January 08, 2013
Tribally Speaking
St. John’s professor and poet Stephen Paul Miller is trying to
make the case for a distinct Jewish-American poetry.
12/26/2012
Lehman Weichselbaum
Special to the Jewish Week
“Jewish poetry,” writes Miller,
is also “hot poetry.” Michael Datikash
Is there a Jewish-American poetry?
Trick question. According to Stephen Paul Miller, all poetry
is Jewish.
The reason? Two words: “Walt Whitman.”
Like many if not most scholars, Miller embraces the iconic
l9th-century bard as the singular foundation of modern American
poetry. But the provocateur poet-critic takes it one step further.
To Miller, it was Whitman’s unique revisionist-Protestant
adaptation of the long, rolling lines of the Hebrew Bible and the
visionary declamations of its prophets that transfused American
verse with a timeless, distinctly Jewish essence.
As Miller writes in his poem “There’s One God and You’re Not It”
(also the title of his latest of six collections): “Through
Whitman/biblical forms —/the nonstop melodies/in just
talking—/spread by whatever structure works.”
“Whitman came to occupy the national space,” says the hefty and
affable Miller. “As in the Bible, his prophet is both a poet and a
critic.” Like many Jewish-American writers, the 60-year-old Miller,
a professor of English at St. John’s University and a longtime
fixture of New York’s downtown literary scene, underwent an ethnic
reawakening. He chronicled his epiphanies in stem-winding verse
over the last several years. He also, together with Daniel Morris,
co-edited the 2010 critical anthology “Radical Poetics and Secular
Jewish Culture.”
As Miller writes in that book’s poem-preface: “Ongoing
intensity, neurotic intensity/marks not only the best Jewish poetry
but simply /hot poetry.”
Of course, by now we all know what “Jewish-American
fiction” looks like — its creative lights, its common themes and
rhythms, its indelible mark on gentile-American fiction. Making a
case for a distinct Jewish-American poetry (and its attendant
how-to poetics) is, if anything, long overdue. And the delay is
likely due in large part because, in this culture, a lot more
fiction gets read than poetry.
All of this has started some lively conversations in
saloniste forums.
“Radical Jewish poetry,” wrote Emily Warn in a Tikkun magazine
review “There’s One God,” “promises an experience that expresses
the agitated, untethered relationship that many secular Jews
experience in relation to normative Judaism. Yet to comprehend the
poetry requires the equivalent of the audio tours at postmodern
visual art exhibitions — a function that this book provides.”
To Miller and his confederates, it’s possible that
anything tagged a Jewish-American poem can’t help but be “radical.”
Most of the “radical” poems cited in “Radical Poetics and Secular
Jewish Culture” are pointedly not “about” anything Jewish. Rather,
they start with a questioning, frequently contrarian spirit that
subordinates what they say in favor of dramatic new ways of saying
it, in a manner that the rest of the world has deemed “Jewish.”
Grappling with both the suggestiveness and slipperiness of
the premise, Hank Lazer essay in “Radical Poetics and Secular
Jewish Culture” identifies a “devotion … to an actively engaged
mode of not-knowing, a perpetually inconclusive, midrashic mode of
writing, which may or not be Jewish-American poetry.”
Similarly, Miller sings of Jewish work whose “parallelisms
and/intensities dovetail with argumentative, narrative,/and/or
referentially abstract, linguistically/reflexive/poetry that, as
Duke Ellington puts it, swings.”
The roster of these swing makers is notably small. In “Radical
Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture” and in Miller’s own work, you
won’t find much from mainstream writers like Anthony Hecht, Howard
Nemerov, Delmore Schwartz, Louise Gluck. Instead, other names keep
cropping up in the essays: revolutionary 20th-century formalists
like Charles Reznikoff, Getrude Stein, George Oppen, Louis
Zukovsky, Paul Celan and of course Allen Ginsberg (with a
sprinkling of Yiddish poets and Tin Pan Alley composers), as well
as heterodox scholar-critics like Walter Benjamin, Marjorie
Perloff, Jacques Derrida and Gershom Scholem
The contributors cite one another without inhibition
(Charles Bernstein, Adeena Karasick and Alice Ostriker come up a
lot), turning up the heat in this subcultural hothouse.
Miller explains: “Of course it gets a little biblical, a little
tribal. It’s a small world.”
