{"id":95851,"date":"2022-06-14T17:05:23","date_gmt":"2022-06-14T15:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95851"},"modified":"2022-06-04T08:37:19","modified_gmt":"2022-06-04T06:37:19","slug":"14-05-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=95851","title":{"rendered":"You Need a Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>You Need a Poem<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nJAKE MARMER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In the first installment of a monthly poetry column, words of unrequited revelation for Shavuot<\/span><\/h4>\n

.
\nRembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ 1655THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Eerybody needs poetry, all the time. I am sure of it, sure enough to spend my life writing and teaching it, and even writing about<\/em>\u00a0it, often in\u00a0these very pages<\/a>. More than anything, though, the life in poetry, for me, is about reading poems\u2014in books and off innumerable screens, quietly alone and with my partner, in coffee shops and at the dinner table, with my children and my friends, on the beach and at shul. And while most of the time, I read poems for pleasure, curiosity, and insight, there are times when my need for them becomes acute.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I remember how much I needed poems when my children were born. Or, on the other side of life\u2019s swing, I needed poems when the war in Ukraine started, and I was lost for words, trying to turn the chaos in my head\u00a0into thoughts<\/a>, if not into a balm. I also feel the deep need for poems when seasons change, on birthdays, at celebrations, and during holidays. Like nothing else in the world, poems allow us to hold onto life\u2019s pivotal, liminal points: we may feel speechless, but a poem\u2019s words ring out, bring sense and beauty to the moment, and perhaps even sanctify it, as a ritual might. In this column, which I have entitled \u201cYou Need a Poem,\u201d and further installments, I will feature poems the moment is calling for: the poems I need, which you might need as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tikkun Leil Shavuot<\/em>\u2014the tradition of staying up all night reading and studying Jewish texts on the eve of Shavuot\u2014might just be the one Jewish ritual I adore without any reservations. It involves unstructured, community-led learning, staying up late talking and thinking about the transcendent. (Drinking coffee and eating cheesecake at all hours doesn\u2019t hurt either.) The theme of revelation, which the holiday commemorates, is spiritual and esoteric but it gets enacted in an intellectual manner as texts are received, discussed, and internalized. \u201cRevelation\u201d, admittedly, is a prohibitive, difficult word, but the learning and the convivial atmosphere bring it down to earth a bit.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Denise Levertov, a poet who has written extensively on spiritual experience and often draws from Biblical and Hasidic teachings, sees revelation as both transcendent and dream-like yet oddly concrete. In her 1961 poem \u201cThe Jacob\u2019s Ladder,\u201d (from the New Directions\u00a0collection<\/a>\u00a0with the same name) she envisions the transcendent path:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n

The stairway is not<\/strong>
\na thing of gleaming strands<\/strong>
\na radiant evanescence<\/strong>
\nfor angels\u2019 feet that only glance in their tread, and<\/strong>
\nneed not touch the stone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is of stone.<\/strong>
\nA rosy stone that takes<\/strong>
\na glowing tone of softness<\/strong>
\nonly because behind it the sky is a doubtful,<\/strong>
\na doubting night gray.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A stairway of sharp<\/strong>
\nangles, solidly built.<\/strong>
\nOne sees that the angels must spring<\/strong>
\ndown from one step to the next, giving a little<\/strong>
\nlift of the wings:<\/strong><\/p>\n

