Portions by Hank Lazer, and: Diorama with Fleeing Figures by Merle Lyn Bachman (review)

165 Book Notes Kneel as in prayer, kneel as in a sexual act; “Did I substitute?” Teare doesn’t intend to resolve this conflict; his final poem, “An Essay to End Pleasure,” is anything but. His attempt fails deliberately . Pleasure, sonic, linguistic, natural, sexual, and sinful fill this book. Read it for this. Take pleasure in the quick prose poems of the “Pilgrim” section; take pleasure in the sometimes shocking juxtaposition of prayer and sex; take pleasure in the formal experimentation; take pleasure in Teare’s mining of Emerson , Thoreau, Anne Carson, Djuna Barnes, and a 1956 Field Guide to the Ferns; and take other pleasures I have missed. As Teare writes, “we are / as much as we see.” Portions, by Hank Lazer Lavender Ink, 2009 Diorama with Fleeing Figures, by Merle Lyn Bachman Shearsman Books, 2009 reviewed by Norman Finkelstein The current generation of Jewish poets in America continues to produce some of our most robust and intellectually lively work, and interest in Jewish American poetry remains high. In the last two years alone we have seen the publication of Maeera Shreiber’s superb study Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics; a hefty poetry issue of the Jewish studies journal Shofar; and strong new work from poets as diverse as Henry Weinfield, Michael Heller, and Tom Fink. Forthcoming is Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, a collection of essays by some of the most important practitioners in the field, including the authors of the two books under review here. And indeed, avant-garde or “radical” poetics operate in both volumes . Yet if readers think of this practice as entirely devoted to defamiliarizing or estranging effects then they are in for a surprise , for Hank Lazer and Merle Bachman have written wonderfully welcoming books. Like many other Jewish American poets today, both Lazer and Bachman are also active critics. Bachman, who is fluent in Yiddish, is the author of Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature, and as we shall see, her relation to the language and culture of Eastern European Jewry is colorado review 166 fundamental to Diorama with Fleeing Figures. Lazer, a remarkably prolific poet and critic, has made many important contributions to our understanding of the avant-garde, and recently, in poetic works such as The New Spirit and in his collection of essays Lyric & Spirit, has been investigating the possibilities of Jewish spiritual renewal in a decidedly heterodox literary context. It is out of this context that his newest collection, Portions , emerges. Portions, as Lazer explains in his afterword, is an instance of his longstanding practice of “inventing a form and living with that form either for a specified number of poems . . . or for a specified duration of time.” Each poem in the book consists of fifty-four words, patterned 3 x 3 x 6: three words per line, three lines per stanza, six stanzas per poem. Though not gematria (a numerological method of interpretation based on the fact that Hebrew letters also serve as numbers), the form still reflects the Jewish tendency to see numbers as embodying spiritual principles , a notion that may also be operative in the late, numerically obsessed poetry of Louis Zukofsky, to whom Lazer dedicates one of his “double portions.” The idea of the “portion” itself comes directly from the Shabbat service, where each week a “portion” (parshah) of the Torah is read aloud, scrupulously studied, and opened to often highly imaginative interpretation. But what are Lazer’s portions about? In a word, immanence: the religious concept of spirit indwelling in the created world, or as Lazer puts it in “Here,” “this resounding space // where thinking sings / sacred place the / moment’s measured being.” Immanence, then, may be understood as a spiritualized version of the philosophical notion of Being, which reminds us not only of Heidegger, but also of American poets in the Objectivist tradition, like Zukofsky, from whom Lazer may claim descent. Being or presence is experienced in the moment, which in turn renews our sense of the sacred. The locus classicus for such poetic experience is George Oppen’s “Psalm” (“this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out”) to which Lazer alludes in “Which...