Writing of the least Jew-friendly stars of recent cultural
history, he declares: “And, obviously being subjective,/[T.S.]
Eliot and [Ezra] Pound sometimes seem /more Jewish than
Whitman./Well, sometimes anyway.”
Asked today if he still holds that typically incendiary thought,
Miller replies: “I don’t know. Maybe not. I’d have to think about
it.”
In fact, Miller’s wavering here, as elsewhere, goes to the heart
of his practice, which he describes as “re-illuminating the
traditions of ancient Israel, a sacred dialogue about freedom and
economic justice, and taking them into the identity points of the
modern world.” Inexhaustibly open-ended, his method is classically
Talmudic, assiduously chasing this or that detail of ritual or
esthetic law. But while in the Talmud, rabbinical umpires end the
otherwise endless debate with a final decree, in Miller’s work,
similar arbitrating is seldom found.
Miller began publishing his poetry in the mid-1970s, while
writing several plays riffing comically on history, the day’s news,
and assorted autobiographical ephemera. A representative work,
“Whatever Bernard Goetz” at downtown performance space 8BC,
elevated applied miscasting to a high art with the wraith-like
elder raconteur Taylor Mead in the title role of the notorious
“subway vigilante.”
Miller also authored the cultural study, “The Seventies
Now: Culture as Surveillance” and, with Terence Diggory, co-edited
“The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets.”
A 2000 Fulbright-sponsored visit to a Poland still in the
throes of its transition from Communist to free-market governance
dropped Miller into a land of unhealed traumas and anxious
present.
“It was like World War II was still happening,” Miller
recounts.
Crucial preconceptions upended, Miller found himself deeply
rethinking his own self-perception as an artist and a member of a
particular American religious-ethnic minority.
“I knew that being Jewish was important somehow,” says Miller,
who grew up in an assimilated family on Staten Island.
Until then, Miller had made his mark as a star of the next
generation of New York School poets, nimbly frolicking between
philosophical rumination and wild elaboration on pop culture, with
many adventures along the way. After Poland, descents into his
racial unconscious, mingling secular, biblical and literary
scholarship and an inveterate skeptic’s metaphysical yearning,
dominated much of his verse.
“There’s Only One God and You’re Not It” discourses on
“Postscript to Ezra’s Torah,” “Monotheism” and “Milking
Honey.” It also treads older, familiar ground, in poems like
“Being Being, Ha Ha Ha,” “Do You Mind If I Sketch You While We
Talk?” “Laughter” and “FDR’s FDR, Jefferson, and the Bigger Than
Watergate Operations against Them.” Lines like “Jews come up with
the whole/denying other gods exist gizmo,/the ‘your mother’ of
religion,/what makes Ancient Israelite Jews…” sit comfortably
near “I’m a problem,/My roots are getting papery,/You on the other
hand/Have tendrils./Forgive me./I’m so drunk.”
After three visits to Israel, confirmed diasporist Miller
distrusts “theocracy” — driven agendas that he believes hamper
Middle East peace efforts. “The right wings of both sides profit
from ongoing conflict,” he says.
On hiatus from public readings and the various panels on radical
Jewish poetry that surrounded the publication of the anthology he
co-edited, Miller — “recklessly reclusive” — is concentrating on
his teaching and new writing.
Says Maria Mazzioti Gillan, director of the creative writing
program at SUNY/Binghamton and co-editor of the literary
anthologies “Unsettling America” and “Growing up Ethnic”: “Even
though I’m not Jewish, Stephen’s work leads me into Judaism. I want
to find out more.
“He comes to grips with the struggle that’s in all of us and
what we can take away from it. He makes me feel comforted.”
A bit of the old-fashioned Jewish patriarch himself, Miller has
made use of the visual and poetic gifts of his now high-school son
Noah in the pages of his books. He began doing so in the boy’s
kindergarten years.
“Noah is a wonderful poet,” says Miller, “and, like me, he lives
for research.”
Stephen Paul Miller is a wonderful writer and poet. He should
also take credit for being one of the founders of assembling
magazines; magazine where each poet xeroxes 150 to 200 copies of a
poem, brings them to a central location, and, with a number of
other poets, puts a magazine together. The magazine he was the main
editor of was The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side.
Stephen is a cultural treasure.