Richard Jeffrey Newman

So this is kind of cool. I have been enter­ing my books into Sente, a really fine bib­li­og­ra­phy soft­ware pack­age if you’re on a Mac, and I came across these two books of poetry that I took from my grandmother’s library, Cups of Illu­sion and The Upward Pass, both by Henry Bel­la­mann, best known for the novel King’s Row, which he pub­lished in 1940 and which was made into a movie in 1942. Any­way, what drew my atten­tion was the fact that Bel­la­mann inscribed the books of poetry to my grand­mother, call­ing her his “dear lit­tle friend” in Cups of Illu­sion and “good friend” in The Upward Pass. My grand­mother once hinted to me that there was a story from the time she was a girl about her and a writer – though she never actu­ally told me the story; she tended to be very secre­tive about her past – and now, of course, I am won­der­ing what that story might be. In 1928, the year Bel­la­mann inscribed The Upward Pass, he also pub­lished Crescendo, about a man in love with two women. I some­how doubt that was the story my grand­mother never told me, that she was one of the women in the novel, but it is fun to think about.

Not much else to say about this. Just that I think it’s kind of cool. Here is a poem from Cups of Illu­sion that I opened to at random:

August Gar­dens

Falling petals and dusty leaves
And droop­ing flower heads
Beneath unpity­ing skies
Unpromis­ing of cloud or change–
Yet some faint life still moves
In your pale veins;
Some dumb, unknow­ing courage
Meets each day’s mock­ing sun.

How you keep faith with wind and rain!

I watch you in your silence,
Touch your curled ten­drils,
While my eyes
Search Heaven for promise
Or for change.

Can you know in your dim nerves
The touch of one who waits like you
And still keeps faith with God
As you keep faith with wind and rain?

And here is one from The Upward Pass:

The Gulf Stream

They say a tropic river threads the seas
Bear­ing the strangest things to north­ern lands:
Ver­mil­ion fish, like flow­ers, with sil­ver bands,
And bronze sea­weed from scar­let coral keys.
Green birds that mock the moon from tall palm trees
Where ghost-gray mon­keys hang by cun­ning hands,
Fol­low the thin­ning blue to north­ern sands,
And there among the black pines scream and freeze.

The while this ardent cur­rent chills and fades,
Splen­dors of ice drift slowly south, each one
A frozen torch of bore­alic fire,
Each one a spec­tral ship with rain­bow sails,
Sink­ing and fad­ing as it nears the sun
In this relent­less river of desire.

I am late pub­li­ciz­ing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Rad­i­cals” and “Empty Rhetoric” were pub­lished on Poets for Liv­ing Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”

Row­boats on the pond:
ran­dom par­ti­cles
danc­ing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and him­self com­manded
them to speak

—and our son, sleep­ing,
nes­tles fur­ther back
in his stroller, ani­mals,
no doubt, track­ing with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the nar­ra­tive com­po­nents
bounc­ing off each other
like these ves­sels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re hon­est about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Sub­mis­sion guide­lines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a state­ment if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, cor­rected for the spac­ing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a con­cept that is cen­tral to Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al­ity, means, lit­er­ally, the fix­ing of the world, and it refers to a reli­gious duty Jews are sup­posed to con­sider our­selves oblig­ated to per­form. In one strand of Jew­ish mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion, tikkun olam means the task of gath­er­ing the frag­ments of the shat­tered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in cre­at­ing the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to recon­struct the orig­i­nal god­head. On a more mun­dane, though no less sig­nif­i­cant level, tikkun olam is rep­re­sented by such things as the strug­gle for social jus­tice. For me, writ­ing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has writ­ten, “The first duty of the writer is the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Con­fu­cius], “All wis­dom is rooted in learn­ing to call things by the right name.” Find­ing my way through lan­guage to a fin­ished poem is the act of find­ing that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to dis­as­ters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encom­pass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Liv­ing Waters mis­sion state­ment is also worth reading:

