Four By Four #37

Writing News

I have two pieces of writing news to share with you:

An essay that is very important to me, “I Was A Creative Writing Program Dropout: One Poet’s Story,” has been published by Majuscule, an online journal that’s very much worth knowing about. The essay takes as its starting point the moment in May of 1985 when Philip Booth, one of the founders of Syracuse’s MA in Creative Writing—they didn’t have an MFA back then—told me, and I quote, “You don’t need a creative writing degree to be a poet.” The rest traces the path I forged for myself as a poet and, along the way, says some things that I think are worth saying about MFA programs in general. I hope you’ll check it out.

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It has become commonplace to use the devastation Israel has wrought on the Palestinians, whether you call it genocide or not, to dismiss Jewish concerns about antisemitism as trivial by comparison, especially when they are in any way connected to Israel or Zionism. I was gratified, therefore, that Poets & Writers Magazine chose to publish my response to Namrata Poddar’s essay, “Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism.” You can read my response in its entirety here—it’s the second one on the page—but I will quote from the ending:

I am responding as a Jewish writer to an article about the politics of narrative published in a magazine for writers, in which the article’s author uses my identity to make her closing argument; and I am pointing out that her use of my identity, while it does not invalidate her argument as a whole, does not live up to the decolonizing standard she set for herself in her essay. In this context, in an era when we expect writers to care very much about, and to take care with, how we use the identities of those who are Other to us, that does not seem to me to be trivial at all.

I continue to believe Poddar’s article is worth reading, but I think my response offers an important perspective.

Four Things To Read

Q: Can We Talk About Narrative Magazine?, by Betsy Tuch

Narrative Magazine ran a contest, charged $27 for entry. Out of the hundreds and likely thousands of submissions they received, they could not find a single story, essay, photo essay, or graphic narrative worthy of their esteemed magazine. Not for First Place, and not even for Second. Will the entrants receive a refund? No, because as per their submission guidelines, the fees are non-refundable. Will the magazine explain why they did not choose winners in any of these categories? It doesn’t seem so. Narrative is a long-standing literary magazine with a large subscriber base. If they received just 500 submissions for their contest, that’s $13,500. Given the magazine’s reach, and given the breadth of genres represented in the contest, they likely received at least one thousand submissions. Which means this contest could have generated…well, a year’s salary for some.

The role played by contests in the literary world is a fraught one at best. What Tuch does in this issue of her newsletter, Lit Mag News, is expose the-questionable-at-best behavior of a literary magazine that is likely on many writers’ bucket list of where they would like to publish. I also appreciate the biting sarcasm and bitter irony embedded in the way Tuch has structured this piece. If you are a writer submitting work, or if you have reason to care about the socioeconomics of literary magazine publishing—from either side of the submission pile—this is worth reading.

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In Gaza, The Olive Trees Resist, by Hend Salama Abo Helow

Our harvest season has always been more than work; it is an unspoken ritual of love and resilience. But last year, genocide stole that from us. Our olive crops, ripe and waiting, were left to wither beneath the soil, buried under the chaos of relentless airstrikes. The terror in our hearts chained our limbs, leaving us unable to embark on the season that once brought life to our family and land. For years, we relied on skilled olive workers to help us complete the harvest in a week or two — a time of unity, laughter, and shared labor. But this year an insurmountable fear loomed over us, the shadows of war casting doubt on whether we would even survive the gathering.

In this brief essay, Helow tells the story of her family’s determination to complete the olive harvest despite the genocide raging around them. The details are disturbing enough in themselves, but I think this story is especially worth reading now, in the context of President Trump’s proposal to remove the Palestinians from Gaza—essentially a reboot of an idea that Joe Biden tried to pressure Egypt into accepting—as if they never really belonged there in the first place. It’s important to recognize that the destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza has not severed the connection that Palestinians who live there feel for the land. If anything, Israel’s actions have only strengthened those connections.