and a man climbing<\/strong>
\nmust scrape his knees, and bring<\/strong>
\nthe grip of his hands into play. The cut stone<\/strong>
\nconsoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.<\/strong>
\nThe poem ascends.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Perhaps the most striking image of the poem is the \u201cdoubtful, \/ a doubting night gray\u201d sky. Rather than the \u201cpitch black\u201d darkness that is often invoked in poems and myths, the sky here is of a far more realistic shade, one we are most accustomed to actually seeing: that liminal dark-gray color, in which shapes and people might be discerned but are easily misidentified. Levertov\u2019s night-sky is both \u201cdoubtful\u201d and \u201cdoubting\u201d, as if given the agency to think on its own. Through that thinking, it comes to question its own existence\u2014the same way a human staring at the sky might. The \u201cdoubt\u201d here is endemic to the spiritual experience itself: the skepticism that comes, almost inevitably, by way of talking and thinking, about such an experience.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Levertov imagines the stairway as \u201csolidly built\u201d, which is puzzling: the poem suggests the existence of a well-worn spiritual path, one that has been walked by others, and that is always there, honed and furnished, waiting for us. The sky around it may be fraught with doubt, but the stairway is solid. Can the spiritual experience be quite so defined? Or is the poem suggesting that the ancestral text, the story of Jacob\u2019s ladder, is itself a passage upwards? Is this about the act of reading the tradition, struggling with its sharp edges, step by step, and making it one\u2019s own\u2014just as Levertov is doing here, creating her own midrashic reimagining?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is a kind of faith in this poem\u2014not only in the spiritual quest but also in the meaning-making. The year Levertov wrote \u201cThe Jacob\u2019s Ladder\u201d was also the year of a well-known trial in Jerusalem, which Levertov reflected on in her poem \u201cEichmann Trial\u201d, describing the heinous criminal as \u201can apparition \/\/ telling us something he \/ does not know: we are members \/\/ one of another.\u201d It is a poet\u2019s verdict: sharp, scintillant, and brave. Clearly, Levertov believes that it is possible to find words for the unspeakable and respond to life\u2019s most impossible moments; that the poetic contemplation of history, just like her contemplation of the sacred myth, can culminate in an insight.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After all, the culmination of the \u201cJacob\u2019s Ladder\u201d is the poem, as the final line attests. But it isn\u2019t the writing: the poem \u201cascends\u201d rather than descends, it is neither given nor revealed. Rather, it moves higher than the person \u201cclimbing\u201d can reach\u2014as a prayer might, or at least hopes to.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Rachel Mennies, a contemporary poet, whose incredible book \u201cThe Naomi Letters\u201d was published last year by\u00a0BOA Editions<\/a>, has a very different approach to spiritual moments. \u201cThe Naomi Letters\u201d is a set of epistolary fragments, addressed to the poet\u2019s muse named Naomi. These letters are laced with desire\u2014sometimes it is a desire for human companionship, other times it is explicitly erotic, other times it is numinous. We do not know whether Naomi is a real person or a textual mirage. References to Jewish holidays and Hebrew texts appear throughout the book, and Naomi\u2019s name itself can\u2019t be read without the Biblical resonance it carries. Yet, if Biblical Naomi was the addressee of the famous \u201cWherever you go, I go\u201d phrase, the Naomi of Mennies\u2019s poems moves in the opposite direction. She seems to be everywhere the poet\u2019s imagination goes: whenever the poem appears, it finds Naomi there.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In one such letter, with a date for its title, \u201cFebruary 20, 2017\u201d, the poem describes an ascent, radically different from Levertov\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
\n
\n

A stack of books sits to my right and another to my left at my writing desk.<\/strong>
\nOne stack reads\u00a0Wrecks<\/em>.<\/strong>
\nThe other reads\u00a0Odes<\/em>.<\/strong>
\nBeyond the window our god will write nothing until the sun rises.<\/strong>
\nI do not understand my role at this desk, Naomi.<\/strong>
\nThe ritual unchanged for years, the streets beyond the window unchanged.<\/strong>
\nI once thought aging was more like climbing a mountain than unfolding your unread letter.<\/strong>
\nI thought the view evolved the higher my legs took me.<\/strong>
\nThat the air cooled you at certain altitudes \u2013 might easy the body, lull the limbs.<\/strong>
\nInstead I wake with a turning fist between my legs, another in my teeth.<\/strong>
\nThe wind beyond the window disordering my pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Here, instead of a single, well-crafted ladder, we see two stacks of books, rising upwards: one is the collection of praise, the otherInenumerates destructions. But which is the right pathway for the poet, seated at her desk between them? \u201cI do not understand my role,\u201d she confesses. Unlike Levertov\u2019s protagonist, she does not climb, but is stuck, paralyzed in her place. Her own book, one that we find ourselves inside of, is lyrical, and personal: she neither joins the ode\u2019s chorus, nor speaks of the world\u2019s wreckage. Her praise is for Naomi\u2019s shadow; her wreckage is her own.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rachel Mennies<\/strong> NASTASIA MORA<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

