Homage to Chana Bloch

The world lost a wonderful member of the literary community in 2017—Chana Bloch, poet, translator, and teacher of generations of creative writers and students of literature. I attended her memorial on October 8, 2017, at Mills College, where Chana taught for more than thirty years. It was moving to see women who had studied with Chana decades ago returning to campus to recount how Chana had changed their lives, including professionals who did not end up as writers but were still profoundly shaped by the experience of working with her.

Chana Bloch

Chana had a fantastic sense of humor, and she was a modest person, free of pretention, despite her numerous accomplishments. She collaborated on some of the best contemporary translations of Hebrew poetry. The English version of Yehuda Amichai’s collection Open Closed Open that she created with Chana Kronfeld is to me one of the finest literary translations of contemporary poetry into English. A friend told a story at Chana’s memorial about this book: Amichai was terminally ill while the two Chanas were working on the translation. The poet was pressuring them to finish so he could see his best collection in English before he died. According to the speaker at the memorial, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld resisted the demands of the great Hebrew poet, knowing they would probably only have one chance to get the translation right, since books of poetry in translation rarely go into multiple editions. As it turned out, the Chanas finished their work to their satisfaction, and Amichai lived to see the book in print.

Chana Bloch’s translation in collaboration with Ariel Bloch of The Song of Songs is one of the most beautiful renditions of a biblical text into English. Their version brings out the freshness of the language and the imagery, and returns the romance and the raunch to The Song of Songs:

Let me lie among vine blossoms,

in a bed of apricots!

I am in the fever of love.           

This book of the Hebrew Bible is often bowdlerized in translation till the sensuality becomes only symbolic or veiled. Chana was determined to create a nakedly beautiful Song of Songs, and she succeeded. 

Chana Bloch’s own poetry is full of tantalizing complexity. The poet Judy Halebsky spoke at the memorial, recalling that she had asked Chana when she was a student at Mills College about an emotion that she was trying to express in a poem, which had not yet come across as she’d intended. Chana told her, “Every emotion is actually two conflicting emotions.” That’s not only true in life, it’s true in Chana’s poetry as well.

In Chana’s poem “The Joins,” included in her collection Blood Honey, she refers to the Japanese art of kintsugi, a method of repairing broken pottery where the seams are sprinkled with gold dust to create a gorgeous pattern out of the breaks. From the first line of the poem, Chana makes clear that she is speaking in metaphor:

What’s between us

often seems flexible as the webbing

between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible, but it’s not;

what’s between us

is made of clay

Human relationships are almost always Chana’s subject. Even though she’s talking about a technique in pottery, the poem is clearly about breakage—emotional, psychic, global:

We glue the wounded edges

with tentative fingers.

Scar tissue is visible history

In Chana Bloch’s poetry, she begins with the assumption that we are all wounded. But by recognizing those injuries, by learning from the pain, we can reach a state that might even be better than innocence:

Sometimes the joins

are so exquisite

they say the potter

may have broken the cup

just so he could mend it.

A couple of times Chana visited a class I taught regularly on contemporary world poetry at a college in San Francisco, where she spoke about the writing of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch that she had cotranslated. I have to confess I was a little jealous of how instantaneously my students bonded with Chana, a stronger connection than I’d been able to weave during an entire semester. I think that ability to win the trust of students came from Chana’s piercing intellect, her genuine warmth, and her disarmingly frank comments, delivered in her Bronx accent. It just wasn’t in Chana’s constitution to be anything less than completely honest, as a professor, a poet, and a friend. I miss her. 

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 9: The Dialectic of Praise and Lament

Now I’d like to turn to another aspect of praise and lament: the unexpected links between these two seeming opposites. We saw in Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” that there is a connection between praise and lament. One learns to praise well by describing in detail the pains of life. I would like to take this even farther and say there is a dialectic of praise and lament.  

Like the ode, the dialectical method originated in ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle developed a form of dialectic, but this method of reasoning was brought to fruition in nineteenth century German philosophy, particularly in the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel argued that the more an idea or moment in history became truly itself, the more it starts to bend toward its opposite. Eventually, from this conflict or contrast of opposites, a new synthesis is born.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I think there is a dialectic of praise and lament, because in all these poems we’ve discussed there are elements of both. Lament suggests praise, because if we feel the loss of something acutely enough to mourn its passing, then we are implicitly praising it. If it is worthy of being lamented, it’s worthy of being praised.

The other side of this equation is a little harder to see, but I think it makes equal sense. If something is being praised, there is a grain of lament in it, since nothing lasts forever or can be completely possessed. The more we value something and praise its virtues, the more we are setting ourselves up for lamenting it now or in the future.

To illustrate this, I’d like to focus on the final psalm of the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 150. Here is the King James Bible version of the psalm:

Psalm 150

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his Sanctuarie: Praise him in the firmament of his power.

Praise him for his mightie actes: Praise him according to his excellent greatnesse.

