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Danger, Skepticism, and Democratic Longing: Five Contemporary Secular Jewish American Poets
- The University of Alabama Press
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Danger, Skepticism, and Democratic Longing Five Contemporary Secular Jewish American Poets Thomas Fink The five Jewish American poets whose work I will discuss (in reverse chronological order) alert us to various dangers, practice similar modes of skepticism , at times in divergent ways, and use different strategies to imply or articulate some form of democratic longing. While David Shapiro (b. 1947), Charles Bernstein (b. 1950), and Stephen Paul Miller (b. 1951) are close in age, Joseph Lease (b. 1960) and Joanna Fuhrman (b. 1972) are not. All of the poems analyzed here were produced in the last decade and a half, and most were written in the current decade. Generational distinctions seem less important to me than the notion that all of the writers are actively engaged in socially and formally acute exploration that characterizes innovative poetry in the United States at this time. Although David Shapiro has influenced younger experimental poets who write explicitly about Jewish issues, references to Judaism in his work coexist among so many different elements that it is difficult to consider them part of a sustained engagement with Jewish concerns in a single poem or a poetic sequence. And yet there are illuminating exceptions. In “Voice,” the first section of the sequence of the same name, Shapiro includes his most direct reference to the Shoah. This 1994 poem begins with an allusion to rabbinical interpretation: A woman’s voice is a sexual organ according to the Rabbis I would draw your voice photo of a sketch for reproduction (not for sale) 324 Fink A woman’s voice is a body part again washed to the beach like a bloody misogyny Cold light is misunderstood Do the firefly lights up from inside a children’s song.1 The first two unpunctuated sentences occupying the first six lines can be read as a male lover’s celebration of his beloved, bolstered by the authority of Jewish tradition’s admiration of women’s vocal beauty.“Organ”punningly includes a synesthesia of embodiment and an evocative musical instrument. The lover’s desire to re-present the voice in an artwork, allowing the voice to undergo multiple mediations (“photo”/“sketch”/ “reproduction”), is an act of homage, but “reproduction” is also a pun; perhaps the Rabbis affirm women’s sexual allure as insurance that the Jews will survive from generation to generation. But in the poem’s third sentence, Shapiro eliminates the ambiguity in “organ” by replacing it with the much less lyrical “body part,” and “bloody misogyny” challenges the assignment of a celebratory tone to the first six lines and may suggest that dangerous, antidemocratic tendencies within the rabbinical tradition would contain women’s sexuality with the excuse that it is a danger to men and to the Jewish people. The idea that “cold light / is misunderstood”—indicating a relay of synesthesia from “voice” indicates that interpretation is a problem, but it does not help us choose between the conflicting views in the first and second six lines. And the “enactment ” (imitation) of the firefly’s light in the “children’s song” is a reminder of illusion built into the fiction of representation. At this point, an indirect allusion to the Shoah enters the poem: Friend meets Waldheim Temple of Hypermnesia are you in the “forgetting movement” Kitsch and poetry No I’m in the remembrance movement and poetry is fire in the house. (55) Danger, Skepticism, and Democratic Longing 325 Kurt Waldheim was secretary-general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981,and between 1986 and 1992,when he was president of Austria,it was discovered that he had lied about his participation in the German army during World War II. As it turns out, Waldheim was tied to major war crimes. In his friend’s “meeting” with Waldheim, Shapiro envisions an intense recognition of the Holocaust’s dangerous impact on the present. “Hypermnesia”is not merely a prodigious memory,but one so troubling as to be linked with psychological illness.“Temple of Hypermnesia”connotes a religious calling for the extremely difficult exertion of memory to abhor past horrors as a means to democratic vigilance.This“remembrance / movement” is pitted against “‘the forgetting movement’” exemplified by the tendency at the time for some“revisionist”historians to minimize or even deny what occurred during the Holocaust.2 For Shapiro, such forgetting includes the aesthetic failure of kitsch, which misunderstands the “cold light” of tragedy by imposing sentimental representations of it.Instead,as“fire in the house,”poetry of acute remembrance...