Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture

Stephen Paul Miller is a professor at St. John's University. He is the author of five books of poems: The Bee Flies in May, Fort Dad, Being with a Bullet, Skinny Eighth Avenue and Art is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam. He is also the author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, and coeditor of Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets.Daniel Morris is the author of The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Allen Grossman, Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors Write on Modern Art, and The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self. He is also editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

“Some of the key issues for Jewish writers in the 20th century are those of identity and self-representation. 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. 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 are some of the qualities these poets see as common to themselves, the poetry they make, and the tradition they work within.”--Shofar