T’shuvah
Poetry
Fernwood Press, 2023
$16.00, 75 pages ISBN: 978-1-59498-112-8
T’shuvah, Hebrew for “repentance,” is a word whose luster brightens particularly in late summer as the Jewish Days of Awe approach. Within the parlance of T’shuvah, Richard Jeffrey Newman’s masterful third collection of poetry, the term not only orchestrates, in the words of Rabbi Wahrman, his early yeshiva teacher, “returning not to where you were . . . but to where you should have been all along.” Newman’s iteration of t’shuvah is indeed a backward journey, a double-barreled one, through poetic locution and form as well through memory. Most memorably, it sets out on Yom Kippur day itself, 2019, in a Queens marked by an ebullient secularity sustaining what is justly touted as an unparalleled patchwork of ethnicities, languages, cultures, and skin-tones. (Jackson Heights, Newman’s home base and where he also curates the longest-running and best-known community poetry series in Queens, is widely recognized as one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the U.S., a distinction it shares with its adjacent Elmhurst, Astoria, and Long Island City.)
In four segments counting as the chapters in a narrative, T’shuvah proceeds to its destination, a sequence of taut sonnets, titled, strikingly, “This Sentence Is a Metaphor for Bridge.” The initial long peripatetic piece, “Yom Kippur 5780,” a full third of the volume, ambles—acutely, meditatively. Through a Queens degraded, to some, by its staunch resistance to any official sect or creed. But lit up by the creole of its inhabitants and the marvels made possible through the laxity of its zoning: sauntering past a school for the deaf and a Bulova corporate headquarters during the poet’s early morning jaunt.
On the Yom Kippur of Newman’s journey, one splicing an adult karaoke bar in Seoul and a Tehran bazaar into its recursive loop, Queens may feel bleak and disaffecting: “choosing to write on this day/ even after three decades/ of not setting foot in shul,/ of eating whatever I want/ whenever I want, of trying to live/ as if repentance required nothing” (18). But it is only as a vivid extended poem in itself that the borough unscrolls its secrets, in a welcome twist to the New York school of poetry at the same time extending its irreverent survey.
But one could just as well speak of T’shuvah as a musical composition—Newman is also an avid jazz pianist. The speaker of “Yom Kippur 5780” is streaming Philip Glass’s eighth symphony as he wanders. The second stage of this journey, “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life,” is a sequence of terse, aphoristic encomia taking their formal downbeat from the sonnet. These are life-lessons, such as might be delivered from the pulpit by Rabbi Wahrman on a good day. But in the parlance of a knowledgeable and erudite contemporary poet, who staunchly conserves conventions of diction and form while aiming for fully up-to-date realism, franchise, and striking pertinence of detail.
“Embrace those broken wings; forego the clouds,” the speaker of “Do Not Wish” inveighs, referencing Coleridge. Another key strand of this collection running from overture to final couplet, alongside the creative power exerted by memory, music, and moral purpose, is its investigation into the role of its interlocutor, its “second person.” Within the framework of T’shuvah, this position is not so much “implied” as freshly contested and productively reworked at every stage. The collection’s overarching “you” is also off on a journey. It can, on several occasions, index the speaker’s own sensibility, or “inwit.” This kind of internal dialogue upgrading moral sensibility is precisely what Yom Kippur, the holiday, is all about.
The speaker of the initial segment, on his morning stroll, crosses paths with a particularly telling dog: “and you’re remembering/ how Jake barked just like that/ every time Shahob ran/ what was about to become/ too far ahead” (23). But a propos of Mikey, another family pet, “who wasn’t dying/ when I got down with him/ on his vet’s blue tarp,/ but that memory is not for you,/ at least not yet” (24), the “you” is the poetic audience. In the poet’s virtuoso variations on the second person, the “you” can indeed be the writer, a “they,” who bears some, but not total resemblance to Richard Jeffrey Newman. But “you” can also be the reader, in which case the speaker reserves the right to obfuscate as well as defer memory and association. In the case when “you” is an annotation addressed to the poet themself, the speaker is holding back some sector of insight or cognizance for delayed activation.
