Dara Barnat. Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

In the concluding pages of her book, Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry, poet and literary scholar Dara Barnat cites Jerome Rothenberg on influence: “Everything one of the poet’s powers is to choose this lineage thoughtfully.Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry crafts a genealogy of Whitman in the Jewish American poetry oeuvre from the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass onward. Barnat uses Jewish American poets’ responses to Whitman—their writings about him in prose and poetry, their self-reflections on his role in their works, and the ways in which his language and style quietly rise up, or loudly declare themselves, on the surface of their poems—to reflect on poets’ relationships to Jewish identity, culture, and religion in America. Throughout, Barnat’s close readings of poems tend to the social, cultural, and political, and thus to the thematic; this attention serves her argument and her own theoretical understanding of her project, which she situates within “cultural poetics” or “social formalism” (11). Attuned more often to the sociocultural, Barnat’s close readings could integrate more fully the formal worlds of and connections between the poets’ works, situating the poems’ sounds, meters, rhythms, and rhymes more intimately alongside the thematic.Crucial to Barnat’s argument is her assertion that Whitman not only “remade” poetry in Jewish America, but Jewish American poets also “made” and “remade” Whitman (10). She unravels her argument by examining the similar but distinct ways in which poets across generations and schools borrowed from, resisted, and reshaped Whitman (often all at once) in their works. In a footnote to her introduction, Barnat discusses her approach to “influence,” via Chana Kronfeld, and argues that intertextuality, rather than influence, is a more useful framework for literary critics to employ. Barnat examines the “appropriation, allusion, response, echo, and adoption” of Whitman by the various poets she examines (151–52).In chapter 1, Barnat complicates Reznikoff’s relationship to Whitman (Reznikoff claimed to not care for him) by arguing that Reznikoff negotiated his position as a Jewish American poet within a Poundian, high modernist, and limiting milieu through the democratic poet. Barnat finds poetic echoes between the two bodies of works but also asserts that Reznikoff utilized Whitman in his portrayals of immigrant identity, adopting a “Whitmanesque persona of the urban outsider” through a poetics of witness (39). In an interesting moment of comparison, Barnat writes that the image of grass in Reznikoff’s work (specifically in his 1969 poem “Early History of a Writer”) is not the “hopeful green stuff woven” that is Whitman’s grass, but instead a forbidden space, representative of Reznikoff’s marginalization in America as the son of Jewish immigrants. Reznikoff’s identification with the Other differs from Whitman’s: while Reznikoff approaches the Other while maintaining distance, Whitman fully transforms himself (47). Barnat’s discussions of Jewish identity, assimilation, and Otherness in the United States invite further analysis of the historical contexts of Jewish immigration in the twentieth century and shifting relationships between Jews and whiteness in the States. Barnat focuses on the context of high modernism, in which the Objectivist poets’ turn to Whitman served as a counterbalance to the exclusionary, and antisemitic, world of Ezra Pound and others.Chapter 2 dwells on exactly this context, examining Karl Jay Shapiro’s and Kenneth Koch’s championing of Whitman as a means to attack elitist elements of high modernism and to promote a more democratic, “Whitmanian” model of poetry. Beyond this argument, Barnat contends that through these two poets’ works, “Whitman himself is transformed, politicized, and ‘ethnicized’” (55). Barnat pauses briefly at the difficulty of this idea, and of Shapiro’s ethnocentric depiction of Judaism (62); the borders between universalism, essentialism, and notions of collective identity that account for difference await further unraveling. Barnat sees in Koch’s poetry an attempt to forge, through the poem, a more liberal American society through Whitman’s modeling. She ends the chapter with a bold claim: “Whitman is a poet not just to examine the Jewish experience but, for Karl Shapiro and Kenneth Koch and so many other poets in this book, through which to construct a more liberated idea of Jewishness” (76).In chapter 3, Barnat returns to the gaze of the poet and studies Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and Gerald Stern and their “Whitmanian poetic strategy of witnessing—casting a humanist gaze on his most vulnerable subjects” (77). Complex genealogies emerge as Barnat crafts a Whitman-genealogy that holds various other interwoven lines—Reznikoff to Ginsberg, Ginsberg to Stern, and Rukeyser to Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Marge Piercy (the poets of chapter 4). Barnat claims both Rukeyser and Whitman as prescient poets, and sees the presence of Whitman in Ginsberg’s work as filtered through Reznikoff and in Stern’s work as filtered through Rukeyser and Ginsberg. Stern “invites Whitman to participate in the poetics experience of Jewishness in America” as he works through his relationship to those marginalized by American society (106). Barnat is careful to note the ways in which each poet resisted and critiqued Whitman, even as they adopted him into their works.This argument holds true in the book’s final chapter, in which Barnat traces Whitman’s status as “a spokesperson against exclusion and elitism, as a counterpoint to prejudicial strands within High Modernism, and as a symbol of humanistic poetics” in three Jewish American women poets who have at once embraced and criticized Whitman. While Rich responds to Whitman through writing that wrestles with a multiplicity of identities as it works towards a “more democratic poetics,” Whitman for Alicia Ostriker serves at once “to substantiate Ostriker’s outsider status as a Jewish woman poet in America and to symbolize the problematic history and policies of America,” the ways in which Whitman’s democratic vision fell short (125). The final poet of these case studies, Marge Piercy, brings in Whitman to imagine a “more open, progressive Jewishness in America,” Barnat argues, one which can include Piercy’s new, body-centered renditions of Jewish liturgy.In its gathering, Barnat’s book can serve as a useful teaching tool—the reader learns the landscape of twentieth-century Jewish American poetry, reads such gems as Rukeyser’s lines, “I will still be making poems for you / out of silence; / silence will be falling into that silence, / it is building music” (82), and encounters the wisdom of a wide array of literary critics, including that of the poets themselves.The book’s close readings are led, and occasionally constrained, by the book’s argument, and notions like “humanism,” “outsiderness,” and the “cultural standpoint” of Judaism require further unpacking. If interrogated further, these notions could be used to complicate the differences between the poets’ approaches to a “democratic poetics.” Barnat’s work opens up broad questions surrounding influence: can poets take formal influence from other poets without also adopting the ideological or political viewpoints of their poems and/or their authors? Where are the borders between influence, appropriation, and (re-)enactment? And, following Barnat’s reading that Ostriker views Whitman “not as a poet who speaks for women, but instead . . . a paradigm of ‘power without authority,’ which women poets can employ according to their own poetic and political agendas” (123), can poetic influence take shape as a (useful, powerful) form of ventriloquy, and then amendment?In Barnat’s own published poem, “Walt Whitman,” she writes at its end: “together / we decide nothing / is more desirable than love from the dead.” With an admiration for the past and for the ways in which poets choose, and critique, their predecessors, Barnat has crafted a narrative of Jewish American poetry that looks backward and forward at once.