TEN GREAT JEWISH POETS

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Stein not only coined the term “Lost Generation” but became one of its foremost figures. Although her Jewish identity was notoriously confused, entangled and largely ignored in her own writings, a number of scholars have argued that Stein’s propensity toward experimental poetics that defied genre and convention had a lot to do with her own marginal status, both as a lesbian and a Jew. Who can’t see wry Jewish wit in her famous dictum: “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”

Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938)
This great Russian Jewish poet is remembered as a leader of the Acmeist poetry movement, which sought to combine clear, accessible verse with the imagery of world mythology. Mandelshtam’s reflections on his Jewishness appeared in his writing during the late 1920s in reaction to the threat of Stalinist purges that targeted, among various other groups, minorities, poets and non-conventional thinkers. In his essay collection Fourth Prose—composed during Stalinist rule—he suddenly exclaims “the honorable name of Jew, of which I’m proud.” As Mandelshtam foresaw, he was arrested and met his tragic end in obscurity in a Siberian prison.

Paul Celan (1920-1970)
Widely considered one of Europe’s most important post-World War II poets, Celan’s poetic identity was largely shaped by his experience in the Shoah, in which his family perished. In “Death Fugue,” he famously wrote: “Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night / Death is a master aus Deutschland.” Celan wrote in German, and his fraught relationship with this language defined his voice: abstract, perplexing and dark. Unable to bear the weight of his past, the poet ended his life at the age of 50.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
Bringing together meditations on Jewishness, Israel and diaspora, the divine, love and eros, Amichai’s Hebrew-language poetry was equally influenced by Israeli colloquial street-talk and biblical Hebrew. Gentle, pervasive humor makes his voice instantly recognizable. Poet Chana Bloch, one of Amichai’s foremost translators, has done a formidable job preserving and reconfiguring his voice for English-speaking audiences. She and Chana Kronfeld collaborated on translating these memorable lines: “God is a staircase that ascends / to a place that is no longer there, or isn’t there yet.”

Samuel Menashe (b. 1925)
Largely unknown until his late 70s, the bestowal of the Neglected Master Award by the Poetry Foundation in 2006 put
Menashe’s terse, intensely spiritual poetry on the international map. With a propensity for density and mystery, the poet focuses on Jewish imagery at the heart of his writing. In a keen summation of diasporic Judaism, he writes: “I know Exile / Is Always / Green with hope— / The river / We cannot cross / Flows forever.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
One of the leading poets of the Beat movement and an iconic statesman of literary, sexual and political revolutions, Ginsberg composed, among other works, two poems of epic caliber. In “Howl,” he explores the plight of his generation, calling himself “meat for the synagogue cast on the pavement.” In “Kaddish,” one of the greatest American poems, he mourns his Russian Jewish mother Naomi, whose descent into madness he witnessed as a child.

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
This ground-breaking poet and thinker exemplifies the artist who directs her talents toward social activism, feminism and struggles against racism, homophobia and all other manner of injustice. It is mostly in this framework that, reflecting on the Jewish half of her identity, she once defined herself as a “non-Jewish Jew…whose solidarity with the exiled and persecuted is unrestricted.”

David Meltzer (b. 1937)
Well before Kabbalah became a Hollywood fad, this Beat poet, folk singer and scholar delved into Jewish mysticism, emerging with immensely potent poems, musicality, lyricism and, at all times, irony. One of Meltzer’s classic poems remixes Kabbalistic imagery with music: “Jazz Kabbalah, the black & white of it, the page, the letters, ink / its black absence its white presence / the sounds made are colorless until pulled out of the air & / transcribed, not even trance-scribed, but blacked onto white onto / black lines of the page… / we riff our ruin into say-no amulets & say-yes run-the-lotto-down / dream-book number code.”

Alicia Ostriker (b. 1937)
Although many of Ostriker’s Jewish poems recall with melancholy and humor the Yiddish-speaking immigrants she grew up among, she virtually invented the idea of “poetry as midrash,” that is, writing poems that unpack biblical stories. Her insistent, razor-sharp spirituality makes itself heard, for example, in this part-poem, part-prayer: “please look at us and take us in your arms / not like a master, like a mother.”

Charles Bernstein (b. 1950)
One of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement in the late 1970s, Bernstein personifies the American avant-garde, pushing the boundaries of language and intellectual discourse. The Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture anthology volume featured some of Bernstein’s incisive and challenging perspectives on his Jewishness: “I am no more Jewish than when I refuse imposed definitions of what Jewishness means. I am no more Jewish than when I attend to how such Jewishness lives itself out, plays tunes not played.”