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…
Sitting down with Israeli poet Admiel Kosman and his translator Lisa Katz (who is a poet in her own right) in the Forward’s podcast studio felt less like a formal interview than a conversation in a dimly lit cafe, extending for hours into the night. And it likely would have extended — if the producer…
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” Walter Pater famously wrote. While this statement is usually understood in terms of an author’s subconscious intentions, and an artwork’s ability to transcend its form and content, there are some artists who purposefully make their works musical. This is certainly true of Steve Dalachinsky, and not…
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…
Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010 By Jerome Rothenberg Junction Press, 178 pages, $21 Author and translator of nearly 100 books of poetry as well as editor of numerous groundbreaking anthologies, poet Jerome Rothenberg is turning 80 this year. A retrospective of his work has long been overdue. Yet Rothenberg, who throughout his literary career…
Crossposted from Haaretz “And I take the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the supra-national value of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to designate a poet: and I stand before you, not on my…
טאָמאַס וווּדסקי און זײַן ייִדיש־תּלמידה מרים באַקענען זיך מיט אַ ייִדיש־רעדנדיקן טאַקסי־שאָפֿער און אַ יונגן ייִדישן בעקער
100% of profits support our journalism
