Poetry as Secular Prayer
~A reflection on earlier generations of American Jewish poets~
A writer knows about human capability.
A writer is empowered with the possibility
Of human infinity—a personal empowerment,
A this-worldly stance.
-Louis Zukofsky
1. To create a poem is to create life. It is a Godlike gesture, perhaps even an idolatrous challenge. The writer places him or herself firmly between one moment of creation and the next. The poem is a kind of secular prayer.
The trees are tall gods
commanding a view
of my study. I bow
my head over my typewriter
and start the ceremony
of a prayer.
-David Ignatow
2. A prayer is a transference of power from the human sphere to the divine. It is a belief in the ephemeral, a moment of suspended animation. It is looking elsewhere for answers, for control, for sovereignty. Prayer is a vital spiritual experience—a yielding of one’s power to another—a relaxing of tension, of everything this-worldly—to a feeling of calm, of tranquility, of peace. But this release of responsibility can also be about surrendering into one’s own creativity, in the recognition of an infinite ability to create, instead of surrendering to an all-powerful other.
Poetry is about disparate connections that come together in a new plane. Poetry is about human control. It is about looking inside ourselves to discover connection, answers, solace, and hope.
3. There is a strain of poetry found in Jewish American poets, who were on the cusp of the immigrated self and in the shadow of the Holocaust, that echoed prayerlike in their poetry. These poets take up a dialogue with God, challenging the deity, often fueled by anger and disappointment; sometimes fueled by wonder.
4. This short poem of Harvey Shapiro’s, written late in his life—to God—captures the spirit of connecting disparate moments and places. But it also provides an expansive sense of prayer, prayer as daily conversation—the reader can imagine Shapiro walking on the streets near his Brooklyn Heights home, having this conversation with God:
Psalm
I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me.
Governor’s island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.
5. This is not making Art (with a capital A) into a God, but making people—the artist and the audience—into people who are not dependent on the idea of God as the sole power. It is, crudely, about People Power. God ostensibly has the power to create. See: heaven and earth. But of course, so does the artist. Each time a new work of art appears in the world, it changes the world forever. It’s pure creation. For a generation of poets who still recalled both the Holocaust and the immigrant experience, some of their poetry was also about a tearing away from God while taking a stand, poetry as proclamation. They follow the Yiddish poets who came to America and, whether secular or believers, questioned or turned against God. Philip Levine, a poet known for his commitment to social justice, found beauty in manual labor and strength among other people, not from an elusive God. He wrote this:
You chose no God
but each other, head,
belly, groin, heart, you
chose the lovely road
back down these hills
empty handed, breath
steamy in the cold
March night, or worse,
the wrong roads
that led to black earth
and the broken seed
of your body.
6. Traditional prayers provide useful poetic technique: parallelism, incantation, repetition. Poems can become substitutes for prayer when they imitate prayer in tone and style, even when they were not written to intone belief or to be spoken or read by believers. They can even be repurposed as prayers (and indeed, the Reform and other liberal Jewish strains include contemporary poetry as prayer in their prayer books). But they are prayers written by people who believe in the power of people to impact life and death.
Blessed
in the light of the sun and at the sight of the world daily,
and in all the delights of the senses and the mind; in my eyesight,
blurred as it is,
and my life, brief though it was.
-Charles Reznikoff
7. Poems can recreate prayer or create new prayers. With her poem, “Akiba Martyr,” Muriel Rukeyser created a contemporary martyrology that mimicked the original Akiba story. Rukeyser used to tell the family tale that Akiba was a relative of hers, taking pride in that lineage. Akiba, a great teacher, lived in Biblical Israel from 50-135 CE. He was executed for his teachings by the Roman rulers.
The look of delight of the martyr
Among the colors of pain, at last knowing his own response
Total and unified.
To love God with all the heart, all passion,
Every desire called evil, turned toward unity,
All the opposites, all in the dialogue,
All the dark and light of the heart, of life made whole.
8. After the Holocaust, the Yiddish poets’ tone became more caustic. For those who were assimilating into America, earning a living from sweatshop labor, and experiencing a loss of old world familiarity and insularity, the new reality was stark. Kadia Molodwsky put it best:
O God of Mercy
For the time being,
Choose another people.
We are tired of death,
tired of corpses,
We have no more prayers
For the time being,
Choose another people.
9. Jacob Glatstein goes much further in his disdain, but also in his arguing with God (“the God of my disbelief is magnificent,” he famously wrote), especially intensifying his poetic arguments as the Holocaust unfolded. Glatstein, like Molodowsky, wrote in Yiddish, having arrived in New York from Poland in 1914. He defined poetry as “silence which has no boundaries; disciplined silence,” in a Yiddish lecture in 1955 to the Montreal Yiddish Book Center. But then he quickly contradicts himself by saying that today “a poet cannot remain silent… because we have gone through so many horrible events.”
Who will dream you?
Who will remember you?
Who deny you?
Who yearn for you?
Who, on a lonely bridge,
Will leave you—in order to return?
The night is endless when a race is dead.
Earth and heaven are wiped bare.
The light is fading in your shabby tent.
The Jewish house is guttering.
Jewish God!
You are almost gone.
10. Yet prayer never ceased, keeping the argument with God alive. In Jewish tradition it is not one-sided. We are not supplicants. We are questioners. Decades later, poets continue this tradition of questioning God, an unbeliever who wants desperately to believe. Stephen Berg wrote decades after the Yiddishists, but sometimes in a tone that could be mistaken for these earlier poets. Berg’s poem, Pauses, probably written in the late 1960s, draws a direct line, either knowingly or unknowingly, from Glatstein’s nihilistic dialogue with God:
I’m angry
so i talk to you, big shitter
who doesn’t exist.
It’s late.
I pull the covers up
and squeeze it.
A chair, books stacked in a corner,
same old face on the wall
with its children
hangs there as
a breeze comes in over the fire escape steps,
its path like the great writing in air
and laughing men of Sengai
that fly over the pages
in me.
11. One of the most famous poems inspired by a prayer is Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg, a monumental ode to his mother Naomi. Kaddish, it is taught, is a prayer less for the dead than for the living. And so, this poem, which catalogues the poet’s mothers’ tortured life, ends with this couplet:
Outside I bent my head to the ground under the bushes
Near the garage—knew she was better—
Ginsberg allows himself some solace, a feeling evoked by praying.
12. It is in that solace that poetry can act as prayer, become a meeting place between an imagined heaven and the reality of earth, as in these lines by Maxine Kumin. Kumin, from an upper-middle class Reform Jewish family, was far from the yiddishkeit of these earlier poets. She wrote a refined poetry that was intently stylized, but still it exemplified her longing for a godlike response. In her poem, she captures the eternity of the word which, after all, may exist side by side with the eternal belief in a God—or perhaps simply exist on its own.
We eulogize autumn, we long
for a better world, we seek to deliver
a purer hemidemisemiquaver,
the one brief note that says we mean,
roughshod and winged, to last forever.
Kumin’s poem is also about eternity, or at least outlasting life. This, of course, is the gift of poetry, of any art or creation. It is the description of Zukofsky’s “human infinity.”
Jo-Ann Mort returned a few years ago to poetry writing after a 22-year hiatus. Her poems have recently appeared in Plume Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, Atlanta Review, Stand (UK), Upstreet, and Sources Journal (published in Jerusalem). A journalist and analyst too, she is a member of the editorial board of Dissent Magazine, where she writes frequently and has recently published there as well as in Democracy Journal, Index on Censorship, The American Prospect, and the New York Review of Books Daily. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.