Nineveh E-Book

Zohar Atkins

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Nineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. Zohar Atkins's poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.

Leseprobe

ZOHAR ATKINS

Nineveh

Contents

Title PageProtest System Baby The Sin Fake Judaism The Binding of Isaac Some Pogs Fugue or Fondue? Outside Echoes Déjà Vu Seeker’s Psalm Descent Song of Myself (Apocryphal) The Oy of the Poyem: 28 Exercises in non-Mastery Poetry TedTalk Notes Poetry Is Failure by Other Means Soundbytes Tosefta Say Dear Guru Dementia Letting Nothing Wait Villanelle Hermeneutics What Did the Heavenly Ministers Do? In the Beginning Cain and Abel Radish Teraphim Prayer Rahab Where, Oh Lord? Lord, You Know Praying with My Feet CV Self-Portrait As a Poetry BotApologies in Advance Innocence Is Never Luxuriant Subway Poem These Gyros of Inattention Sent The Consolation of Poetry Mychal David Two Great Lights Lost and Found Opportunity Cost Nineveh Elegy For A Special Kid Yom Kippur 2017 Pirkei Avot Blackbirds Why You No Longer Pray Amongst the Ruins Doorknob Poem Without Without Title AcknowledgementsAbout the Author Copyright

Nineveh

Protest

No sooner do I say

‘Let there be light’

Then a horde of angels arrives

With their signs.

‘No more oppression of darkness!’

‘Stop occupying our empty wild.’

‘Down with the visible!’

‘God Should Know Better Than to Speak.’

Even the walls of my hotel lobby seem

To sing out against me.

But then I remember, I’m God.

Soon the angels will want to go home.

In the end, nobody will remember how they

Held hands, soaring together, like a school

Into the tear-dusk firmament.

How they laid their celestial torsos down in a row

To prove my world a desecration.

Nobody will hear their words of lament,

‘Holy, holy, holy’, as anything

But praise.

System Baby

I was six when I first filed for moral bankruptcy.

I was ten when they told me language is inherently classist.

At thirteen, I started defining kindness

as ‘making nice to those who like your favorite teams’.

At twenty, I hired a ghost to write my LinkedIn profile.

At thirty, I started radiosuctive parole therapy.

At forty-one, I began to look sideways and call it inward.

At eighty-six, I’m a work in progress.

Today, at 120, I’m a proud piece of gum,

who’s almost forgotten the countless nights it took me,

locked in the shoe of the human mind,

to get here to tell you: don’t let others humanise you.

Don’t let them take away your objectivity

no matter how much they brutalise you.

The Sin

According to the Zohar, a sin is never as defiant as it seems.

Rather, the sin, if it can be so called, always comes

from too much of what is proper.

The builders’ sin, for example, was not

that they breached the heavenly palace,

but that they stopped at the first gate.

Others say the sin was that they made the tower resemble a deity.

The builders had placed a sword in the tower’s hand

like children drawing on the cover of Time.

Others say the sin was that they had taken a natural word, ‘Babel’

and leveraged it into the brand of a Multinational Consulting Group.

This is the true meaning of ‘Let us make a name for ourselves’.

No one agrees.

As if the scattering of tongues in the story were a cipher

for the interpretive chaos to come.

To this day, we continue to debate what bricks to use.

Should they be made of rice paper or holograph?

Should the tower’s shadow be cut through enemy airspace?

Can folks in PR really be called builders?

I still can’t find the word sin anywhere in the story.

Fake Judaism

Abraham, says Deleuze,

could only become a Jew

by first being a goy.

Inside every pintele yid

is a Pinteresting Gentile.

And inside every Gentile

is a unique ignorance

of the Midrash

that the Torah was given to everyone.

*

I have studied the yud-shaped pool of blood

like an exhausted hunter sniffing out the air for some lentils.

I have adorned myself with Bilaam’s staff infection, and the lines on my face

record the litany of psalms I have struggled

to compose

lisping, tongue-numb from the frost of imagined taiga.

But never could I hear

the night-ram bleating out

Zohar, Zohar.

*