Under the aura of Glass’s persistent music, the speaker falls into a “vigilance that makes you nervous.” Here, “you” is the speaker who has been piqued by Glass’s music. Barely launched on their ramble, the speaker’s interlocutor may be an “elderly Sikh, orange dastār,/ wispy white beard” (15). But by the time the persona, addressing themself, turns “right onto 25th Avenue/ . . . I too am watching,/ sitting here this Yom Kippur morning,/as the path you weave/ back and forth/ across this page/ revises the mental map/ I hold in my head/ . . . which is not the metaphor/ I started these lines to plumb,/ but then you, the second person,/ flowed so naturally into their rhythm/ that I chose you” (17). In this sequence, the perspective of the random third-person observer, the Sikh, has shifted laterally into the poetic “I.” The “you” is at once the speaker, possibly enervated by their own vigilance; the words they are scoring, weaving “back and forth/ across the page”; the reader, after all, the party to which the performance is directed; also, the position of the second person itself, “chosen” (like the Jewish people, according to Biblical claim) as a vessel for poetic communication. By the time we are enmeshed in this dazzling pronomial and perspectival byplay, an indispensable tool in poetry’s kit, the construct of t’shuvah has morphed into an order or a conduct. One that can only proceed from the operating system of language in its specifically poetic deployment. And indeed, this is precisely the trajectory that guides the entire volume. It may set out in the identity politics of a post-War Jewish upbringing on the East Coast, with a morality proceeding from communal strictures. But it ends up in an encompassing ethical sensibility to which the practices and time-honored forms of poetry have themselves been sufficient.
The third stage of the volume’s journey is aptly titled “Insomnia,” as it is a dream sequence. The demonstration is that dreams, whether as figments of an “unconscious” or the materials in a mental archive extending well beyond voluntary memory, comprise as rich a source for contemporary poetic intervention as a “buzzing, blooming” megalopolis. In this sequence, the downbeat is on an embrace: the author’s, of his poetic surrogate’s status as a sexually active male, also, a creature of pleasure, and a consumer of sorts.
Not unlike the Freud of his essay on the “Uncanny” (1919), the dreamscape of this volume keeps depositing the poet back at his starting point, whether a girl from his early religious training who ended up a fashion model, or a table-dancer from Seoul whose come-ons are lovingly retained decades later, despite their mercenary motive–as an augury of erotic fulfillment. Dream becomes the venue for whatever remains of transgression in the parlance of a resolutely ethical poet. It is both a comfort zone and a scene of creative as well as sexual ferment The margin for sexual transgression in Newman’s poetic world is not wide. His published work begins, in The Silence of Men (CavanKerry, 2006), by broaching, among many other issues, the impact exerted upon his life by having been sexually abused in childhood by an adult male. Newman has been rightly recognized as a pioneer in placing this fraught subject-matter on the docket of contemporary poetry. The creative aftermath of this event has lent both his subsequent writings and his tireless advocacy on behalf of Queens poetry a palpable moral cast. And yet the roving poetic sensibility celebrated on every page of T’shuvah gives full sway to transgression and its allure—above all as the incitation to composition.
The volume’s apotheosis is nothing less than a prayerbook of hymns arising out of the tonality and metrics of the sonnet, as if in response to a riddle: what would be the nature of a resolutely secular liturgy, in which poetic mindfulness and scruple gained the ethical upper hand? A religious practice no longer under the scrutiny of an “all-knowing bookkeeper god” (18). The “sentence” that Newman sets out for the reader at the gateway to this culminating segment of T’shuvah is a poetic fugue on a consummate “bridging” that is the province of poetry alone. This is between the edifying but hardscrabble Queens of “Yom Kippur, 5780” and the virtual domain where poetic improvisation, correction, and refinement take place under their own steam—through autopoiesis. The poet, having aspired to the perch of a secular visionary, unapologetically issues forth in pronouncements, claims, and encomia redolent of the wisdom, by ages-old tradition, delegated to hymns and prayers. But in a scene of writing meticulously configured according to aesthetic values. Hence, “Your path is clear./ There is no balance/ without fear” (54). “Alone, you’ll never build/ the necessary fire,/ and in this metaphor,/ you are alone” (55). “Make yourself what love obliterates./ You’ve chased forgiveness long enough” (56). And on a thunderous downbeat: “The rage you’ve borne till now/ Has readied you for this./ Give your heart the room it needs./ Leave the comfort of your skin behind” (64).
The prayerbook that Richard Jeffrey Newman presses into our hands at the close of T’shuvah is open wide to all who hear the music and visualize the devices of poetry; open to those who espouse the wildly diverse communities, faiths, and languages of Queens and beyond. On multiple registers, Newman devoutly ministers to the culture and literacy of an outer borough—through a unique engagement rendering him a poet of record.
Jackson Heights, N.Y.