Between Shades inaugurates a multilingual
Jewish American poetics that encompasses Hebrew, English, and Yiddish languages
and traditions. The great strength of this unfolding project – the part that
makes me certain it is the start of something important – is its refusal to
essentialize Jewish history and language, favoring instead a decentered
fluency. Resnikoff’s migrations, translations, and “avoidances” obey a scrappy,
pragmatist principle of composition. The poems are not revivalist showpieces or
sentimental fantasies but living mosaics born of a Jewish diaspora that is
always estranged from itself anew, always “waiting / ‘to be’ / wandering.” In
this sense, Resnikoff has begun to accompany the work of major predecessors in
a larger field of poetics engaged with diasporic transmission—Nathaniel Mackey,
for instance, whose ongoing long poems, “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu,”
perform syncopated Projectivist variations on diasporic themes. Robert Creeley
also comes to mind as a model for Resnikoff’s fine intuition for the pacing of
his lines. Take the opening of “Peh-etics (a midrash)”:
An efes
rises from the sand
of syncopated
speech songs
& sings
itself
transcribing
a fable de-
scribing
a stone.
The efes (Hebrew: “zero”) that rises here
might also be a corruption of epes
(Yiddish: “something”). This nothing-something grounds the poem in its own
origin myth/midrash, a shifting foundation of “syncopated / speech songs” in
which a false spelling can “transcribe” or “de-scribe” a world. Here we have
not a poetics but a “peh-etics,”
from the Hebrew word for mouth, “peh.” Resnikoff plays with Zukofsky’s famous
interval of music and speech in these lines, filling the nothing with a tune
made stonelike (cf. “Anew -20”).
As
a scholar and translator of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, Resnikoff has tuned his
ear to exceedingly low and distant frequencies:
Each night begins
low as one speaks to a child
as one writes in chalk
on
the street.
So begins “In Winter,” the
opening poem in the chapbook. Like so much of Resnikoff’s work, these lines
induce very fine double vision—should we take “as” as a simile here, or as a
temporal marker? Poised in an interspace, a polyglot ghosthouse, the title and
contents of this little book could also be read as between shades, the tunes and tones that occur in between (the
craggy cover art by Rivka Weinstock aptly signals the volume’s complex
textures). Or it can be taken as a weird simple sentence: Between shades. Yes, you feel “Between”
expanding in these poems, coloring everything. Resnikoff’s poetics depends on
the co-existence of all of these readings, and, more importantly, on this kind
of inclusive reading—his words convene at the space and time of translation,
where languages carry over and shade into each other.
You
can feel it, for instance, in the way his poem, “not that”, flickers in and out
of coherency:
Tohu ve-
tohu with
out
waiting
“to be”
wandering
infinite
skin
over shade;
is finity
finally
the secret
skin of earth?
question answers
question
marks erasure
marks
structure as
erasure
erases
strict skin stretches
between shade.
Not this
time
w/ clock
‘s calloused hands –
not that
river’s
skin
over this.
Haim
Nahman Bialik’s prophetic essay, “Revealment and Concealment in Language”
(1915), provides the nourishing ground for this and other poems in Between Shades. Bialik, the father of
modern Hebrew poetry, imagines language as a frozen river whose surface we walk
across mistaking it for solid ground. This is the “concealment” of language,
the fact that we attribute permanency to words that will soon “slip, slide, perish,/ Decay
with imprecision, will not stay in place,/ Will not stay still,” as Eliot says.
Yet the very life of language depends on the rise and fall of words, as
necessity brings them into and out of existence. The frozen surface of the river sits precariously
over the abyss of meaninglessness (Bialik calls it “blima”, or “without what”),
yet prose writers step over the cracks in language and ignore what lies
beneath—they skate on thin ice. Poets, however, gaze into the cracks and
“reveal” the life and death of words (just as Kafka said that a book must be
“an axe for the frozen sea within us”). Poets put us in touch with the futility
of pitting words against the pure emptiness of things, even as they renew
language that constantly atrophies. And they make us watch.
“Watch
it!” Resnikoff repeats/warns in several of these poems. His broken-off
reference to “tohu-bohu,” the elemental state of things in the beginning of
God’s creation, conjures up Bialik’s terrifying “blima”. But this is not a poem
about language’s decay into silence (Bialik is notably pessimistic about
poetry’s final efficacy); rather, it’s a poem in the form of an ice
floe—breaking up and melting away “with
out” a trace, as skin, shade, and structure are put under inquisitive
erasure. “is finity / finally / the secret / skin of earth?” he asks. Question
answers question, and we come to understand that finitude, mortality, and
“blima” are the necessary conditions for meaningfulness and exchange. The force
of Resnikoff’s response to Bialik derives from this pressure we feel, somehow,
in the fissures of this decreative poem—in the “between” where incomprehension
and understanding abrade each other, where translation happens.
Resnikoff
gathers and harmonizes a far-flung chorus of poetic voices. Among the tutelary
spirits of Between Shades—including
the Yiddish poets Avrom Sutzkever and Reuben Ludwig, the Israeli poets Zali
Gurevitch, Gabriel Levin, Yoram Verete, and Dennis Silk, and the American poet
Charles Reznikoff (a relative)—two stand out for having become Hebrew poets as
adults: Harold Schimmel and Avoth Yeshurun. The American Schimmel switched from
English to Hebrew when he moved to Israel
in the 1960s, and his work over many decades at the center of Israel Israel Krasnystaw , Poland
from whence you go
& to where you come
I won’t arrive
at anyplace.
b/c all my goings are
toward the from-where
b/c the nothing is.
The nothing exists.
in the non-existence – write in logic. clear.
exact:
all that does not exist in existence.
in nothing, exists
all that exists.
all who come from there,
like a dog I’ll smell their clothes.
those, their smell, my father & mother,
brothers & sister stand
straight in my eyes
& all Krasnystaw stands at the windows.
It is Yeshurun’s manner to slice
language down to the bone, then past the bone. Like Bialik, he is a master of
negativity, yet he defers Bialik’s full-bodied sublimities in favor of a hybrid
language that rattles, gasps, stutters, breaks off, and chokes in a Hebrew
shot-through with Yiddish, Polish, Arabic, and other languages. Here, too, is a
poetics of watching: “my father & mother,/ brothers & sisters stand /
straight in my eyes / & all Krasnystaw stands at the windows.” This is a
different kind of watchfulness, though, than that of Bialik, a keen
attentiveness conditioned by guilt and mourning. Resnikoff does an excellent
job in this translation of getting across the shorthand flavor of Yeshurun’s
work—the lower-case title and text, the ampersands, the b/c’s. What kind of a
poem is this? It begins with a garbled reference to Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 3:1, “Know from whence you
came, and where you are going.” The poem begins by falling into the cracks of
its own unusable language. Nothing comes from nothing, and there is no there
there, in Krasnystaw. I think Resnikoff responds very movingly in Between Shades to the contingency of
this poem, the way it obeys what Robert Duncan calls “the unyielding Sentence that shows itself forth in
the / language as I make it.” Language
is not transparent, and form is not fetishized. Words are material things we
make make meaning. When Resnikoff plays with the sound and sense of the Hebrew
“efes” in “Peh-etics,” we hear behind it Yeshurun’s “rattling / mouth //
garbled / running.”
With
this debut, Resnikoff lays the groundwork for a major life-long poetic project
of “gathering from the air a live tradition”—a multilingual Jewish-American
poetics that we will be watching very closely.
No comments:
Post a Comment