Poets for Liv­ing Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil dis­as­ter of April 20, 2010, one of the most pro­found man-made eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phes in his­tory. For­mer US poet lau­re­ate Robert Pin­sky describes the pop­u­lar­ity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s over­whelm­ing enor­mity to a more man­age­able indi­vid­ual scale. As we con­front the mag­ni­tude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecol­ogy states that every­thing is con­nected to every­thing else.  An appre­ci­a­tion of this sys­temic con­nec­tiv­ity sug­gests a wide range of poetry will offer a mean­ing­ful response to the cur­rent crisis, including work that harkens back to Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and the ongo­ing regional effects.

This online peri­od­i­cal is the first in a planned series of actions.  Further actions will include a print anthol­ogy and a pub­lic read­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC.

I am very pleased that my poem, “Not Silenced, But Need­ing,” is in the new issue of diode. It’s a really good look­ing issue and it’s the first poem I have pub­lished that is not a trans­la­tion in a long time. I am hop­ing it’s the begin­ning of a trend, since one of my sum­mer projects is to work on the poems I have in my files and start sub­mit­ting them. I have enough poems to make a book; I just don’t know if the poems I have make a book, if you know what I mean.

The poems are from The Silence of Men. Here they are:

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrap­ping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a cur­rent,
a melody gath­er­ing words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iri­des­cent fish
bring­ing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
wash­ing the night from your flesh,
and I cra­dled your body ris­ing in me
till you were clean, glow­ing,
and when you sur­faced, glis­ten­ing,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Ethics Of The Fathers

Moses received the Torah from Sinai
and passed it on to Joshua, who gave
it in his turn to The Elders, and love
or duty, or maybe both, explain why
we still hand it down, even if we die
doing so. The Church burned us alive,
the Romans did worse…but you who give
your­selves to goy­ishe women, you lie
with their gods as well, and so we cast you out.
The rabbi paused, whis­pered Come back, and left
the stage. No applause. Behind me, a man laughed.
Beside me, a woman squirmed in her seat.

In love, my love, I’ve given myself to you,
nei­ther god nor god­dess, and not a Jew.

After Drought

Knees rooted in the bed on either side
of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat
bent in sum­mer wind, a bam­boo shoot
ris­ing, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud
swelling, a swal­low sculpt­ing air, a freed
white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot
beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat
lifts me away: I’m not ready. Out­side,
foot­steps, voices. Two men. Gig­gling, we pull
the sheet around us till they pass, but if some­one
does see, what will they have seen? A cou­ple
mak­ing love. No. More than that: They will
have seen the com­ing of the rain; they will
have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen.

If you’re an Asian Amer­i­can poet, you should con­sider apply­ing for this retreat. Kundi­man does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help men­tor the next gen­er­a­tion of Asian-American poets, Kundi­man is spon­sor­ing an annual Poetry Retreat at Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity. Dur­ing the Retreat, nation­ally renowned Asian Amer­i­can poets will con­duct work­shops with fel­lows. Read­ings, writ­ing cir­cles and infor­mal social gath­er­ings will also be sched­uled. Through this Retreat, Kundi­man hopes to pro­vide a safe and instruc­tive envi­ron­ment that iden­ti­fies and addresses the unique chal­lenges faced by emerg­ing Asian Amer­i­can poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tues­day to Sun­day. Work­shops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

