Tag: medieval poetry

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Why is Nobody Here? Who is Listening to Us?

I’m in a group that’s reading through Jack Spicer’s poetics this spring, and by way of introduction, we were asked to respond to his “The Poet and Poetry” and it spurred me to make some notes about something that I’ve been trying and failing to write since October. I’ll get there eventually.

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— I hate the idea of introducing myself as a writer with something super unpolished so I’m going with bullet points so that I don’t feel like I’m uploading a shitty first draft (Anne Lamott) but rather notes for a shitty first draft that I can then share with no-one.

— Spicer’s “embarrassing question” (“why is nobody here? who is listening to us?”) resonates with a lot of the questioning about the relevance of the humanities today, and that’s even before he gets to his jabs at the New Critics.

— In my very small corner of the academic-study-of-poetry world, cited to the point of cliché is the question posed by Mahmoud Darwish: “Is al-Andalus in the earth/ or in the poem?” He’s asking whether this place in time (medieval Spain) that is so lionized or demonized or something-else-with-teethized is or was real or exists only in the imagination of poets.

— Since October I have been avoiding writing something about the unfortunate coincidence in my undergraduate syllabus that had me teaching the Andalusi Zionides the week that the war between Hamas and Israel began. These are lengthy poems written in Hebrew by the otherwise-Arabic-speaking Jewish poets of medieval Spain that express a longing for Zion, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes geographical and real. Normally I try to draw some distinctions between “Zionism” in the Middle Ages and political Zionism in the modern world. This time I just avoided saying the word as much as possible.

— I did a terrible job teaching poetry that I normally love and teach well because I just. didn’t. want. to talk about it. My friend Noam posted on Facebook that he teared up that week in a seminar he was teaching all about Andalusi poetry; I think he did the better job of it because he let his students see the impact that medieval poetry could still have on a person.

— Me? If I cry, it’s about the Sarajevo Haggadah. (Look up Geraldine Brooks’ piece from the New Yorker a bunch of years ago if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

— NYU kicked Faculty for Justice in Palestine out of the atrium of the library where they were holding a reading of Palestinian poetry because you can’t read poetry aloud in the atrium of the library.

— “Live poetry is a kind of singing… Poetry demands a human voice to sing it and demands an audience to hear it. Without these it is naked, pure, and incomplete — a bore.” Spicer was trained as a medievalist. Of course he knew this.

— One more bullet point would be putting, well, too fine a point on it, no?

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A Personal Seamus Heaney Syllabus

Following my surprising foray into poetry? as a pandemic project, I applied for and was accepted into a yearlong program at Brooklyn Poets — lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of critique, lots of class. One of the elements of the program is that each participant chooses a poet to do a yearlong deep-dive read. Because I’m particularly interested in translation and reworking medieval texts, I’ve chosen Seamus Heaney. I feel a little intimidated about having to be intelligent about the work of a poet that is totally out of my context, as if I should be able to jump in and be brilliant just because I already know how to read text; but if I can screw up my courage, I’ll try to blog my way through reading Heaney’s oeuvre. 

I’ve kept the secondary literature to a minimum, partly so that I’m approaching the poetry without it being filtered through others’ readings first, and partly, honestly, just because there are still only 24 hours in a day and I have an academic book, a trade book, and a translation that I’m also supposed to be working on, plus all the other stuff… But in any case,  what I’m reading this year is after the jump:

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“I Sing: Mizmor le-David”: Hebro and the Hebrew Poets

My intellectual lineage is such that it is perhaps inevitable that I will always think about poetry and music together. Once you accept that Bob Dylan has more in common with the Provençal troubadours than not, something breaks open in the theories of literature that govern your reading. I will always be a Clapton girl at heart, but the more medieval poetry that I have read, the more I have come to appreciate rap, hip-hop and R&B music. I know, I know — what a bougie, white-girl, academic way to come to those genres, but all the same, maybe that’s the point: Maybe medieval poetry maybe shouldn’t be quite so rarefied and reified in the canon.

