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Who or What Is a Jewish American Poet, with Specific Reference to David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Jerome Rothenberg Hank Lazer There is no need for me to Mintz my words, and thus whatever Perl-of wisdom I can come up with, I will say it.  I have learned, for example, that Halakah is a secret anagram, an amalgam of Hanukah and my own name, Hank Lazer, and thus the particular Halakah citations I will make, in answering that vexing question, who is a Jew?, will have the requisite Halakic authority.  Who is a famous Jewish American poet? I have it on the best authority. I googled. The very first source listed indicates,“This is a list of famous Jewish American poets.”And the website itself is answers.com, so how much better can it be? Charles Bernstein (I’m not making this up—he really is listed first),Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Allen Grossman, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Chester Kallman, Bob Kaufman,A. M. Klein, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Emma Lazarus, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Howard Nemerov, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Pinsky, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Adrienne Rich, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Boris Zubry, Louis Zukofsky, Zvi Yair.  As for who is a Jewish poet, there is one fundamental test: humor. If not ever funny, then not Jewish. Pound is probably not Jewish. Zukofsky maybe. Oppen may have a problem.  For me, it all comes down to one story. If your son—let’s give him a happy name: Felix—doesn’t want to have a Bar Mitzvah, makes that his decision, Who or What Is a Jewish American Poet 19 and you don’t push him, but very near to his thirteenth birthday he decides he does want to have a Bar Mitzvah,and you contact a good friend,say,a poet you have known for a long time, perhaps a poet who is a Buddhist priest, and also a Jew, to do the ceremony, and, thank god this is in New York City, you inquire around, and, in fact, it is possible to rent a Torah, and you do so for the sake of your son’s Bar Mitzvah and to assist the Jewish-Buddhist-poetfriend , then you are a Jew. What I do not have time to take up in this essay, but hope to do so perhaps at a later date, is what is a poem and who, therefore, is a poet.  A Test of Jewish American Poetry: If Philip Levine was stopped by the side of the road and was being questioned by the police, would you pull over to help him? If Philip Levine’s poetry was under attack by a prominent, nonJewish critic, would you come to his defense? Does your response change if I say that in the New York Review of Books the noted Christian American literary critic Helen Vendler attacks the famous Jewish American poet Philip Levine for his sentimental poetry? Or, do you hold back and think to yourself that perhaps Oscar Wilde was right when he said that “all bad poetry is sincere”?  (Note: Bernstein, DuPlessis, and Rothenberg have all contributed to this present collection of essays on Radical Jewish Poetics edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris . Many of my citations originate with these talks/essays.) Kafka’s question (written in his diary of 1914)—interestingly, cited by both Bernstein and Rothenberg—“What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself”—points toward a refusal, an uneasiness, a discomfort with identity itself, with the particularity of an identity-based or ethnic taxonomy. The paradox of this particular refusal of identity—the Jew who refuses the Jewish American or Jewish label—is that it has become an identifying Jewish trait. I wonder if there are similar traditions of refusal among Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Muslims, particularly among poets born into these groups who, nonetheless, in spite of their gestures of distancing, remain figured within such terminology. Rachel Blau DuPlessis cites Edmond Jabès asking, “How come the non-believer as much as the believer can claim, can presume on the same Judaism?” Or, as Rachel continues,“as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi remarks: ‘In the often turbulent process of social and cultural change that accompanied or succeeded the Haskalah, there emerged that modern species of “gottloser Jude” [Godless Jew] whom we...

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