This past Sat­ur­day, my col­league and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­viewed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive reader and won­der­ful inter­viewer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Work­ing The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s read­ing of this piece was her notic­ing my mother’s pres­ence in the poem and how that started me talk­ing about some­thing I often encounter but have never given much seri­ous thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­fort­able with their mother’s sex­u­al­ity, and I don’t under­stand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I under­stand intel­lec­tu­ally, I don’t get it emo­tion­ally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­turb­ing that I am not made uncom­fort­able not just by the idea of my mother as a sex­ual being, but by the fact that, when I was grow­ing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sex­ual rela­tion­ships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sion­ally go to bars, or danc­ing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick some­one up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me per­fectly nat­ural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they social­ized? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was grow­ing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was hav­ing sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is some­thing I want to write about, some­thing I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Work­ing The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
man­aged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­selves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hang­ing crys­tals
scat­ter­ing the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretch­ing
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers trac­ing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there grow­ing soft,
squint­ing at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the card­board open
and sat read­ing on the bed’s edge,
thumb­ing the foil-packed
lubri­cated cir­cle,
try­ing to visu­al­ize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was cov­ered with the dust
and small par­ti­cles of dirt
that set­tle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneel­ing hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised her­self on her elbows,
smil­ing that the sec­ond skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instruc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hold­ing water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile dis­ap­peared
and bunch­ing the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pil­low
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
try­ing with one hand
to be grace­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to bal­ance over her
with­out falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
star­ing wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, try­ing
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nos­ing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hol­low of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giv­ing way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hold­ing her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lift­ing heavy boxes.
She screamed into the mus­cle
just above my col­lar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said noth­ing after­wards.
We didn’t cud­dle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

“My faith lies else­where.” When I fin­ished read­ing Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007)¹ and started think­ing about what I would write in my review of the book, that is the sen­tence that came to me, almost as if it had been wait­ing — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the sur­face of my con­scious­ness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in Kryah’s book:

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given your­self over?

Who dis­solve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stop­ping place will be pro­vided, what
rest?

Where am I in this emer­gence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith places on the other side of the absence that is all, accord­ing to the monothe­ism I was taught grow­ing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two ques­tions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into them­selves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, there­fore, in itself per­haps the deep­est and most fun­da­men­tal test of faith — who will those peo­ple be? At the same time, the speaker of the poem is clear that some­thing is emerg­ing — some­thing which, based on the first two ques­tions, we can assume the speaker believes to be God. Then, out of that clar­ity another ques­tion emerges. What is the speaker’s posi­tion in the emer­gence, not in rela­tion to it, as if he were stand­ing out­side of it, watch­ing what was hap­pen­ing, wait­ing to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the speaker places him­self within this emer­gence, who is emerg­ing is no longer clear. The pos­si­bil­ity exists in the lan­guage that it is the speaker who is emerg­ing, that he is watch­ing him­self become, that he has dis­cov­ered his god within him­self, that he has come to accept that he is him­self, some­how, within his god.

Ques­tions of faith have been impor­tant to me since I was a teenager and I believed my future lay in the rab­binate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have demanded of me, how­ever, I did not set aside the strug­gle to come to terms with the final, indif­fer­ent and absolute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a mea­sure of Kryah’s suc­cess that, despite the fact my faith lies some­where very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spir­i­tu­al­ity — the poems in Glean nonethe­less con­fronted me with the ques­tion of just where, pre­cisely, my spir­i­tu­al­ity does lie. In large mea­sure, the poems accom­plish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for exam­ple, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”

Breath­bloom, the res­ur­rec­tion lily
spent on its stem,

the pale throat thrown back
announcing — what?

Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal released, their beauty un–
mis­tak­ably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hiero­glyph (for­got­ten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plun­dered,
it might give up its blank stare, and
sud­denly, shud­der in my mouth.

We exchange a lan­guage
dumb as flesh, pressed into and bruised
beyond recog­ni­tion, its only response the black eye’s dull cir­cle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
each color off­set by the sur­round­ing skin,
the cal­cite thought of your return­ing again.

I can­not muster
what I should have lost, and in the wish gained
more stead­fast: your curio, what swings from a locket upon my chest,

a mes­sage that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, sim­ply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line recalled for me Holy Son­net #14, “Bat­ter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself think­ing of Donne’s Holy Son­nets often while read­ing Glean, so much so that I read through the sam­pling of them in the edi­tion of the Nor­ton Anthol­ogy that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are rooted in the body, though very dif­fer­ently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metaphorizes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the phys­i­cal world in gen­eral, to give pres­ence to the absence in the face of which he ques­tions, asserts and main­tains his faith, Donne posi­tions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose pres­ence in the world the poems them­selves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Son­nets while read­ing Glean because, despite the fact that Kryah’s poems are writ­ten in a very free verse — the sen­tence frag­ment and the uncon­ven­tional spac­ing of the poems seemed to me just about the only two for­mal devices used con­sis­tently through­out the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of lan­guage as some­thing phys­i­cal, some­thing to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released.

