Dialogue:
Zackary Sholem Berger and Frances Klein
Zackary Sholem Berger on Frances Klein’s "Song for the First Hard Rain of Spring" and "Guide to Interpreting Dreams II"
1.
To witness gentleness from the underground,
And save oneself from the cold surround.
Dreaming of what must lead underground,
As straight as the finite world is round
Or oblate. All must go to ground
On a random, fractional day, not round-
ed to memory’s needs. Underground
Gentleness is absorbed, as myths resound.
Dreams of gentleness on the ground
Penetrate, fall, and deeply bounce.
2.
There is a myth in Jewish lore. Such myths often overlap with halachah, what Jews call law, and anyone can call law, if they choose. (Just like for those resident in the US, law overlaps with myth, desire, violence, mysticism, the unseen and unknown, and for all that we can still, and do still, call it law.) This myth has to do with the outhouse.
When one approaches the outhouse – this “one,” in the mind of the rabbis, is someone identified as male, but I and you are different from them in all sorts of ways, gender perhaps included – it was said that one should take leave of one’s accompanying angels, who would wait patiently while one was using the facilities.
That custom has fallen out of use, even among the most punctilious Jews, perhaps because we do not feel that sense of awe that one (? they?) used to feel upon approaching that place of import.
According to these mythic texts (which one can certainly call law books if one wishes) this is the language with which one should take leave of the angels before entering the outhouse.
“"Be honored, holy ones, my supreme servants, my servants, my servants, my helpers, my helpers, wait for me until I come in and go out, for that is the way of [human beings].”
3.
Waiting for whatever comes out of the earth, whether it be first underground and then emerges to above ground; waiting for whatever is coming out of a room to meet us; waiting for what comes tomorrow, or what revisits us from yesterday, or another season; are we not the angels mentioned above? Or are we the soft creatures emerging? Who can tell us which we are?
Frances Klein on Zackary Sholem Berger’s "How We Live Now" and "Comfort" by Rita Kogan [a translation]
The best poems—the really magical ones—have the ability to sweep you off the page and drop you into your own memory, so strong are the associations they create. This is how it was for me when I read Zackary Sholem Berger’s poem “How We Live Now,” which invokes our society’s current trend toward a lack of ideological commitment with lines like, “Categorical judgments are so over./it’s all about nuance.” Reading this poem transplanted me right back into the classroom, where I spent over a decade attempting to coax bright but stubborn high school students toward committing to their written arguments. Berger writes lines like, “Rather than seek the good,/complicate others’ judgments” and I can feel the fluorescent lights and smell the hard-working deodorant on its last legs as I hear a too-smart-for-his-own-good sophomore boy say, “I see what you’re saying, but what if…” That cultural tendency to ‘hedge’ on an argument or issue is brought home at the end of the poem with a line that has stayed with me since my first reading of the poem, “Every will becomes may,/Every should becomes dead.”
This edition of ballast also gifts us another poem from Berger: “Comfort,” a translation from the original Hebrew of a poem by Rita Kogan. The poem opens simply, stating, “Once the world was wide/And comfort small.” Here, Berger offers us the kind of comfort we expect, a genuine positive. As the poem progresses, however, comfort changes into, “a terrible fluff pillow/wrapping, caressing, crushing.” Berger’s translation brings incredible nuance to this simple word, which appears in almost every stanza of the poem. Comfort evolves from something soothing to a threatening force. For me, this poem brought back another side of my classroom life as a teacher in the era of book bans. When parents and school boards seek to ban books, isn’t their stated goal to protect children from any modicum of discomfort at being exposed to the world in all its complexity? When reading Berger’s translation I could see those empty classroom library shelves in the lines, “the world fades away,/A strangled comma.”
Reading both of Berger’s poems for this issue of ballast, I kept coming back to that first poem’s title. In such concise, clear-eyed wording, Berger’s poetry truly captures “How We Live Now.”
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.