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People Hate Mourning Jews, by David Schraub

And it is not just the Bibas family, but the entire Jewish world, who is mourning[Kfir Bibas’] death. And, because we are Jews, that means that some people—sometimes other Jews—will tell us we are mourning Kfir wrong. One way we might be “wrong” is if we have the temerity to focus, for even a short spell, just on the Bibas family. Don’t we know others have suffered too? Are you saying that Jewish lives matter more? How tribal, how cloistered, how gauche, to not use this moment to make a statement about the universal value of all human life. But another way we might be “wrong” is if we do mourn Kfir Bibas by reference to the universal value of all human life—and in particular, of both Israeli and Palestinian life.

In the three part series I wrote called “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?” (1, 2, 3), I talked briefly about why I think it’s necessary to understand Hamas’ October 7th attack as both an expression of Palestinian resistance and as antisemitic. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an antisemitic expression of Palestinian resistance.) At the time, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza had not yet begun in full force, though it wasn’t hard to predict what was to come, and I thought it was important to make visible some of the complexity I felt within myself in responding to Hamas’ attack as a Jew. As the war raged on, however, and the destruction of Gaza and Palestinian life—the ongoing massacre of Palestinian men, women, and children—became increasingly overwhelming to contemplate, it grew more and more difficult to see focusing on that complexity, relevant though I continued to believe it was, as timely. The hostage exchange, however, has brought this question to the fore in a way that Schraub illuminates nicely, though from a very different angle than the one I took in my essay. His post is well worth reading.

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The Erotic in Poetry: Self-Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sexual Liberation, by Sara Sturek

My doctor diagnosed me with vulvodynia, a condition of pain and discomfort in the vulva referred from tight and dysfunctional pelvic floor muscles. My vaginal muscles were unknowingly flexing, all the time. My pelvic floor was the place I was holding all my stress, anxiety, and trauma similar to someone with a stiff neck or shoulders… I had experienced sexual trauma in the past, and while I believed I had moved on, processed it, my body seemed to operate independently. It was still afraid, unwilling to cooperate with my brain. Every time, I continued to have sex with untreated vulvodynia I was re-experiencing the sexual trauma inflicted onto my nerves, bones, and flesh.

That diagnosis lies at the heart to Sturek’s essay, which is decidedly not about how she healed or how erotic poetry, reading and writing it, helped her heal so that she could enjoy sexual penetration without pain. Rather, the essay is about how writing poetry became for her “a space [in which] ’to release’ what I could not always physically in pelvic floor therapy” and how that made her poetry a place “to navigate sexuality and gender beyond societal limitations.” In the end she makes a connection between her commitment “to seek sexual pleasure despite such sexual dysfunction” and her choice to write sestinas, a formal constraint that “works sort of like a cock ring, or a ball gag” to create a meaningful contrast between “pleasure and severity.” Sturek’s essay is a thoughtful meditation on the connection between poetry and the body that goes well beyond the usual ways that idea is expressed, as, for example, in Charles Olson’s idea of Projective Verse, where the connection is through breath as a means of establishing rhythm and meter. Sturek asserts that the constraints vulvodynia exerts on her sexuality are not unlike the formal constraints of the sestinas she writes, that working within those constraints to seek pleasure, whether of the body or of art-making, is, in the end, a way of “practicing what it mean[s] to be free.”

Four Things To See

These covers—all from the British Library, from the series “Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses,” and all published in 1892—are in the public domain.

A Wife In Name Only

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The Fates of Three

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The Secret of the Pool

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Her Bitter Awakening

Four Things To Listen To

Day Dream - Kenny Baron and Dave Holland

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Shekare Ahoo - Mitra Sumara

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Dawn - Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble

(If you're unable to watch this on my website, I highly recommend clicking through to YouTube. This is a beautiful piece of music.)