In all hon­esty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not some­thing I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and com­mit­ment, the hon­esty and courage that went into writ­ing it. It is the kind of book I think every­one should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will trea­sure for the rest of their lives.

Talk about two very dif­fer­ent books by two very dif­fer­ent poets, but there are con­nec­tions, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side.¹ I first met Suheir Ham­mad some years ago when she came to Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege (NCC), where I teach in the Eng­lish Depart­ment, to give a read­ing as part of a day-long pro­gram on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict. The pro­gram was spon­sored by NCC’s Inter­na­tional Stud­ies Com­mit­tee and it gen­er­ated, even in the plan­ning, a lot of con­tro­versy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the col­lege admin­is­tra­tion voiced con­cerns about ade­quate secu­rity, about who the pan­elists would be and whether a bal­anced view of the con­flict would be pre­sented. What they meant by “bal­anced,” how­ever, at least as I under­stand it, was that no one who spoke for the Pales­tin­ian side should express views that were overtly hos­tile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing the Israeli side might express views overtly hos­tile to Pales­tini­ans and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speak­ers was a woman rep­re­sent­ing a far-right Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion — not Israeli, but Jew­ish — who spoke quite force­fully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quot­ing from the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion,² except that all the ref­er­ences to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

Dur­ing lunch that day — her read­ing was in the evening — Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revis­ited)” a poem from her first book, Born Pales­tin­ian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the pre­vi­ous semes­ter called Intro­duc­tion to World Jew­ish Stud­ies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s Feb­ru­ary 1994 mas­sacre of 29 Mus­lims — approx­i­mately 100 were injured — in which the speaker, a woman, imag­ines the vio­lence she would have done to a Jew­ish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flat­bush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the spe­cific details of the vio­lence it describes, but also for the naked­ness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates her­self for even imag­in­ing that she would per­form those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my stu­dents, all of whom hap­pened to be Jew­ish and most of whom came from con­ser­v­a­tive and ortho­dox reli­gious back­grounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly sur­prised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a sim­i­lar anger and that Suheir Ham­mad there­fore had every right to express her­self in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave read­ings. I don’t remem­ber her pre­cise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so vio­lent that she was not sure how her audi­ences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that peo­ple needed to hear, that she owed it to her­self and to her audi­ences to read it, pre­cisely because the pain and the vio­lence in the poem are so deeply embed­ded in the emo­tional cen­ter of the con­flict between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans, and no one should be spared a con­fronta­tion with that center.

My own opin­ion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jew­ish man she sees on the train in New York City respon­si­ble for the views of Baruch Gold­stein and, by exten­sion, the poli­cies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more pre­cise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is com­pre­hen­si­ble, how­ever, it is also an excus­able moment of Jew-hatred, no dif­fer­ent than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African dur­ing apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What mat­ters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes respon­si­bil­ity for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remem­ber, frankly, whether Ham­mad takes on the ques­tion of that respon­si­bil­ity in any of the other poems in Born Pales­tin­ian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My over­all rec­ol­lec­tion of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about com­ing to terms with anger. I remem­ber a cou­ple of with­er­ing poems protest­ing the way Mid­dle East­ern women are exoti­cized in the US, and I remem­ber poems that were clearly intended to con­front the reader with the phys­i­cal hor­rors of occu­pa­tion. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explic­itly that I am not accus­ing Suheir Ham­mad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mis­take to con­fuse a poet with the speak­ers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she har­bors that kind of hatred for any­one.) » Read the rest of this entry «