Exiled in the Word: Poems and Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present by Jerome Rothenberg

by Jerome Rothenberg

A poetry anthology that explores the range of Jewish verse from tribal remnants of pre-Judaic times to the works of contemporary Israelis and that traces the course of Jewish thought

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not Jewish, but I tend to read more about Judaism than most gentiles because of my intense interest in world religions. I think the title of this anthology, Exiled in the Word, is taken from Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions. Pieces of writing by Jabès, Celan, and Kafka, three of my very favorite writers, are included among those of the many authors represented in it. It also has a poem by one of its editors, Jerome Rothenberg, who is an excellent poet in his own right. The book includes commentary, on much of its contents, provided by Rothenberg and the other editor Harris Lenowitz, which elucidates the more obscure and less familiar processes that grew the large and diverse group of utterances collected in it.
One of the memorable pages in the book shows a black-and-white photograph by Wallace Berman depicting a woman crouching near a wall covered in large Hebrew writing – she is looking up at a place on the wall where a spillage of black, (paint, but reminiscent of some kind of violence), has blocked some of the letters, but over which is painted more writing in white, as if the words were coming, luminous and living, through the sluice of ink. Judaism is a perfect religious tradition to be represented with an anthology of writings because of Judaism’s multilayered probing and grasp and love of language – speech, alphabet, the text of Torah and its commentaries; and also because Judaism the religion is inseparable from Jewry as a living community based on kinship and culture, and ostracized and persecuted by other cultures, yet also distinct by choice, by conscious affirmation of their relationship and responsibility to God. The works in this book, therefore, range among both religious and secular emphases, but with the balance definitely tipped toward the religious. These pages give an awe-inspiring sense of witness and connection to, and searching after and assenting to and/or rebelling against, the mysteries of divinity, (plethora of worlds and eons held in existence and moved by the single, ineffable God.) Also present are Jewish voices irreverently satirizing aspects of Judaism. And voices of individual people commenting from their deepest points on aspects of their lives, as well as on Jewish life in general, (as the form of poetry, when well-made, always enables the expression of the deepest terrains of its writers.) This book is full with the uncanny dreamlikeness of religious mysticism, and with the Jewishness of active ambivalence, displacement, parallax and paradox, conscience and consciousness. Moreover, the book gives a profound sense that to be human is also to be religious, to stand alongside other conscious beings, facing God the Creator, the Divine Being dwelling alongside and beyond the core of every point in the universe. Another of my favorite things included in the book is a contribution by Jackson Mac Low of a notation for and explication of a version of a prayer said and sung by several people at one time, with a given limited freedom for improvisation among the order of the sounds in the words and the tones and durations with which they are sounded – he says the most important thing in the sounding of this prayer is to “listen and respond” to the other participants’ voices. I imagine that this listening and response will ensure beauty and complexity, along with the newness in every time this piece religious art, (this instance of modern and timeless communal religious worship, religious act or action, one of creating and metamorphosing sounds within prayer), is put in voice.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

On my schmancy Android phone, this app doesn't work well. I was trying to write a progress/ status update... no dice. Additionally, I am unable to read other reviews of this book via the cell phone app. Many readers gave this book 5 stars, and I would dearly love to know why. Personally, I think this book is... incredibly odd. it's full of strange mathematical equations, and umm... sentence fragments that read like... the rantings of unhinged people. There's... stuff that's appealing, but then as I was flipping through, I found precious little written by women, and an overall sense that most of these writers had a... whacked sense/attitude towards women; that age old b.s. of "women as virgins" being the perfect ideal, and boy, that full -on pisses me off. I'm not overly fond of a bunch of weird crap that pseudo intellectual snobby people deem ' artistic and brilliant' when honestly? This stuff is full-on nutty, sorry. I think what these editors are trying to convey here is: Judaism, and Jews have always felt marginalized, persecuted, etc. Putting all this whack stuff that these whacky ' mystics' ranted/wrote about in one volume simply underscores this premise. Sorry. Literally, I feel like that kid in the story The Emperor's New Clothes": whatever the rest of these readers said in their reviews, I call B.S. This stuff is simply crazy. Caveat: there are some actual poems in here, scattered throughout. They are mostly...meh.

[Garth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of this book consists of translations of ancient or medieval texts written in a postmodern poetic style. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Overall I enjoyed it.