By: Mr. Hillel Broder, English Faculty
What makes a poem a poem? Must a poem have a rhyme scheme,
follow a poetic tradition, or contain a particular poetic technique? Must it be
written by an author whose intention is that it be read as poetry?
Teaching both the writing and reading of poetry is no easy
task: too often, students assume that a poem must rhyme, possess a certain form
or shape, contain parallelism or metaphor, or present as enigmatic or riddling in
its meaning. No wonder that the study and creation of poetry are both perceived
from the outside as arcane tasks or obscure pursuits.
In teaching poetry, then, I begin with the opposite
assumption: poetry is not a lofty or obscure art form that is only achieved by
the most eclectic or romantic. Just the opposite, in fact—poetry is the very
music that underlies all language; it is the confluence of cadence, coinage,
and sheer surprise that we find in pop songs and sonnets alike.
To start, I ask students to find poetry in everyday,
mundane, and “low brow” language. They might find a startling, alliterative
phrase in a news report headline, magazine ad, or television show title. They
might locate an isolated but embedded rhetorical flourish that moves,
entertains, or inspires within a sea of facts, technicalities, or clichés.
None of this is new in the history of poetry, in particular,
and in the arts, in general. Building poetry from the language all around us is
akin to the work of the museum curator and collage artist. And discovering
poetry underlying certain linguistic expression takes a certain confidence—it
is to read the world and all of its “Stop!” signs—with a certain poetic lens.
The Russian Formalists described this essential literariness underlying poetry
as that which defamiliarizes the familiar—that which makes the familiar, new.
In our world of verbal expression, popular songs and avant-garde poetry alike have been crafted out of new constellations of found and
collaged language—on a personal note, my grandmother’s cousin, Robert Feldman, jotted
down the hit single “My
Boyfriend’s Back” on a bar napkin after overhearing that song’s chorus
shrieked overhead. And of course, T.S. Eliot’s modernist poetry is built on a
tradition of allusion, as much as John Ashberry’s Tennis
Court Oath and Hart Seely’s Existential
Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld draw on the language of popular media and
politicians, respectively, in a tradition of satirical form.
This is not to say that poetry is solely an attempt to build
upon a consolidated literary canon, or an ironic political jab. Nor is it
solely a recreational form—a leisurely activity of recollecting experience in
tranquility as Wordsworth might have it, or an expressive means for the
obfuscating riddler and wit.
On the contrary: As engaged Jews, our students appreciate
the complex historical engagement with the immediacy of our verse, as a
language of the soul at its most immediate and most pressed —in the cries of
David in Psalms and the laments of Ecclesiastes, we derive the very prayers
that we harness when most fragmented and broken. In more modern terms, the
fragmented rhythms of Paul
Celan’s “Deathfugue” in Auschwitz, and in contemporary terms, the simply
arranged lists of names in Billy Collins’s 9/11 commemoration “Names”
speak directly to loss, to the experience of shattered selves and stories. If
anything—and against the infamous pronouncement of Theodor Adorno to the
contrary—there might only be poetry after Auschwitz, as
poetry doesn’t demand that we impose meaning, form, or narrative.
Our challenge, as students and teachers familiar with Jewish
texts, might mean making these comfortable works strange to us—so that we might
hear their poetry anew. Instead of reading through the usually paragraphed Siddur
or abstracting the Bible’s narrative arcs and moral principles, how might our
students hear and speak the rhythms, the strikingly spun repetitions, and the
shocking language in these traditional texts? How might they hear the song
underlying the Bible, and the music in our Siddur? They might start, as I have
suggested above, by collaging, translating, and elaborating upon the striking
phrases in Psalms in the form of a found poem, thereby generating their own prayerful
intentions (kavanot)—and prayers—within the bounds of the tradition. Later,
they might find the unfamiliar and strange—or the familiar and moving—poetry in
the language of the Siddur itself through a mindfully versified recitation.
These are some of the exercises that I envision in the
Jewish humanities and arts: students rendering their own translations of the
Siddur and building their own personalization of the siddur through
translation work of liturgy into poetry. And in a similar vein, these are some
of the questions that I encourage aspiring performance poets to consider in
writing religious poetry for a Sermon Slam: How might
they discover their tradition’s spoken rhythms and rhetorical forms when
crafting their own verses of exaltation and lamentation?
In so doing, we might reorient our relationship with the
Bible and Siddur, and thereby reorient our own selves. For our traditional
texts stand as a reorienting mirror, reminding us of our sometimes unfamiliar
potential within.
