Word: kaddish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...heat of the inner city, Ilana's parents rent a cottage on the beach next door to Anne's cousins, a recently widowed Orthodox Jew named Ezra Dinn and his young son, David. The sounds that come from the Dinn's house during the course of the summer, the Kaddish or prayer for the dead, the morning prayers and Sabbath hymns, catch Ilana's ear while she is sitting on the beach building sand castles or reading on the porch with her mother. Soon, the exoticism of the yarmulkas, the Sabbath rituals and the dietary restrictions, attract Ilana and draw...
...dark pall hovers over the the story when Ilana's father is killed while covering the fascist bombing of Guernica. Ilana continues to go to synagogue in order to say Kaddish despite her mother's disapproval. Soon, Ilana leaves public school and enrolls in a Jewish day school. There is a sort of spiritual determinism at work here: despite her mother's adamant atheism, despite her father's Protestant background Ilana has a Jewish soul in need of uncovering. This represents a twist of the theme of generational conflict that is at the crux of much of Potok's work...
Most of the poetry was previously published by City Lights Books and the rest made it to print through other publishers. Classics like "Howl" and "Kaddish" adorn the pages of this volume, adorned by Buddhist-inspired drawings, pictures of Ginsberg's Beatnik buddies and supplementary essays by literati honchos like William Carlos Williams. The most novel aspect of the book is its comprehensiveness--avid Ginberg fans can view the poet's life and work in a single volume...
...like Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis. The idea behind the jazz was spontaneous improvisation and long breath. That had an influence on the line in "Howl" and any other long-line poems I've done. Thelonius Monk's idea of thinking then silence, thinking then silence affected "Kaddish." It would go: clonk, clonk...clonkcklonkcklonk. The big silences in Monk's work are equivalent to the dashes that I use for short breath "thinks" inside the verse line, separated by dashes...
...strong imagery. The energy never flags, but the quality is wildly uneven. There are love poems that read like high parodies of rest-room scrawl. Howl, once effective as counterculture manifesto, is now an unconvincing historical oddity: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." But Kaddish, about Ginsberg's insane mother, who died in 1956, is a masterpiece of candor and emotional persuasion: "The Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish--pale red near the bones. Her smells--and oft naked in the room, so that I stare...