Admittedly, not everyone sitting down to their Thanksgiving dinner is going to be recalling Yiddish-speaking immigrant ancestors, ranting about social injustice, or invoking Allen Ginsberg — and doing all of that using an ancient Arabic poetic form. That’s why we need Alicia Ostriker, a great American poet and thinker who was awarded the Jewish Book…
“In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.” So in “Allegory and Trauerspiel” Walter Benjamin explained the complex, romantic appeal ruins hold for us. New York poet Pinny Bulman,…
Photo courtesy of Murray Silverstein One of my greatest poetic discoveries this year has been the work of Murray Silverstein, which I first encountered in the recently published book “Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity.” Silverstein’s daytime gig is in architecture; he has written and co-written a number of books on the subject, including…
Bob Holman is one of New York’s poetry legends. He pioneered the performance poetry scene a few decades ago, opened and is still running his world-renowned Bowery Poetry Club, is a professor, publisher, lecturer and much more. Today, in the spirit of the upcoming holidays, The Arty Semite is featuring Holman’s 1994 poem “A Jew…
Contemporary avant-garde poets have done a great deal to question and redefine the concept of good poetry; new styles, approaches and whole movements emerge constantly. It does not happen often, however, that the notion of a “book of poetry” gets challenged. Ammiel Alcalay’s “‘neither wit nor gold’ (from then),” published this year by Ugly Duckling…
The recent protest movement in Israel is something of a mystery not only to us, across the ocean, but even to many Israelis. Today The Arty Semite is featuring a glimpse into the heart of this phenomenon through a poem-invitation, composed by a promising young Israeli poet, Anat Levin. One can endlessly argue about the…
The niche narrows Hones one thin Until his bones Disclose him So wrote poet and sage Samuel Menashe in one of his numerous works addressing death, Menashe’s first Muse and greatest obsession. As he often mentioned in conversation, he became a poet at the age of 19, having survived the notoriously dangerous World War II…
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces four poems by Alicia Jo Rabins. Songwriters who are also known as poets often only become so once they receive a degree of popular acclaim for their music. Cases in point include Bob Dylan and…
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