For Black History Month, the Black Jewish writer MaNishtana shared music videos on Facebook featuring Black Jewish artists; that’s where I first came across this song, which draws heavily on the words of Psalm 23. I found it compelling on its own: I think that rhyming “so the world should know” with “le-ma’an shemo” (1:15) is pretty close to poetic genius — although I’ll admit I’ve always been a sucker for a solid bilingual rhyme.

I don’t think I’m really saying anything earth-shattering by pointing out the cultural-contextual similarities between rap music and medieval poetry; it’s certainly one that I’ve found useful in the past in teaching and in presenting medieval poetry to a lay audience. I’m writing this now more because I was just really grabbed by a new-to-me example of the phenomenon of sampling which is a striking demonstration of the ways in which Jewish poets draw not only from the Bible  but from the literary, poetic, and musical traditions around them in their broader local communities.

This song plays with several modes of traditional Jewish writing, but also draws in its rootedness in hip-hop in a way that very much reflects the practices of the medieval Hebrew poets from Spain. The song uses medieval modes of commentary on a biblical text; it recourses to tropes about God and writing that we find all over medieval Jewish models; and it is bilingual and bicultural in ways that reflect the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets’ borrowings from other languages and the dominant cultural and literary contexts they inhabited. Continue reading ““I Sing: Mizmor le-David”: Hebro and the Hebrew Poets”

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The Proof of the Poetry

The Nobel Prize in Literature went (as you surely know unless you have been living under a rock) to Bob Dylan this year. The news was followed by rather a lot of complaining about the choice, agonizing about the nature of the literary, and pearl-clutching over the decline of high culture in favor of pop. The one community in which none of this happened was amongst medievalists: Those of us who study the protest poetry and personal anthems of the Middle Ages, written in verse and often sung aloud, do not have the luxury of holding up the Provençal troubadour lyric (just to give one example) as the exemplification of the literary just because it is old while condemning Bob Dylan for being pop or soppy or definitely not poetry because he is a lot less old. The line is blurry and in the end they are the same thing: Bob Dylan is our troubadour.

For more on rock music and its relationship to the Provençal lyric, read chapter 3 of María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love, which focuses on a collaboration between the Persian poet Nizami and the rocker Eric Clapton that transcended language, death, and eight-hundred years. That chapter argues, in part, that in lyrics like Dylan’s or Clapton’s or the Provençal troubadours, the music is an inherent part of the poetics and the lyrics and the music can’t be separated out and read separately. It makes perfectly good sense: we don’t, for example, separate out the two languages in bilingual poetry or the sources or influences from poetry written at a cultural crossroads (or we shouldn’t, anyway). Some medieval Hebrew poetry has Arabic metrics; some medieval Arabic poetry ends with a Romance couplet; some Provençal poetry is influenced by Arabic forms and sung as song; and some twentieth-century American poetry has electric guitars.

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Menocal brought rock to medieval studies in ways that were revolutionary and totally self-evident.  (And in fact, having been her student, the coincidental timing of the fourth anniversary of her death and the awarding of a Nobel Prize that I’d like to think would have thrilled her gives this all a bit more weight for me.)

But despite my intellectual lineage, I don’t know all that much about Bob Dylan’s oevre. I find his voice hard to listen to, so I mostly don’t. At the end of the day, I’m a Clapton-Beatles kind of girl. The song of Dylan’s that I know the best, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” isn’t one that I know because of him, per se, or through a recording that he made. I don’t even really know it in English. In the early 1970s, the Israeli poet Jonathan Geffen translated several of Dylan’s songs into Hebrew, which were recorded in 1974 Danny Litani.

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Nerdy Knitting

I ran out of yarn while at the 4th Annual St. Louis Medieval and Renaissance Symposium Mini-Conference on the Cultures of the Translation in the Medieval Mediterranean. On the plus side, this means I finished a scarf* (based on a historical pattern) that has completely unnecessarily taken over three years to finish; on the down side it means I needed to stop and pick up some new yarn for the flight home. (Most of the time when a knitter tells you that he or she needs yarn, question the definition of the term need; in this case, it was really a question of having something to do on the flight home that would distract me from how much I hate flying. This is about as close to a legitimate, dictionary-standard definition of need as it gets with yarn.)

This will actually become as much a medieval poetry post as a knitting one momentarily. Really.

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