the unique opportunities afforded by its medium (daily posts, podcasts of every poem, moving images) but also because the writing is so top-notch. (Full disclosure: I guest-edited the Opening in the Body issue with Teju Cole a few years ago, which was a joy.)

One of Qarrtsiluni's recent issues was an issue dedicated to chapbook contest finalists, 2010 -- poems lifted out of the manuscripts which were finalists in the magazine's second annual chapbook contest. The winning chapbook this year is Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which is available both in print and in electronic versions, and it's excellent. (The winner of the first chapbook context, Pamela Johnson Parker's A Walk Through the Memory Palace, was also terrific.)

But the poems in the contest finalists issue give a sense for how difficult it must have been to choose Michaels' manuscript, because it was in pretty remarkable company. One of my favorite poems in the issue is Feeding the invisible cat by Janet McMann:

Music for fall - Rachel Barenblat

As soon as autumn weather settles in, I find myself tuning my iPod in the car to Värttinä. There's something about their tight (and sometimes dissonant) harmonies and their often-complex rhythms (who else writes songs in 15/8 time?) which calls to me during the cold months. Probably my favorite of their songs at this time of year is "Tuulen Tunto," which is in my favorite meter of all (6/8, which rolls like the perpetual-motion machine of the ocean) and which is melancholy and sweet.

Dave Bonta's utilitarian odes - Rachel Barenblat

Dave Bonta is prolix. He posts a lot of poems to his blog, Via Negativa. (Here's one from this week: October dusk.) He also podcasts. And he's author of the recently-published Odes to Tools (Phoenicia Publishing, 2010), a chapbook of poems which speak to, and for, the contents of his workshop. Here's one of those odes:

Ode to a Socket Wrench

Better than all power tools
is the socket wrench:

its accommodating nature
its chrome-plated steel
its handling of torque.

It can make a complete revolution
from the smallest arc

& as if time could turn
in either direction
with the click of a lever

the past screwed down
the future loose

a spring-loaded finger
clicks against
the gearwheel’s teeth.

Motherhood poems - Rachel Barenblat

The first poems I read after my son was born were by Heid E. Erdrich (sister to the novelist Louise.) My friend Tisha Turk (author of Getting Out Alive) sent me a copy of Erdrich's The Mother's Tongue with a note advising me that if my poetry-reading time were limited, I should start with the third section of the book, a series of poems about motherhood under the section heading "Milk sour."

My memories of those early weeks of motherhood are pretty blurry now, thanks in no small part to sleep deprivation (sleeping in 40-minute increments does really weird things to the body, as do postpartum hormones) but I remember reading Erdrich's poems. I read them one and two at a time, with the baby rocked to a precarious state of sleep on my chest or my shoulder, and I boggled to think that this overwhelming and exhausting experience was obviously intimately familiar to someone else.

During the pregnancy, I remember making a list of poets who were also mothers. Alicia Ostriker (Mother/Child Coda.) Sylvia Plath (Metaphors -- "I'm a riddle in nine syllables...") Naomi Shihab Nye (Eye Test.) I'm not sure I realized it at that moment, but it seems to me now that I wanted proof that it was possible to be a good poet and a good mother at the same time. I didn't know Erdrich's work then. I'm glad I do now.

Obsessions - Rachel Barenblat

Hello all! It's good to be back.

This week you'll be getting a grab-bag of posts about some of my current obsessions -- some poems and poets among them.

Of course, any list of interests is necessarily an act of self-editing. A list of things which I love but won't be writing about (at least not here!) would naturally include -- though not be limited to -- the following:

Fringe (and how John Noble blows my mind on a weekly basis); Argentinian wine; the Jewish art of midrash and by extension the pop culture art of fanfiction; Tex-Mex, especially Tex-Mex Sunday brunch (and the challenges in long-distance duplication thereof -- see also: "Diaspora Texan"); the smell of woodsmoke; Malagasy music; Hasidic texts about obscure holidays; watching my ten-month-old son flirt with a goatee'd teenaged boy at a diner this morning and wondering what kind of teenager he will become; windowsills lined with cobalt glass; laying tefillin; polar exploration (see also: my adventures on a glacier just before I discovered I was pregnant); Lapsang Souchong tea and its cousin Russian Caravan; our new red tagine which is just waiting for its first taste of preserved lemon; the incredible luxury of sleeping through the night; glimpsing a ribbon of road through rust-colored autumn trees.

What are you not writing about tonight?

