IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

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Celan’s Prophetic Darkness

My immersion into Paul Celan’s poems hasn’t been depressing; instead I’ve been following, with keen attention over the past weeks, a mind which has been where we are treading.  Celan spoke of poems as being prophetic, that they “cast their shadow ahead of themselves: one must live after them.  Life itself must pass through the poem.”  Yes indeed!  

I follow mindfully through his halting struggle to wrest language out of its abuse and false clarity.  And darkness, I can’t help but feel the power of “living, creative darkness,” a human darkness which also seethes in poems.  I’m thinking of Celan’s “From Darkness to Darkness.” Never would you find a deus ex machina, a miraculous light bursting into a scene in Celan.  Instead a subtle light appears, throws shade ahead of the poet, onto a beloved, onto an empty field.  There is trembling possibility – a breakthrough of recognition, across borders, time and self.  (I’m drawing on a brilliant introduction by Susan Gillespie, who translated Corona, Selected Poems.)  Through the obscurity, the poem carries forward, having been sparked with the light and coursing energy of human exchange.  

I felt it when reading together with a group of smart folks who were listening as if a trumpet was sounding.  And at the protest where a shared consciousness was erupting in the gray rain.  It is a kind of faith, hope against hope in a dim world.  A shared consciousness to observe the present and the unknowingness of the future.  Rock on, Celan.

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Grand Slam at the Brink

Oh, a mere mortal; the hours I spent
on my couch, watching, not watching, 
pacing, cleaning, anything to trim 
the tension of watching the tennis gods

two bedraggled bodies wracking them-
selves senseless smacking the small ball
to new and giddy places.  Mother,
if I had five ounces of that resilience…

Five hours in, sports writers are sick
with praise. Even the clay, even the living dust
is whipped up, spent but glowing,
having witnessed magnificence.

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The Page, the Page!

“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”

Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do), 
transmuted into light and hovering figures

On a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige 
holding its head aloft in a 
restless, churning language. 

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MEMO TO SELF

On the Notion of
Self Promotion:

Poems are Not Self. 

Rather, perceptions and loss
desire and dross

Whirled in the vortex
of the mind’s mouth

Erotic wrestle of 
words and wordlessness(Sultry!)

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

The self.  
How very small.  
The poem, how other. 

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The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.

The Nazis pillaged museums as part of their merciless war on “degenerates and decadents,” on the “mentally ill,” Jewish-Bolshevists “who brought in the modern. Their criteria was not aesthetic, but propagandist, against anyone “trying to insult German feeing or destroy of confuse natural forms.” Railing against cultural disintegration, they created an exhibition, “Degenerate Art, Entartete Kunst,” in 1937 of 650 works, sent it on parade so Germans – over 2 million in total, 20k a day – could spit and be disgusted as they learned to revile what would become mainstream modern art. 

You can’t walk through this show without hearing “WOKE’ as a synonym for “Degenerate.” Trump, our new chief aesthetic critic, denounces literature, art, thought with a bludgeon-like precision. Germans Klee, Kirchner, Nolde, Kurt Schwitters, along with Picasso, Kandinsky and Chagall were the targets of the Nazis. Today Trump carries out DEI purges, such as his and Hegseth’s Naval Academy removal of Maya Angelou, Einstein, Kendi. It screams loud and clear that these cultural wars are meant to make foreign and other a part of the body politic. And guess what – Holocaust studies are part of that purge.

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To Be Immersed in Color

To be immersed.  To be immersed in color, through the body medium.  Matisse wrote, “I must be so penetrated, so impregnated by my subject, that I can draw it with my eyes closed.”  Color emanates as a primal force in the Azure of Matisse’s Mediterranean canvases, his magnificent chapel in Vence, France:  “After a certain moment it is no longer me, but a revelation: all I have to do is to give myself up to it.”

As sure as a teabag is steeped, an idea saturates things, as a mind is whetted and wetted with thought, it will flow beyond itself. 

The traditional tannery workers in Fès seem to be the ultimate act of immersion: could they be more immersed in color?  Could they put their whole selves into their craft, crawling into vats that fill entire planes with dyes once and often still of turmeric, indigo, pomegranate, mimosa flower, saffron and indigo?  Sinewy limbs stripped to the waist, having cleaned skins with limestone and softened them with pigeon guana droppings.  The radical ‘70s artists who dipped their naked bodies in paint, then rolled on canvases had the same idea. To be one with.  Saturate. With not an ounce of doubt or self or restraint. They are beautiful in a way that horrifies us – how is their health?  Their pay, their hours?  But they uphold long cultural tradition that dovetails with seeking union, here with color.  I’m in. 

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Festive Earworm

O holidays of promised liberation:
One towards an earthly land,
One to a place promised 
posthumously.
In our hands, 
Questions: 
Which way now, 
How to mind the gap, 
Is home home? Exile exile?  
Do the two meet as two seas that
clash and shamble towards each other?

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Salt Water & Suffering

Saying shema in the oldest synagogue
in Fès

part of a run-on sentence said before 
and after me, 

as the long-gone rabbi still brays 
among lanterns and blue walls

and sheep graze on the hillsides below
among soul-white stones of the Jewish dead.

As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again. 

Everything that brought me to this moment

is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,

moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.

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Strait Up

How narrow the narrow straits.  That divide us.  The width of a new moon.  The crescent of a fingernail clipping.  The narrows of sea washing between land fringed and scalloped – one side Africa, one side Europe.  A shudder of civilizations in that two-lidded eye that opens, washes, blinks at our folly. The crossing of Gibraltar is shorter than crossing mainland Rhode Island to Block Island in the smallest state of America.  

To think that orange trees grace the patios on both sides, the same palette of gold and blue asterisk tiles remains from the Almohads – to think that Islamic kingdoms lit up al-Andalus Spain for eight centuries & make Seville’s Alcázar the glittering sister of Morocco’s imperial palaces. Now pulling away from Tangier, the minaret recedes, phones leap forward, midway in the strait, by several European hours. To think that time, that thick-headed concept, could move so radically in a ferry ride that takes an hour!

To think, to think, to think how much rides on such a minor waterway. 

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Lunching in Morocco during Ramadan

To peer through the window, being Jewish, while the dominant culture celebrates its religious holiday; Christmas is the familiar scenario, but Ramadan a whole different thing. Three Ramadan weeks in Morocco, lunching in front of people who had woken at 5 to eat, then starved themselves of food and drink until a voice wails that it’s time to eat dates and the best soup ever, harira, and of course pray; then eat more around 11, be happy, and sleep until just before sundown when the whole thing happens again.

A deeper understanding began to seep in. Ramanan always comes up in conversation, but with a deep glow, not complaint It’s a holy month, accepted as things strange, given, apart. In Fez, spirituality permeated the medina, a humility in the air. I began to wait dreamily for the chanting, soft, twining with the birds and blossom scent; I began to imagine it could be a religion of peace. What if that peacefulness twines into your soul, if you approach people with that humility, neither commandeering nor servile; if you have a sense of human place. Not because you’re parched, but just thinking broadly.

I saw hipster girls listening to recorded chants of the Koran, saw some seventy shop workers in Marrakech lay out either mats or cardboard in the open air of Jemaa Fna to pray, tried to return a rental car but the attendant was busy breaking his fast and praying. Tried to buy a dress, but the seamstress was holding down the fort while the shopkeeper was praying. And now, Sunday and Monday Eid, the celebration, the close, the sigh.

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