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Prokofiev - Overture on Hebrew Themes

Four Things About Me

When I was seventeen, my father showed up to take me out for my birthday with a terrible hang over. He took me to what back then would have been thought of as a very fancy diner and, after we sat down, explained to me that he only had enough money to pay for me to have dinner, which, he said, was fine, since all he could really stomach was a buttered bagel. I ordered duck l’orange, which I’d never eaten before, and I’m sure we talked while he sat opposite me eating his bagel, but I don’t remember anything we talked about, except that, on the way home, he said something about how he “could’ve been around more. I have no memory of responding, but when I think about that birthday meal now, I place it in the context of my father telling me not too long before he died about what it was like when he and his third wife first started gambling in Atlantic City and they would run out of money. They sometimes had to sleep, he said, on a bench and use the reserve cash they made sure never to gamble to take a bus back to where they lived in Manhattan. Maybe my birthday that year happened to fall on a day after they’d lost everything—his wife at the slot machines and he most probably at the blackjack table.

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The first secret I remember being asked to keep was my about father’s gambling. When he and my mother divorced in the mid-1960s, he was awarded weekend visitation rights. He would take my brother and me for the day on Saturday and sometimes we’d spend the night with him at his parents’ place in Brooklyn. I don’t remember when it started, or how often it happened, but he would sometimes stop when he was taking us home at an Off Track Betting (OTB) establishment. I didn’t fully understand what he did in there when he left me and my brother in the car—which people did back then—but he would look at us very seriously every time he came out and say something like, “Make sure you don’t tell your mother we stopped here. It’s just between us.” I kept the secret for him for I-don’t-know-how-long, until one time, when my mother asked us what we did with our father that day, I let slip that we’d stopped at OTB on the way home. I don’t remember what my mother said, if anything, and I’m not sure how my father found out that I’d told her. I think my brother might have let it slip accidentally-on-purpose, since there was some tension after the divorce about me being on my mother’s side and him being on my father’s. However he found out though, I remember very clearly my father turning around in the driver’s seat of his car after he pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex. “I was hoping I could trust you, Richard, but I guess I can’t.” He glared at me while he spoke those words and all I wanted in those moments was to disappear.

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When my mother married the man who became our step-father, she asked my brother and me to call him Dad around the house, not George, and to call our father Larry. It would, she explained, make George feel more welcome in our home. I don’t think my mother did this to undermine my father’s place in our lives, at least not consciously, but I understand nonetheless why contemporary divorce settlements often include a clause explicitly prohibiting this practice. Neither I nor my brother were at all confused about who our real father was, and George never once tried to use what we called him to alienate us from our father, but the fact that we did as my mother asked caused my father no small amount of pain and anxiety, which he often took out on me. He didn’t mention the issue of what we called George specifically, but he would go out of his way to make me feel guilty about not appreciating him. One example sticks out in my memory. Back then, they didn’t have stepfather cards for Father’s Day, so my brother and I gave George the same kind of card we gave our father. I don’t remember caring very much about what George’s card actually said, as long as it said something generically appropriate for the day. I did care, though, about what the card I gave my father said. I wanted it to mean something. One year, I must’ve been around nine or ten years old, I picked out for the first time a card for my father that I had a personal connection to. I don’t remember anything about it, except that there was a picture of a Garfield-looking cat on the front and that I saw the message, whatever it was, as an inside joke between me and my father, one that would tell him just how great I thought he was. When I gave him the card, though, after he’d read my brother’s, he looked at the front, scanned the inside, and said, “I bet the card you gave George had the word Dad printed on it, not like this one.” Then, without saying thank you, he tossed the card along with my brother’s onto the front passenger seat. “Get in,” he told us, and we climbed into the backseat and he drove us off to whatever it was we did that day.

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When I think now about how young my father was when he and my mother got divorced—if I have the timeline right, he was not much older than 25—I have, despite the pain he caused me, a great deal of compassion for him. Back then, there was no such thing as either joint custody or even the concept of a “non-custodial parent.” My father’s role was defined by the term “absentee parent.” Given the baggage that term cannot help but carry, when I put myself in my father’s place, I don’t know how I would have handled hearing my younger brother and me, for example, struggle to navigate what-to-call-whom-when if we were talking on the phone with our father and George happened to be in the same room. Being able to understand my father is not the same thing as being able to reconcile with him. There’s a much longer story there that I will have to save for another time.