Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Meet the Preface

Meet the Preface Stephen Paul Miller there’s ecstasy in God being one With God-in-one distances between creation and judgment collapse, and since there’s nothing stopping us— ongoing intensity, neurotic ongoing intensity marks not only the best Jewish poetry but simply hot poetry.1 If God’s one, time’s blue toothed to the portable eternity in his or her belly— perhaps the portability of monotheism’s and iconoclasm’s literally lighter idol load suits nomadic shepherds, and nonnegotiable, scorched earth, theocratic identification with and domination of a place is the iconic, and thus sacrilegious, elephant in the room.2 If God’s one, I’m an other,3 a junk-to-junk jumping4 and boat-borrowing James Bond,5 segueing between wildly reserved Jewish feedback mechanisms, and powerfully unattached Judaisms.6 You beat it, Red Sea parts, escape again, and Charles Bernstein’s eyes light up. The Center for Jewish History asks I propose poetry events. Everyone I tell suggests they and their friends xiv Miller read, period. They fear fundamentalism getting too close to the text.7 But Charles meets my preface at the boat. Knowing no religion but wildly liberating textual scrutiny, Charles suggests talking “secular Jewish culture / radical poetic practice.” Read this note first.8 Notes 1. Many of the essays in this collection acknowledge that however one characterizes “Jewish poetry,” you need not be Jewish to write it. Hank Lazer, for instance, describes Jewish qualities in Fanny Howe’s work; Benjamin Friedlander construes Saint Paul as an innovator within secular Judaism; Norman Fischer illustrates how a continuum between silence and articulation blends Jewish and Buddhist perspectives ; Marjorie Perloff sees beyond simplistic historicizing to recognize Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens as poetic contemporaries; and my poem-essay points out Spalding Gray’s self-portrayal as Jewish. 2.Anita Feldman, in a 2008 conversation, said,“Some Israeli settlers have turned their idea of ‘the land’ into an icon, a sacred image, like the golden calf that the erring Hebrews set up as an object of worship. They’ve identified ‘the land’ as a sacred object replacing the moral law and the Jewish commitment to justice. Remember the person in the audience [at the Center for Jewish History ‘secular Jewish culture / radical poetic practice’ panel] who faulted Jewish writers for not ‘making aliyah’ to Israel? I think of her as someone who has replaced the Jewish devotion to justice with reverence for‘the land’as sacred.”Feldman’s critique of the“sacredness”of Israel does not, I believe, negate but rather enhance the cultural value of Israel. 3.“To speak means to be forever on the road.”Osip Mandelstam,“Talking about Dante” (1933), trans. Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, Delos 6 (1971): 75. 4. “The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.”Osip Mandelstam,“Talking about Dante”(1933), trans. Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, Delos 6 (1971): 66. 5. Like the Homeric depiction of Odysseus, the cinematic James Bond is a wan- Meet the Preface xv dering “man who is never at a loss,” and, since James Joyce in perhaps the protopostmodern English language text re-characterizes Odysseus as Jewish, through a twisted metaphoric logic, Bond can also be reimagined as Jewish. 6.See Edward Mendelson,“NewYork Everyman”(book review essay of Richard M. Cook’s Alfred Kazin: A Biography), New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008. Mendelson juxtaposes the Jew as“an outsider,with no special loyalties to any collective”with the Jew as“a member of a separate and unique group of people.”He associates Alfred Kazin’s literary strength with the former and “temptation” with the latter. Kazin believes some“tempters”trivialize the Holocaust for unrelated political purposes.Other “tempters”had been Kazin’s childhood Brooklyn friends and CCNY classmates who became Reagan followers and “neoconservatives.” Indeed, Kazin quips that he “saves his soul” by writing scathingly about them, likening them to “useful idiots.” Alfred Kazin believed the “ambiguity” of being Jewish, in Mendelson’s words, “central to all aspects of modern culture.”Kazin likens...