Praise him with the sound of the Trumpet: Prayse him with the Psalterie and Harpe.

Praise him with the timbrell and dance: praise him with stringed instruments, and Organes.

Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

Let every thing that hath breath, praise the Lord. Praise yee the Lord.

That’s about as straightforward an example of praise without lament as you can get in the Psalms. When it’s sung in English, there is usually only performed with rejoicing and hallelujahs. By the way, “hallelujah” means “praise God.”

Listen to how this psalm sounds in Hebrew, though.

If you’d never heard that piece of music before, would you think it was a hymn of praise, or a lament? It’s not that clear. It's a hymn of praise, but with a mournful tone. 

I think the closer you get to the roots of these two traditions, praise and lament, the more their roots are entangled with each other. If we are aware of that dialectic, whether we’re engaged in praise or lament, we can allow the opposite to add salt to our praises or honey to our laments, as the recipe demands.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 6: Praise in Yehuda Amichai and Gerard Manley Hopkins

So, now we’re going to move from the valley of lament to the plateau of praise. In many ways, praise is the more difficult mode to write well. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai discusses this in his poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” from his book Open Closed Open, beautifully translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

What Amichai describes so well in this poem is the way in which our psyches are hard-wired to record every detail of an unpleasant situation. This tendency may be a survival mechanism to keep us from repeating destructive experiences. But we humans are not well attuned to recounting the positive. That takes a different kind of attention.

Nevertheless, poems of praise are some of the most ancient in human culture. Many forms of writing or speech or song are traditionally vehicles of praise: psalms, hymns, odes, litanies, blasons (the blason is a form of love poetry that enunciates all of the beloved’s features one by one).

Just as the lament focuses on loss, on absence, the poem of praise focuses on presence. But the poem of praise is not concerned with something that is obviously present. It’s about drawing attention to something present that deserves or demands more of our attention.

One of the earliest forms of praise literature is the psalm. The Hebrew word for “psalms,” tehillim, literally mean “praises,” in this case, praises of God. Let’s say you wanted to write a poem praising God or the spiritual side of life and you wanted to do it using objects or things or creatures in the world that are the clearest manifestations of the divine. What would be the most obvious things to inspire a sense of spiritual awe? You might choose children’s innocence, sunsets, mountains, beautiful skies, rainbows, etc.—things that are self-evidently beautiful or pleasant.

Well, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sort of modern psalm where he praises God through unusual objects or things in the world. Hopkins was a great poet and an Irish priest who lived from 1844 to 1899. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s very interesting what Hopkins chooses to single out as evidence of the divine. Here’s the poem:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

What sorts of things does Hopkins choose to praise, and therefore to connect to the sacred in his poem? He doesn’t focus on days when the heavens are a clear blue, but on mottled skies. He praises not constancy and perfect complexions but what is “fickle, freckled.” He spotlights grungy, physical work: “gear and tackle and trim.” In what way are these manifestations of the divine, if God is, as he says, “past change”? Don’t these things seem like the opposite of the divine?

When I taught this poem in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the summer of 2015, my colleague, the poet Anne Caston, had an interesting interpretation of Hopkins’ choice of things to praise in this poem: “Hopkins understood something about the nature of God to accept the ‘flawed’ and ‘marred’ things in His creation. I love that notion too, that there is a part of the spiritual that sees the beauty and elegance of the ‘flawed’ things.”

One thing writers can take away from this poem is that praise needs to have an element of surprise. There’s a goody-goody side to praise that can be predictable and cloying. Avoid crystals, butterflies, waterfalls, sunsets, and cute babies, unless you can find something to praise in these things that you’ve never heard anyone laud before.

The artistic context of Hopkins’ poem is also interesting. Around the time that Hopkins wrote this poem, the United Kingdom and Ireland were in the midst of a serious medieval revival. You’ve probably heard of the Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, for instance. 

The families of Pre-Raphaelite artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones

Influenced by the art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the idea of going back in art to the time before the Renaissance painter Raphael, whose work they felt represented a sophisticated corruption of the innocence, sincerity, and freshness of medieval art. During this period of the industrial revolution, in literature as well, there was a yearning for a more innocent and pure art. Many artists turned to or imagined a period when art was inspired by faith and the importance of craft. That’s why this school in the visual arts was also called the Arts and Crafts movement.

In his poetry, Hopkins harked back to the rhyme and alliteration of the very earliest English verse, dating back to the Middle Ages. This was the period of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon roots of English before the influence of French and Latin became predominant in the era of the Norman conquest. You can listen here to a recitation of one of the greatest poems of Old English, “The Seafarer,” so you can hear the alliteration and strong rhythms that characterized the literature in English in its earliest days.

By using the sort of alliteration and rhyme from an earlier period in the history of the English language, Hopkins evokes the faith and values of that period as well. But I think one of the take-aways from Hopkins’ poem is that the thing that you are praising—or lamenting—can shape the way you praise or lament it. It has to shape the way you praise or lament it.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry