Editors’ Preface for Paideuma 37

As part of our showcase of the new volume of Paideuma, here is our editors’ preface — more previews to come soon:

For this special volume of Paideuma, we go back to our roots with an eighty-fifth birthday celebration of Mary de Rachewiltz, an important member of the scholarly community that gave rise to this journal and made its continued publication possible. De Rachewiltz’s contributions to the field are substantial. In addition to her magisterial translation of the Cantos (I Canti [Mondadori, 1985]), she is the author of a beautiful memoir, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions (New Directions, 2005). After having long labored at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where she lent her special familiarity with her father’s work to the organization and cataloguing of its Ezra Pound Archive, she has made a permanent home for Pound scholarship at Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian South Tyrol. We are pleased to honor her here with a portfolio of documentary material edited and introduced by Richard Sieburth.

Mary de Rachewiltz’s long relationship with the NPF began in 1985 at the Ezra Pound Centennial Conference, where she sat on a panel with Hugh Kenner to give a talk entitled “Remembering Pound the Poet.” She was also part of a roundtable at the end of the conference that included Robert Creeley, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, Hugh Kenner, James Laughlin, Marjorie Perloff, M.L. Rosenthal, Olga Rudge, and Walter Sutton. At the William Butler Yeats-Ezra Pound Celebration Conference in 1990, she gave a keynote address, “A Pilgrim to Erin Shrines,” and was part of a discussion group that included Kenner, Sutton, Peter Dale Scott, and Carroll Terrell. Her first contribution to an NPF publication appeared in H.D.: Woman and Poet (1986). She subsequently contributed to three special issues of Paideuma, festschrifts for Mary Barnard (1994), Carroll Terrell (1997), and James Laughlin (2002).

In her 1994 tribute to Mary Barnard, de Rachewiltz described Barnard’s Assault on Mount Helicon as “the most dignified, informative and sincere literary memoir I have ever read.” This is a statement Evelyn Haller might apply to de Rachewiltz’s own Discretions. Haller’s “Shadows on the Rock: A Book in American English Ezra Pound Gave His Daughter” is the first of four scholarly essays that follow the portfolio edited by Sieburth. A shorter version of Haller’s essay was printed in the proceedings for the 17^th International Ezra Pound Conference. We are happy to include the full text here, in conjunction with Sieburth’s portfolio. The other three essays are also appropriate to this context. Sean Pryor’s “‘How Will You Know?’: Paradise, Painting, and the Writing of Ezra Pound’s Canto 3” looks at Pound directly in a reading of Canto 3 as an early attempt to “write paradise.” Jeffrey Westover and Joshua Clover look at two Poundian themes: economics and history. Westover (who, like Pryor, is appearing in Paideuma for the second time) brings fresh insight to Lorine Niedecker’s work by reading it in the context of local history. “‘My Sense of Property’s / Adrift’: Attitudes toward Land, Property, and Nation in Lorine Niedecker” juxtaposes colonial and native attitudes about ownership. Clover’s “‘A Form Adequate to History’: Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics” closes the issue with a programmatic statement on poetry’s significance for theory. His perspective is global, with examples (Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann) drawn from three stages of capitalist development.

Paideuma 38, slated for publication in 2011, includes articles by Ondrea Ackerman, Russell Brickey, Natalie Gerber, Matthew Hofer, Charles Kraszewski, and Catherine Paul, as well as an interview with Basil Bunting conducted by James Laughlin and Lawrence Pitkethly, prefaced by Richard Swigg.

—Tyler Babbie, Alison Fraser, and Benjamin Friedlander

There is also a preface by Richard Sieburth to the portfolio he edited. We will give some excerpts from that in the coming days.

◊

To get the word out about this volume we are pleased to be able to offer it at a special discount. Paideuma subscriptions for individuals are $30 a year domestic and $40 outside the U.S. Through March readers of this blog can purchase Paideuma 37 (and our previous volume, 36 [link]) at the low price of $20 (or $30 for orders outside the U.S).

To order, please call Gail Sapiel at  207-581-3813 or send her an email at gail [dot] sapiel [at] umit [dot] maine [dot] edu.  Tell her that you read about the new issue on the blog to receive this promotional discount.

Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Just published by the University of Alabama Press: Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris.

Both Miller and Morris edited earlier volumes for the NPF. Miller — with Terence Diggory — prepared The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (2001). Morris assembled a special issue of Sagetrieb dedicated to the work of Allen Grossman (link here), which is also available as a freestanding book: Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry, Pedgagogy, and Poetics of Allen Grossman (2004).

Here’s what the back cover says about the new book:

“What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!”
— Franz Kafka

Kafka’s quip — paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic — highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition — specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized religion, yet forever shaped by those traditions.

This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as “secular,” and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them — Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.

While there is no easy answer for these writers about what it means to be a Jew, in their responses there is a rich sense of how being Jewish reflects on their aesthetics and practices as poets, and how the tradition of the avant-garde informs their identities as Jews. Fragmented identities, irony, skepticism, a sense of self as “other” or “outsider,” distrust of the literal, and belief in a tradition that questions rather than answers — these are some of the qualities these poets see as common to themselves, the poetry they make, and the tradition they work within.

The book’s contributors include many “NPF Alumni” — and one contributor who is also a member of the NPF Editorial Collective. Here’s the complete table of contents, with NPF-related folk in boldface:

Stephen Paul Miller, “Meet the Preface”

Daniel Morris, “Introduction”

Charles Bernstein, “Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice”

Hank Lazer, “Who or What Is a Jewish American Poet, with Specifi c Reference to David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Jerome Rothenberg”

Jerome Rothenberg, “The House of Jews: Experimental Modernism and Traditional Jewish Practice”

Bob Perelman, “Zukofsky at 100: Zukofsky as a Body of Work”

Bob Perelman, “Addendum: On “The Jewish Question”: Three Perspectives”

Norman Fischer, “Light(silence)word”

Kathryn Hellerstein, “On Yiddish Poetry and Translation of Yiddish Poetry”

Merle Bachman, “An “Exotic” on East Broadway: Mikhl Likht and the Paradoxes of Yiddish Modernist Poetry”

Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Revisiting Charles Reznikoff ’s Urban Poetics of Diaspora and Contingency”

Joshua Schuster, “Looking at Louis Zukofsky’s Poetics through Spinozist Glasses”

Amy Feinstein, ““Can a Jew be wild”: The Radical Jewish Grammar of Gertrude Stein’s Voices Poems”

Michael Heller, “Remains of the Diaspora: A Personal Meditation”

Alicia Ostriker, “Secular and Sacred: Returning (to) the Repressed”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Midrashic Sensibilities: Secular Judaism and Radical Poetics (A personal essay in several chapters)”

Norman Finkelstein, “Secular Jewish Culture and Its Radical Poetic Discontents”

Meg Schoerke, “Radical Relation: Jewish Identity and the Power of Contradictions in the Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and George Oppen”

Daniel Morris, ““Yes and No, Not Either/Or”: Aesthetics, Identity, and Marjorie Perloff ’s Vienna Paradox“

Marjorie Perloff, ““Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps”: Paul Celan’s Poetic Practice”

Charlie Bertsch, “Language in the Dark: The Legacy of Walter Benjamin in the Opera Shadowtime“

Thomas Fink, “Danger, Skepticism, and Democratic Longing: Five Contemporary Secular Jewish American Poets”

Stephen Paul Miller, “Relentlessly Going On and On: How Jews Remade Modern Poetry without Even Trying”

Eric Murphy Selinger, “Azoy Toot a Yid: Secular Poetics and “The Jewish Way””

Bob Holman, “A Jew in New York”

Maria Damon, “Imp/penetrable Archive: Adeena Karasick’s Wall of Sound”

Adeena Karasick, “In the Shadow of Desire: Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime and Its Kabbalistic Trajectories”

Adeena Karasick, “Hijacking Language: Kabbalistic Trajectories”

Benjamin Friedlander, “Letter to the Romans”

Paul Auster, “White”