Crossposted from Haaretz Yarona Caspi’s interest in poetry “is a meeting of souls,” says the singer and artist in a conversation about her fourth and latest album, “Mafia Shel Isha Ahat” (“One-Woman Mafia”). It is an album on which she manages to bring together her intense personality and her awareness of the pop audience through…
Outrageous and, yes, hilarious: Knesset member (and onetime Arafat adviser) Dr. Ahmad Tibi got himself suspended for one week from Knesset debates (though not from votes) for reading an outrageous little poem he had made up in honor of fellow lawmaker Anastasia Michaeli. Michaeli, a member of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, was herself suspended…
Across the centuries, Jewish hermeneutists — interpreters of the holy texts — have had radically different agendas: illuminating and whitewashing, edifying and indoctrinating. A poetic impulse, if not outright poetry, was occasionally part of the picture, too. And how could it not? Dealing with poetic texts of our national and religious mythos, imaginative responses only…
Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams By Herbert Leibowitz Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $40.00 William Carlos Williams was a second-rate poet. Was. These days, of course, he’s a towering figure of American modernism, the heir to Walt Whitman, the godfather of myriad schools…
On Tuesday, Jake Marmer wrote about poems as a noisy Mediterranean duplex. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: Reputedly, Rachmaninoff once said: “There’s no such thing as inspiration….
Jake Marmer is the author of “Jazz Talmud.” His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: About a decade ago I read a Billy Collins poem called “Advice to Writers,”…
One of the most compelling themes, and even triggers, in contemporary Jewish poetic discourse is the question of otherness — our own otherness. There’s no better time to contemplate this idea than during the winter holidays, when cultural differences come into stark relief and questions of identity resurface, as do millennia-old grudges and dilemmas. Ivan…
In this, the third annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of the most important poetry books of 2011. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. 2011 has…
דאָס ביכל נעמט אַרײַן אַ גלאָסאַר, שמועס־פֿראַגעס און קלאַנג־רעקאָרדירונגען פֿון די דערציילונגען.
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