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Introduction Daniel Morris In 2003, the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in New York asked Stephen Paul Miller to host a poetry event. Miller sought a dynamic topic in itself generating discussion, yet those he talked with simply suggested that he or she and their friends be asked to read and participate. However, when Miller posed the problem to Charles Bernstein the drive and specificity of Bernstein’s plan surprised him. Bernstein seemed to have seen a need and was responding to it. Conservative and fundamentalist coalitions were dominating the religious institutional and political terrain,and Bernstein proposed an alternative that would facilitate the public life of imaginative and interpretive, as opposed to fundamentalist , forms of religious life and support. Bernstein also stressed the “secular,” which significantly underscores practical realities of religious life and culture and its relations with culture at large. Miller happily deferred to Bernstein, and the result was “Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice” on September 21, 2004, at the Center for Jewish History. The event featured talks by Bernstein, Miller, Marjorie Perloff ,Jerome Rothenberg,Kathryn Hellerstein,and Paul Auster.Many of these responses to Bernstein’s guiding questions are reproduced in this volume, in addition to other “answers” written for this collection. For “Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice,” Bernstein asked: “What are the innovations and inventions of American Jewish poets over the past century? Can we say that there is a distinctly Jewish component to radical modernist and contemporary poetry? What is the relation of Jewish modernist and contemporary poets to the historical avant-garde and to contemporary innovative poetry? How do Jewish cultural life and ethnic and religious forms and traditions manifest themselves in the forms, styles, and approaches to radical American poetry? What role does a distinctly secular 2 Morris approach to Jewishness by poets and other Jewish artists mean for ‘radical Jewish culture’?” When we decided to edit a book based on the ideas the symposium generated , we added these foci: traces of religious Jewish texts and practices in secular Jewish radical poetic practice, including relations of poetry to prayer and other uses of sacred materials in secular poetics; assumptions that there is a “Jewish” essence, identity, or quality that a poet may express prior to the act of writing; asking how Jewish poetry can be written by non-Jews; expanding how “Jewishness” might look and sound and act in a poetic context ; relating intense textual scrutiny with secular rather than, for instance, fundamentalist religious considerations; Yiddishkeit poetry and culture and Yiddish modernism; contemporary Jewish American culture and poetics on a continuum with pre-Holocaust European Jewish culture and poetics;“eclectic strategies” for “doing Jewish” (as opposed to simply “being Jewish”); Jewish cultural life and ethnic and religious forms and traditions in experimental American poetry; work that accounts for the large body of experimental poetry concerning secular Jewish culture; secular approaches to Jewishness by poets and other Jewish artists and their relations to “radical Jewish culture ”: the secular as a paradoxically religious and in some ways characteristic Jewish concern that is germane to radical poetic process; Jewishness as an alternative to religious and cultural forms of classification, an alternative positing identity crises as positive; Hebraic and Jewish poetic form in modernist and contemporary experimental poetry; Jewish aspects in non-overtly “Jewish” work. This volume contrasts with Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry (1997), in which the editor Steven J. Rubin presented the first anthology devoted to Jewish American poetry. In his introduction, Rubin writes that his “purpose throughout this collection is to present the best and the most representative work of those writers who can properly be classified as American Jewish poets” (11). He goes on to state that he has “not included those poets who, although nominally Jewish, do not deal significantly with the American Jewish experience.” How did he define “best” or “representative?” What does he mean when he says that certain “nominally Jewish” poets “do not deal significantly with the American Jewish experience ?” Does Rubin consider certain kinds of American Jewish experience insignificant? Would Rubin consider a text such as “The Artifice of Absorption ,” an eighty-plus-page “essay” in the form of lineated verse by Charles Bernstein, an insignificant expression of American Jewish experience? Although his poem does not focus overtly on Jewish themes (such as the Holocaust , immigrant experience, Diaspora, anti-Semitism, the family, the place Introduction 3 of Yiddish in American poetry, or the Bible), Bernstein seems to...