Editor's Introduction

The five essays in this special issue of Shofar concern the relation between radical poetics and secular Jewish culture in the United States since about 1940. Ethan Goffman argues that poetry chosen by Jewish editors for the Partisan Review of the 1940s reflects their attempt to construct a paradoxical identity that blended progressive political views with a High Modernist aesthetic that often flirted with totalitarianism. The poetry of a stylistically experimental, but notoriously antisemitic figure such as T. S. Eliot or the politically conservative Wallace Stevens, according to Goffman, could be appropriated by editors such as Philip Rahv to define a new identity for urban Jewish intellectuals as they repudiated Stalinism in favor of a liberal individualism that privileged a fragmentary art. "Alongside the high modernists, the Partisan Review published poets who mixed politics and experimentation, a tradition that would continue through the beatniks of the 1950s to the jazz poets, the black nationalists, to such recent movements as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets," writes Goffman.

Alan Golding demonstrates that the same ironic process of appropriation of a right-wing modernist icon—in this case Ezra Pound—occurs in the work of the left-wing secular Jewish "Language" poet Bob Perelman. Anticipating questions about identity, counter-factual history, and linguistic play discussed by Josh Schuster in his essay on Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Ben Friedlander, Golding notes how Perelman produces a "guide" to Ezra Pound's difficult poetry that parodies (and yet also reflects) an academic discourse designed as a useful pedagogical tool for confronting the interpretive challenges of High Modernism. The emphasis on irony, play, pedagogy, revisioning, rewriting literary history, and an ambivalent relation to academic discourse are all marks of Perelman's secular Jewish version of an identification with Pound. "Perelman's recent work is dedicated to a very Poundian project: finding a renewed place for poetics within institutionalized pedagogy, and expanding the possibilities for poetry in the process," writes Golding.

Goffman and Golding focus on secular Jewish poets and editors who have re-visioned non-Jewish (antisemitic and right wing) Modernist poets to reflect on their own fragmentary identities and mixed allegiances to writing inflected with aesthetic, academic, and political orientations. By contrast, Burt Kimmelman traces the roles alienation and a diasporic poetics play in contemporary Jewish poets who reflect the influence of a Jewish modernist forebear, the "objectivist" poet George Oppen. The poets Kimmelman discusses—Norman Finkelstein, Armand Schwerner, and Michael Heller—were all born into Judaism, and in adulthood have lived secular Jewish lives. "Although they are secular, there is a key element in the Judaic tradition, a tension between thought and writing, which the poets enact in their work; they not only acknowledge it but realize it defines them as being Jewish. The fact of their secularism only serves to highlight, paradoxically, their Jewish orientation," writes Kimmelman. He understands the written word, for the Jewish poets under discussion, as a source of their Jewishness, but also the scene of exile from the Word of God.

The three essays I have discussed so far focus on contemporary Jewish poets and editors who imagine new relations to literary history, and especially to modernism. Josh Schuster's essay similarly deals with issues of writing and revision, but his focus is on poetry that inscribes "counter-factual" history. As much as Kimmelman argues that poets in the Oppen tradition are "men made out of words," to borrow a phrase associated with Wallace Stevens, Schuster discusses the slippery issue of facticity and the dangerous and yet potentially liberating process of re-imaging history through creative writings in Du Plessis, Bernstein, and Friedlander. Schuster focuses on ways of "writing through" history to imagine its alternatives. According to Schuster, "Rachel Blau DuPlessis uses writing through as a long-poem structure to work against the Poundean tradition and his desire to rewrite history. Charles Bernstein's 'what if' poems often involve fictitious dialogues, public policy announcements rewritten as poetics, and taking everyday newspeak like 'girly man' and charging it with poetic and social tension. The counterfactual device used in 'writing through' is the point at which...