Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Relentlessly Going On and On: How Jews Remade Modern Poetry without Even Trying

Relentlessly Going On and On: How Jews Remade Modern Poetry without Even Trying Stephen Paul Miller What is Jewish poetry, or, at least one kind of Jewish poetry?1 Putting aside all-encompassing definitions and tautological-“Jewish-poetry-is-as-Jewishpoetry -does”-responses, I find myself examining my own experience, asking “What sounds Jewish?” or, more to the point, “What does ‘Jewishness’ sound like?” I’m not sure, of course, and thankfully there’s no simple answer, but while driving I entertain my 90-year-old ma by turning the radio to Steve Somers’ Yiddish nuanced sports-talk schtick. She immediately identifies him as Jewish and is happy (though she cares nothing for sports). I ask how she so quickly 344 Miller picks up “Jewishness” in his voice and she eventually says the Yiddish accent comes from dovening, the Yiddish word for prayer sharing Indo-European roots with “divine.” Dovening as praying doesn’t exclude silent prayer, and my mother knows this, but thinks nonetheless of dovening as a rhythmic recitation of Hebrew liturgy while nodding and rocking back and forth. Since dovening is not a Hebrew word, in her experience rhythmic dovening reflects how Yiddish-and-English-speaking peoples process Hebrew, and she sees dovening as an important link between Yiddish and Hebrew, noting cadences of dovening in Yiddish. Okay, I’m not an expert, and my mother’s theory could be wrong, and even if it’s true, it might concern only Eastern European Jews. And yet it might point to something even further back than Yiddish. When I think of dovening, I think of an anapestic rhythm: unstress—unstress—STRESS An anapestic rhythm is generative, propelling us through language as dovening does through prayer, and indeed ancient Jews see time as linear, not cyclical How Jews Remade Modern Poetry 345 or restarting with each new king but thrusting endlessly from creation ceaselessly as a distinctive way of reckoning time, I mention this to my young son on Rosh Hashanah, when I tell him why it’s 5765.“Do some people still rewind time?” he asks. There’s an ambiguity to Rosh Hashanah. It moves you to the start of creation, clearing space to move forward. I won’t pretend to know anything about Hebrew— or even Yiddish— or for that matter the Aramaic in which Kaddish is chanted, but I think it’s notable that Kaddish begins in the future tense anapestically, constructing motion even from death: yisgadol yiskadosh— which are reflexive future third person singular verbs, so I think they mean something like: May He magnify Himself. May He sanctify Himself. I’m not sure but the point is it’s in the future tense and so is the word Israel, or Yisrael, meaning something like He will struggle with God and he will succeed, suggesting a constantly edgy relation with God. When I think of a Yiddish accent and the anapest and a certain Jewish drive, I 346 Miller think of somehow finding myself chatting with Jackie Mason on 57th St and 6th Ave. His last words to me are It’s a PLEASure to TALK to an inTELLigent PERson.” I think this sort of anapest lends itself to a direction indirection surprise! . . . direction indirection surprise! or unstress unstress stress ho hum wow ho hum wow rhythm. Rhythm is perhaps a better word than meter here since when performing Jewish liturgy dovening imposes something rhythmic on other possible metric readings, though it could of course be in the meter of the text too, and a poem can be enriched by possibilities of differing meters in the same passage—this richness of possibility maybe a mark between a good poem and less good one, between say,“of man’s first disobedience” and “once upon a midnight dreary.” Therefore, I do not mean overly to emphasize the anapest, or exaggerate its place in the Bible. The anapest merely indicates, in part through dovening, a tendency to stress a more generative and dynamic, rather than referentially reflective, poetic m.o., m.o.s that can accommodate the pace of say the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup or a Charles Bernstein or David Shapiro poem. The Yiddish accent might owe something to both dovening and biblical poetry, How Jews Remade Modern Poetry 347 perhaps more than to Hebrew itself. Hebrew lives so much through poetry that dovening and what I’ll call the dynamic and parallel structures of biblical poetry influence Yiddish, and other languages Jews use, such as English...