Progression [Rachel Barenblat]

PROGRESSION

The house of Shammai suggested
lighting eight candles, then seven

and so on. Like coating our hearts
in rain that turns to ice.

But we know better.
We light smoky fires, deck the halls

with chopped-up credit cards
and cling to the increasing light.

---

My last poem during this stint of guest-blogging! I'm sorry the week is over, though I haven't maintained a poem-a-day schedule in a good long while; maybe it's a good thing I'm quitting while I'm ahead.

Hillel and Shammai headed the two famous houses of scholarship which manifest the twin poles of Jewish jurisprudence. Hillel's rulings tend to be more lenient; Shammai's, more stringent. The halakha generally follows the rulings of Hillel.

I'm glad of that, especially now, as we prepare to begin the festival of Chanukah tomorrow night. I love going from one tiny flame to the blaze of eight branches of light.

Happy holidays to you, dear readers!

[progression.mp3]

Seven reasons / Psalm 147 [Rachel Barenblat]

SEVEN REASONS (PSALM 147)

You rebuild your city with our hands
and gather our scattered sparks.
You darn the heels of our hearts
and comfort us with bandages.

You smear sunrise across the heavens
like raspberry jam
and coax every blade of grass
to emerge from the dark comfort of soil.
And you love our fragility
not our particle physics
nor the bridges we labored to plant
across the inlets your glaciers carved.

You lay down ice like glass
and frost like lace on our windowpanes
and then you breathe a January thaw
and our frozen places melt.

This creative rendering of psalm 147 owes much to zen abbot Norman Fischer's interpretive translations of psalms. Though I intentionally didn't look at his book before working on this poem, his work has had a profound impact on my approach to the psalms -- including this one, which is part of the daily liturgy. (I've written more about that at Velveteen Rabbi; you can read that analysis here if you're interested.)

[sevenreasons.mp3]

Psalm of assent [Rachel Barenblat]

PSALM OF ASSENT

When the electric company lifted us
out of persistent darkness
we were as in a dream. Slowly
the pub emptied of burly men
from West Virginia and from Maine.

Still, you reminded me
to light the lamp, then turn it down:
the shortest days are still to come
and the prodigal son is running late
leaving the work in our hands.

It is not incumbent upon us
to finish the text, but
neither are we free to refrain
from adding today's letters
quills scratching in the lamplit dark.

---

Line seven donated by Kate Abbott. Thanks, Kate!

If you can't see the embedded audio player at the top of the post, you're welcome to download psalmofassent.mp3.

In the dark [by Rachel Barenblat]

IN THE DARK (VAYESHEV)

The mysterious unnamed man
is always a messenger
sent to keep our story moving
in the right direction.

The appropriate answer
is always hineni, here I am
ready for whatever pitch
is up God's sleeve.

Into the pit, out of the pit
from slavery into service:
descent always contains
the seeds of ascent.

He had to be enslaved
in order to be accused
had to be accused
in order to be imprisoned

had to be imprisoned
in order to hear the dreams
of the cupbearer and the baker
which "surely God can interpret"

had to interpret dreams
in order to sire Freud
a few hundred generations
down the ancestral line.

But the cupbearer forgets
leaving Joseph in the dark
as the longest night of the year
threatens to swallow us whole.

---

Since last winter, I've been writing Torah poems -- poems which arise out of the weekly Torah portion -- and posting each week's poem to Velveteen Rabbi. (I plan to collect these into a manuscript; if you're a publisher who might dig a collection of midrashic poems, do let me know.) This week we're in the Torah portion called Vayeshev, the beginning of the "Joseph novella" -- one of my favorite sections of the Hebrew scriptures.

The Joseph story has everything: scheming brothers, prophetic dreams rife with poetic symbolism, mysterious strangers, descent into pits both literal and metaphoric. There's that multicolored tunic, famed in song and story (and symbolic in its own right: think of how clothing can disguise as well as reveal.) Plus there's the story of Judah and Tamar, an interlude which mirrors the Joseph story's themes of identity, disguise, and "descent in order to ascend," a classical Hasidic notion. And then there's Potiphar and his lecherous wife, and Joseph's imprisonment which sets the stage for his redemption, just as the eventual enslavement of the Israelites will set the stage for their -- our -- redemption writ large.

This year we're reading Vayeshev as the days tick down to the solstice, which gives the tale added poignancy. The days are getting darker, but a turn is coming which will hook our sonnet in a new direction.

Poem cross-posted, with different commentary, to Velveteen Rabbi.