Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah
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Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah Ponichtera Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 ©2012 Sarah Ponichtera All rights reserved All Louis Zukofsky material Copyright Paul Zukofsky; the material may not be reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. A fee will be charged. ABSTRACT Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah Ponichtera This dissertation traces the evolution of a formalist literary strategy through the twentieth century in both Yiddish and English, through literary and historical analyses of poets and poetic groups from the turn of the century until the 1980s. It begins by exploring the ways in which the Yiddish poet Yehoash built on the contemporary interest in the primitive as he developed his aesthetics in the 1900s, then turns to the modernist poetic group In zikh (the Introspectivists) and their efforts to explore primitive states of consciousness in individual subjectivity. In the third chapter, the project turns to Louis Zukofsky's inclusion of Yehoash's Yiddish translations of Japanese poetry in his own English epic, written in dialogue with Ezra Pound. It concludes with an examination of the Language poets of the 1970s, particularly Charles Bernstein's experimental verse, which explores the way that language shapes consciousness through the use of critical and linguistic discourse. Each of these poets or poetic groups uses experimental poetry as a lens through which to peer at the intersections of language and consciousness, and each explicitly identifies Yiddish (whether as symbol or reality) as an essential component of their poetic technique. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Implications............................................................................................................................... 11 Chapter 2: Yehoash: The New World of the Primitive................................................................. 20 I. The Primitive ........................................................................................................................ 21 II. Translation ...................................................................................................................... 31 III. In Geveb ......................................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 3: The Fragmented Self: Individualism in Yiddish Introspectivism ............................... 48 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 48 I: Introspectivism’s Fragmented Individual .............................................................................. 55 II: Introspectivism’s Place in American Literary Culture ......................................................... 59 III: The Journal Inzikh .............................................................................................................. 65 Chapter 4: Submerged Yiddish Structures in the Poetry of Louis Zukofsky ............................... 80 I. Yiddish in "Poem Beginning 'The'" ................................................................................... 80 II. His Despairing Predecessors .......................................................................................... 93 III. Yehoash in "A" ............................................................................................................. 103 Chapter 5: The Critical Turn ....................................................................................................... 115 I. Yiddish Poetry in the Postvernacular Age ....................................................................... 115 II. The Merging of Poetry and Criticism .......................................................................... 119 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 136 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 138 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful for the years I was privileged to spend at Columbia University's Yiddish Program, devoting myself to the study of Yiddish literature. It has been an incredible intellectual journey, and I thank Columbia University, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and the Atran Foundation for making it possible. I could not have made it to this point without the help of many individuals. I am grateful to my advisor Jeremy Dauber, a mentor who guided my development as a scholar from the earliest stages with encouragement, inspiration, and humor. To Michael Golston, who gave generously of his time and expertise to develop and focus my work with poetry. To the other members of my committee: Anita Norich, Casey Blake, and Burt Kimmelman, for their insightful comments and suggestions for the development of this project. To those who read early drafts of the work: Jeremy Dauber, Michael Golston, Casey Blake, Alyssa Quint and Rebecca Kobrin. Your suggestions have brought this work to a much higher level. To the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature for providing a forum to present and get feedback on early stages of this research. To my colleagues (and friends!) in the program: Ben Sadock, Chana Masor, Yuri Vendenyapi, Agi Legutko, and Jessica Kirzane. You are an inspiration! Finally, to my family, for their love and endless patience. I couldn't have done it without you. ii 1 Chapter 1: Introduction This research identifies a direct link between American Yiddish poetics and modern experimental poetry, illustrating the impact of American literatures in languages other than English. Yiddish poetry, as it developed in America, pioneered a fragmented aesthetic, which expresses the psychological fragmentation felt by recent immigrant intellectuals, living between two languages and cultural perspectives. This aesthetic does not disappear with the decline of Yiddish poetry in America, as one might expect, but resurfaces in the work of the experimental American Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, and then again in the experimental poetry of the Language school in the 1970s and 80s. Over the course of the twentieth century, an aesthetic that expresses a sense of chaotic personal experience through the inclusion of words and ideas that emerge from jarringly disparate contexts, including different linguistic contexts, transitions from the insular world of Yiddish poetry to the arguably equally insular world of experimental poets in the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite its limited audience, this is an expansive poetics that consistently rejects attempts to limit its topoi or technique. From the turn of the twentieth century, Yiddish poets in America began to create an aesthetics of fragmentation. The poet Yehoash, who arrived in America in 1890, wrote poetry in der mode of Japanese, Native American, and Arabic folktales, shaping verse with a deep consciousness of meter that he learned from translating Byron. Despite his knowledge of poetic form, he was unafraid to leave meter behind in his later works, which described the chaos and excitement of New York City and modern technology in free verse. Yehoash, a poet educated in a European society deeply influenced by German Enlightenment ideas of culture and peoplehood, wrote a body of work that attempted to provide a cultural basis for Yiddish literature, providing the language with an exquisite translation of a key cultural work, the Bible, 2 as well as innovative verse the proved that the language's resources were equal to the task of participating in world culture. The second chapter identifies his key contributions to initiating a fragmented aesthetics. The poetic school In zikh, or the Introspectivists, think deeply about their practice of poetry, considering the implications of their fragmented poetics, as befits their name. While they share the widespread modernist impulse to reshape the practice of poetry to reflect a modern reality, they cannot subscribe to the American Imagist vision that would entail reducing traditional English verse to a more concise, and concrete, form.1 That poetic technique assumes that all people will have similar emotional reactions to, for example, the famous red wheelbarrow of William Carlos Williams, so that evoking that image alone will bring to mind associations with the image that were presumed to be universal: in this case, ideas of home, agriculture, childhood innocence, and so on. The Introspectivists cannot make the assumption that their readers will share their cultural background in this way, because they seek an audience among both Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe and America, and modern intellectuals from every culture. Instead, they attempt to document their thought process for the reader, knowing it to be foreign to them, at least insofar as any individual is a stranger to the thought processes of another. In their manifesto, they describe their own unique understanding of accuracy in poetic expression. For them, instead of documenting the physical features