As with many tropes of ascent, this one also involves a mountain where revelations are given, which is how the narrator conceives of the process of getting older\u2014being able to see more, to understand more. To receive the relief of \u201chigher altitudes\u201d is to attain the wisdom of aging, by acquiring more context, which, however, seems to remain \u201cunchanged\u201d. Yet even as she unfolds this vision, the narrator questions its viability. Could it be, she posits, that the revelation feels like the \u201cunfolding your unread letter\u201d? Here, the poem is at its most ambiguous. What letter are we talking about? Is it the letter from Naomi\u2014a new letter, which simply has not yet been read or shared with the reader? Or is it a letter\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0Naomi, which is unread, and never will be, because Naomi does not exist? Or is it, perhaps, a letter to Naomi, which, like Naomi herself, exists in the recesses of the poet\u2019s imagination, and is only still being composed, is if unfolded, and revealed? If so, it is not revealed with clarity, but with the intensity of some profound inward stirring.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

While the first part of the poem occurs at the desk, as the letter is being unfolded, the poet suddenly finds herself in her bed. The penultimate line of the poem is its most haunting. It may be erotic, but it is also pained, fraught with loneliness and longing, with something stifled or silenced, and unresolved. It is a very private confession, and it is not here for Naomi\u2019s benefit only: it is here for the poet herself, and all of us, too. If anything is revealed here, it is the speaker herself, who is now at her most vulnerable. Immediately, in the last line, we\u2019re transported again, from the bed back to the desk by the window, where the wind is given a free reign. In Hebrew, the word for the wind is also the word the for the \u201cspirit\u201d,\u00a0ruach<\/em>: it is an unpredictable and disorienting power.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Many of the poems in \u201cThe Naomi Letters\u201d address the matters of mental health, and more precisely, anxiety. As the \u201cNovember 15, 2016\u201d entry in the collection has it, \u201cThe doctor says my anxiety is\u00a0situationally extreme<\/em>, but I believe it\u2019s just a good student of history.\u201d Given the poem\u2019s date, it is hard for me not to contextualize it against the backdrop of the election result that occurred only a week prior. But it could reference any number of reasons, past or future, that the poet may feel anxious. And is it not the role of the poet to be the lightning rod, the voice that finds pained words which intertwine historical and psychological? Writing and reading these words is the ritual of healing the poem offers. If, at the end of Levertov\u2019s work, the poem-prayer ascends, Rachel Mennies\u2019s \u201cFebruary 20, 2017\u201d ends up with pages, scrambled and undone\u2014but witnessing them as such may be a kind of ascent, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The \u201cBook of Ruth\u201d is chanted in synagogues on Shavuot. With Naomi\u2019s guidance, Ruth comes into the fold of Jewish practices. I am reading Rachel Mennies\u2019s book this Shavuot because it feels like a gradual revelation of the self at its most unreadable, using poetry as the only medium strong enough to hold the confusion. And I will be reading Levertov\u2019s \u201cJacob\u2019s Ladder\u201d, because, like Levertov I know that against the backdrop of the sky of doubt, there are texts, ancient and contemporary, that feel to me like mythic ladders. Where do these ladders take us? For that, I think, we need a different poem yet: perhaps another time, in this very column.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/strong>,\u201d by Denise Levertov, from POEMS 1960-1967, copyright \u00a91961 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n
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Jake Marmer<\/strong> is Tablet\u2019s poetry critic. He is the author of\u00a0The Neighbor Out of Sound\u00a0(2018) and\u00a0Jazz Talmud\u00a0(2012). His jazz-klezmer-poetry record\u00a0Hermeneutic Stomp\u00a0was released by Blue Thread Music in 2013.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You Need a Poem JAKE MARMER In the first installment of a monthly poetry column, words of unrequited revelation for Shavuot . Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ 1655THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART Eerybody needs poetry, all the time. I am sure of it, sure enough to spend my life writing and teaching it, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95851"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95851"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95863,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95851\/revisions\/95863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}