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Print this article Radical Poets Set Jewishness Adrift by Emily Warn June 27, 2011 RADICAL POETICS AND SECULAR JEWISH CULTURE Edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris University of Alabama Press, 2010 Don’t let the title dissuade you from reading this provocative book. The poets and thinkers represented here, many of them groundbreakers in American literature and thought, don’t know what it means either. That’s the point — to define these terms so as to answer a question that has not yet been posed in American poetry: what is radical Jewish poetry and how is it related to secular Jewish culture? In good talmudic fashion, editors Stephen Miller and Daniel Morris and their writers tease out the original question into a whole host of them, provoking lively discussion that often addresses some of the most pressing concerns of secular Jews today. What does it mean to claim a Jewish identity or to say that one is a Jewish poet? What is secular Judaism? And is it, in some circumstances, paradoxically religious? When is the intense scrutiny of texts a secular rather than a religious activity? The proffered answers are worth listening to because this particular group of poets and critics are masters, if not of the Good Name, then of the possibilities and pitfalls of language. They are its provocateurs, taxonomists, gematria-ists, and tour operators, roles that are quintessentially Jewish. This collection does nothing less than establish an important Jewish artistic tradition, and as such, inherently comments and expands upon the larger tradition. The essays elaborate radical Jewish poetry’s founding aesthetic, identify its current practitioners, and canonize its forebears — a remarkable group of American Jewish poets from the last century, many of whom were concerned with social justice: Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Reznikoff. George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukovsky (shown top to bottom) are three of the poets seen as forebears of the current radical Jewish poetic tradition. Credits (from top): University of Edinburgh; Gerard Malanga; Jonathan Williams. Being present at the groundbreaking of a tradition must be comparable to overhearing the secret conversations of twelfthcentury Spanish kabbalists just before they risked publicly refuting dominant Jewish beliefs and practices. In this case, the impetus for going public is a recently published anthology of Jewish poetry, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, whose editor Steve J. Rubin claims to publish the work of writers who “can be classified as American Jewish poets,” a classification one can only assume covers poetry arising from a core Jewish identity grounded in normative Jewish cultural experiences and religious practices. From the editors’ point of view, Rubin’s greatest sin is his failure to provide a theoretical basis for his selections — to ask and answer what Jewish poetry is — a shortfall the editors hope their book redresses. Yet when the editors and writers seek to answer the question, a kind of attachment disorder settles in. In the fluidity of experience, any fixed identity seems false to them, and they share a predicament with many secular Jews: they feel an intense ambivalence toward claiming a Jewish identity because it presumes allegiance to the all-knowing authoritarian Jewish God, a belief which has often led to religious wars. While “religious texts remain important sources of inspiration,” poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes in “Midrashi Sensibilities: Secular Judaism and Radical Poetics” (her essay in the book), they “no longer possess canonical authority or signify the poet’s allegiance to Judaism as a religious practice.” In place of a core, or “essentialist” Jewish identity, Charles Bernstein proposes a “performative” one. Bernstein, the group’s seminal thinker, is a Houdini-like poet whose work has confounded neat literary (and now Jewish) definitions ever since he co-founded the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school of poetry in the 1970s. Bernstein first asked and elaborated on Jewish identity as it plays out in poetic practice at a literary program devoted to the subject at the American Jewish Historical Society in New York in 2003. In his talk, now republished in this book, he asks: Am I Jewish? Is this Jewish? I am no more Jewish than when...

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