Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/blog/category/arts-cultural-critique/poetry/)
As a poet, creative writing instructor, and Chassidic Jew, I am fascinated by the surprising ways contemporary poetry and Judaism overlap. It was, therefore, a great honor and challenge to write the following essay, which serves as the “Foreword” to 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), an anthology of poems on the Jewish experience by a diverse group of today’s established and emerging poets.
You emerge changed from the battle, but beware believing that changed means improved.
Oh merciful God, please don’t let me die before I’ve used Gaudi’s model in a poem that can outwit art like he cheated gravity & math.
On a night train to Albany.
The cars slid North on the tracks
And rain splattered grime
Around the sealed windows.
In this review, Anna Newman calls Brenda Hillman's newest poetry collection "an ecopoetical elegy for Hillman’s loved ones, for nature, and for political activism."
Herbert Levine remembers Walt Whitman on the 200th anniversary of his birth: his "democratic wisdom is as relevant today as when it was written."
"Blessed be the nameless, blessed the naming. Blessed the Unnamable un-naming itself." A new poem from Rodger Kamenetz.
"I had a memory once but it was replaced by crumbs of stumbling music the false notes I sang to you. That horizon has no sun." A new poem from Rodger Kamenetz.
"Boys and girls, / I believe in mysteries, / what the Greeks called music." A new poem from Stanley Moss.
"No one could find the tiny hole in her belly where the invisible jets the visible. Would an earthquake reveal her living parts?" A new poem from Rodger Kamenetz.
"Bless the rooster who understands dawn. Who has good sense to read new light on its toe." A new poem from Rodger Kamenetz.
"And the moment I was able to look them / in the eye, they opened theirs, // as surprised as I was to find themselves alive." A new poem from Jon Swan.
"someone came back / from the edge of the world [...] / chanting the word tolerance / over and over, as if / that would change anything." A new poem from Steven Kleinman.
