"Du du du du du du, it's just another day."

I like poetry. I am particularly interested in frum poets, especially Jewish ones. The one I feel most at home with is Zelda. I wish I could have met her over tea and cookies. She writes about light, as many poets do. With Zelda there is no taint of heresy or hint of other godliness in her work. People like Colette Aboulker-Muscat and Rumi touch me, as do ancient Japanese Poets like Matzu Basho, as do Christian poets like CK Chesterton and more recently CS Lewis. The list goes on. And yet, they don't speak with a voice that I feel totally comfortable with, the way I do with Zelda. No-one hits the nail on the head like Zelda.

I think I'd have been a chasid of R Yehuda HeLevi had we only overlapped chronologically and geographically. I am a devotee of the Author of the Torah, the best book of poetry/song ever written. Also, all the rabbis who contributed to our liturgy, including the authors of the ever unpopular kinnot and selichot were outstanding poets, who purposely wrote poems - despite efforts to act like it was some kind of accident and we're stuck with all these prayers that somehow seem to be poems. In recent times rabbis and other frum Jews have started to publish poetry again.

Here's one example:

THE IVORY TOWER

By Yaakov Asher Sinclair

(from his website, linked to above, of photography, essays, and poetry.)

my ivory tower
turns out to be
a concrete blockhouse.
can I break down the walls
or will I just keep printing
the same old stationery?
The Ivory Tower.
The Ivory Tower.

More poetry later.

I just watched an Israeli movie called Jellyfish. It's powerful and well made. At the end, to my surprise I discovered that it was co-directed by Etgar Keret, a super-talented Israeli writer. His work can border on (or cross the border of) the morbid and the absurd. This film is fantastical, mythical, poetical, beautiful. If you can't live easily with unanswered questions, awkward silences, the meaning that rests impossibly in words but possibly in the spaces in between this movie's not for you. If you can reverse that last sentence and it suits you once reversed then you will enjoy this film.

There's a new book out called In The Narrow Places. It's the first book I know of with a reflection for each day of The Three Weeks. I like the author's writing (Erica Brown) in general. I hope this will be helpful to me and others. Perhaps it will start a trend (though hopefully full redemption will come before then), Some years back one book appeared with a thought and an assignment for each day of the Omer. Since then I know of two similar works - all helpful.

Which do you want more - to be loved or respected? How do you define those terms? Is either one without the other somewhat dissatisfying to you? (Me too.) Is respect and for that matter love predicated on position or age, or is it possible that it can and should go in all directions? Do we live by - "Who is respected, he who respects others?"

I just came across two nice quotes:

1. Knowledge Talks. Wisdom Listens.

2. Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you. ~ Mother Teresa

Today it happened again. Why is that some of the people who like my book most, who I would be quick to gift it to - and offer to, are the people who feel most strongly about paying me for my work.

Here's a contemporary Jewish poet:

A Jewish Poet (Excerpt)
By Yehoshua November
(as featured in The Jewish Week's review By Sandee Brawarsky)

It is hard to be a Jewish poet.

You cannot say things about God
that will offend the disbelievers.
And you always have to remind
someone
it wasn’t your people who killed
their savior.
And Solomon and David are
always laughing
over your shoulder
like a father and son ridiculing
the unfavored brother.
And you cannot entice people
with the sloping
parts of a woman’s body
because you mist always
remain pure.
And every day you have to ask
yourself why you’re writing
when there is already the one
great book
It’s hard to be a Jewish poet.
You cannot say anything about
the disbelievers,
which might offend God.

I am working on a review of a new book of Jewish poetry that I love. The intro of the book says not to excerpt except for reviews. I've committed to reviewing it on another website. So, we'll all just have to wait.

I don't recall if I shared here that I recently discovered that a friend of mine is the granddaughter of my kindergarten teacher, Racheil. It took some clarifying. Soup bowl haircut? Yes. Accent? Yes. Great teacher, remembered forever? Yes.

"Take wisdom where you find it" - Rambam

"As your gas tank approaches empty, you don't sit and get depressed and think it's permanent. You go fill it up. It's the same with life—when you're running on empty go fill your tank with a better thought, emotion, or action and get on with life." — Esther Hicks

I'm not usually one to mix blogging and Facebook, but I got a kick out of the fact that I received a record number of likes (all from people I know) for my comment below:

Howie Beigelman

So cool. Marina now has deli roll @ shmorg

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  Neil Fleischmann Reminds me of a routine of mine about single men and women invited to friends' wedding - in short, the women allow sad thoughts about their own age and odds to creep in and the guys go, "I hope they have those little hot dogs in blankets! I love those!!!"
  

  3 hours ago · · 4 people

Until a few moments ago I thought that the line was "What a drag it is getting home." It's actually "getting old." You probably knew that. To me "getting home" makes sense because the song is about a house-wives and how they cope-don't cope. The friend who corrected me chuckled a bit, just as I did - and think now that I perhaps shouldn't have - at my friend who thought that another line was "You put the lion in the coconut."

I just discovered Marilyn Nelson in the latest issue of Image. She's interviewed and has some great comments, such as: "I'm one of the lucky ones with too happy a life for poetry." Here's a real deal poem of hers. She's good, and deserves all the praise she gets:

Thank you for these tiny particles of ocean salt, pearl-necklace viruses, winged protozoans: for the infinite, intricate shapes of submicroscopic living things. For algae spores and fungus spores, bonded by vital mutual genetic cooperation, spreading their inseparable lives from equator to pole. My hand, my arm, make sweeping circles. Dust climbs the ladder of light. For this infernal, endless chore, for these eternal seeds of rain: Thank you. For dust.