Posted on: April 29, 2009
Simultaneous Contrasts, Sun and Moon, by Robert Delauney. 1913
Having just finished another Bart Ehrman book, Jesus, Interrupted, I can’t help but ponder the human need to remain in the distant past. The human need to remake that past to fit the present. Square pegs and all of that. The round hole of now. The miserably archaic square peg of then. This need is both puzzling and understandable, given how difficult and complex life is in the present, in our modern world. Understandable, in that because of those difficulties and complexities, people want to hold on to (their perception of) simpler times, more basic constructions and instructions, a binary system or two or three. Puzzling because of the incommensurability of that simpler time and those binary systems with today’s multiplicities. Yes, ancient ways can bring us calm and a sense of foundational relief.…
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Posted on: April 27, 2009
The Sower, by Vincent Van Gogh. 1888
Sometimes, poetry is like a mystery, like a detective story put to song. Sometimes similes and metaphors string bits of life (like notes) into a song, a symphony, or a collage of chords never heard together. The point. Yes, that’s often the point. The bridge works for visuals as well. And for tactiles. The bridges work between humans, between nature, between humans and nature and beyond. Inside, outside, vertically, horizontally, depth and foreground, finding all dimensions, incorporating disparate elements. Harmonizing. Even atonally. Even off key to form new strings of keys washing into larger lakes, rivers, oceans of meaning.
The poet Jill Magi works some metaphorical magic on a seemingly unlikely topic below: Labor. To borrow a phrase, it’s a labor of love going back in time and leading to the present. Metacritical irony, in a sense, as she works in the vineyard to find the heart of work.…
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Posted on: April 26, 2009
LABOR
by Jill Magi
Last fall I found myself at the gate of an archive. Remembering something from my labor and union past and thinking about my work life at present, I came across the on-line finding guides for the Wagner Labor Archive at New York University. The writings here are a warm-up to my trip into that archive. As of this spring, I’ve been inside, but that writing — is it poetry? — is slow to come along. For now, I’m using exposition to trace the outline of a shape I do not yet know.
November 4, 2008
On the day of an historical election, after weeks of hearing the word “socialism” used as a weapon (as they bail out the banks), I am anxious. So to offset this feeling, I browse around the internet — a way of tuning out, not unlike a drug, or a prayer that I will find the thing I need—
I come across the site of the Tamiment Library and Robert F.…
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Posted on: April 22, 2009
Another aspect of The Secrets is generational conflict and resolution. This is most obvious in the battle between Naomi and her father, Rabbi Hess. Not only does her father see Naomi as rash in her desire to break with tradition and forgo the arranged marriage, he also feels she does not understand his role within the family, or the true role of his departed wife. Naomi says very little about her mother, but makes a powerful insinuation that Rabbi Hess treated her badly and caused her great pain. We don’t know how she died, but it’s clear from Naomi’s comment about her weeping in the kitchen that she was not happy. Rabbi Hess appeared not to know this. The extension of roles moves beyond family barriers and extends far into the ultra-orthodox world. Avi Nesher makes the rabbi more complex, and a bit more sympathetic, by portraying him as at least willing to teach his daughter and let her go to seminary.…
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