Zackary Sholem Berger's Blog, page 9

Redeemed Flame: A review of “Black Seeds: The Poetry & Reflections of Tariq Touré”

I come to this book as an outsider. I am a white guy, a Jew, reviewing a volume of African American poetry for black people in Baltimore. I do this because I live in Baltimore, I feel a kinship with African Americans due to our shared history; and I want to know how poetry of different communities works.

This is all the more true because Tariq Touré’s poetry, in this black-and-white volume called “Black Seeds,” is aimed at his community. These are short poems about the state of black Baltimore, about life and death and striving, murder and failure and desperation. Each poem is accompanied on the facing page by an image, often a photo of an African American looking into the camera. The portraits are unadorned, beautiful.

This is more than a community – it is an audience before whom the poet is performing. This is a multimedia presentation. It is based on the slam esthetic: each poem ends with a boldfaced title, the performer naming what he has just delivered with a flourish.

There are calls to nationalism:

“I see empires in your furrowed eyebrows” — Nubia

… and prayerful meditations on the self:

“Man is given seconds, yet begs for minutes”–The curious attention span

This is hip-hop on the page, and as such strikes a balance. On the one hand there is rhyme aplenty and anaphora, familiar in any oral tradition; on the other these are verses with plenty of space, cascading down the page, and capital letters to give emphasis. There is a poem Balance about this tension between the weight of history (and literacy) and the present-day of orality (and popular culture):

I have friends

Who sit and Pontificate

Musing over Plans

To leave

More than

A biological imprint

7 generations

Down the stream

Where

Apple headed children

Trip over

Their forefathers & foremothers

Legacies

On the way to school

And

I have friends

That have only

Planned

For Saturday night

The entire slim volume is balanced on the razor’s edge of this conflict: duties to the self versus duties to one’s people; honoring past martyrs and building bridges to the future impervious to flame.

Indeed, this book is surrounded by flame, fire out of the gunbarrels of police and the torches of protest in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death. One would expect there to be more hate. I don’t read that here, though there is sorrow and rage:

Jim crow’s skeleton

fell out of

a police van

crashed onto the ashen pavement

paraded down Pennsylvania avenue

brutalized the metal cavalry

of pigs

subsequently

announcing a 100% off sale

the city glowed

as Watts glowed

as Harlem glowed

as Ferguson glowed

for Freddie

Baltimore Power Keg

“Glowing” as candles glow, not burning or flaming as an explosion. The skeleton, zombified, brings multiple sites of tragedy and brutality into redemptive communion.

In the wake of my move to Baltiimore seven years ago, and even more so in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, I have read more and more (though still not enough) contemporary poetry by African Americans. These poets inhabit a diverse space. Toure’s is not the academic poetry of Terrence Hayes or the pop-culture fueled confessional wit of Saeed Jones. His gifts are in the shared world of oral and written, of street, school, protest, home, and quiet self. I look forward to reading more of him, as he sheds his glow.

The Cleaver’s Daughter: A short story about love and bleeding in my new translation

I have been translating the prose poetry/symbolic fiction pieces of Avrom Sutzkever, and a new translation of mine, “The Cleaver’s Daughter,” appears today on the Yiddish Book Center’s website. Here’s a taste. Enjoy!

She was my first love, the pockmarked redhead with cute freckles on her pert nose, like a poppy seed topping. I even allowed myself to imagine that she had as many freckles as she was years old, a freckle every year for good luck.

When I made her acquaintance, I counted nine of those presents on her nose. The street where we both grew up panted its way uphill, starting from the Green Bridge over the clay banks of the Vilia, ascending as far as the Sheskin Mountains, where the street became a trail going all the way to Vilkomir. Most kids from my street and even a number of adults called the girl the Cleaver’s Daughter.

Why did she get that name? Why was an orphan labeled that way?

Stop the 21st Century Cures Act

21st Century Cures Act will distort the meaning of ‘FDA approved’

The term “FDA approved” means a lot to those of us working in health care and the patients we treat. But if the 21st Century Cures Act becomes law – the House of Representatives approved it Wednesday and the Senate will vote on it next week – this mark of trustworthy stewardship will become a shadow…

Doctors Against Trump: you can’t avoid politics in health, it’s too late.

Some doctors might say,

“I don’t want to mix politics and medicine.”

Too late. They have been, always will be mixed. #SDOH

— DoctorsAgainstTrump (@MDsAgainstTrump) November 16, 2016

Handcuffed for no reason in Baltimore, 4: It never happened!

The saga continues, thanks to an intriguing letter from the Baltimore Police. Or, perhaps, the whole thing never happened at all.

What’s the deal with blood clots on plane flights? And can anything be done to prevent them?

Check out my latest bit of medical advice. There’s a happy ending! Or at least an elastic one.

Only childhood gets no older: me and Avrom Sutzkever in The Potomac

Thanks Charles Rammelkamp for including three poems of mine in the latest issue of The Potomac — one original work, and two translations from Avrom Sutzkever’s Diary Poems. (And don’t forget to check out Carol Berkower‘s lovely verse in the same issue!)

Here’s one of those translations of Sutzkever’s Yiddish:

1975

Explain it? Explain it how?

The sun didn’t turn colder,

but she won’t melt tears

and only childhood gets no older.

Youth, her brother, was trampled

like red grapes in the cellar.

The shadow’s hair turns silver

and only childhood gets no older.

Her snows and her violets

are not to be had for gold.

Her king grows old, as does his kingdom

and only childhood gets no older.

From Diary Poems by Avrom Sutzkever,

translated from the Yiddish

New episodes on my podcast “Sholem’s Bias”: check them out!

I can read! I’ll prove it next Tuesday

Please come and hear me read from Making Sense of Medicine on Tuesday, August 2, at 7pm, at Baltimore’s Ivy Bookshop.

“What a terrible thing! It’s a shadow, a clown. It’s not me!”

My translation from the Hebrew of Natan Alterman’s poem The Shadow is now posted at the Manhattanville Review, and also — below! (Check out the journal website for a little squib about my translation philosophy or lack thereof.)

The Shadow

Natan Alterman

From Hebrew: Zackary Sholem Berger

Once there was a man and his shadow.

One night the shadow stood up

took the man’s shoes and coat,

put them on. Passing by

it took the man’s hat from the hook,

trying as well to remove his head —

without success. It took his face off

and put that on too. If that weren’t enough

next morning he went out with his walking stick.

The man ran down the street after him

shrieking to his friends: What a terrible thing!

It’s a shadow! A clown! It’s not me! I’ll

write the authorities! He can’t get away with it! He wailed

bitterly, but little by little got used to it, fell silent, till at last

he forgot about the incident.