The Unwound
The unwound
able wound will,
willing, willing.
The olive trees bull
dozed (the unknow
able being en
acted), someone else
’s mother with
drawing, drawn
out, writhing,
writing, en
graved.
Midrash
A comparison is necessary here.
Possession, according to R’ Ahabic, suggests difficult,
distant,
without.
According to R’ Aschre it suggests the hole,
mask (shadow),
and (what I thought) the name of another.
Mini-interview with Jonathan Dubow
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
JD: In graduate school at the University of Alabama, I took a workshop with Peter Streckfus where we were tasked with keeping a notebook which we would write in every day. At the time, Alabama was a very generative program, and its philosophy was best defined by Michael Martone’s “hypoxic” workshop, where students would submit a story to be workshopped each week (and would be constantly, metaphorically, out of breath from the relentless writing). In many ways, Martone’s pedagogy has guided my teaching and my life in the years since. But it was Peter’s conception of the poet’s notebook which has guided my writing. I think most students in the class did not take the assignment seriously, did not write in their notebook each day. But going into the workshop, I had been feeling very stuck as a writer, finished with one project but unable to move on, and not happy with any of my writing. So I took the assignment seriously. So seriously that I have kept it up until this day (with more than a few days off here and there!).
What was so transformative about the structure of keeping a poet’s notebook was that it allowed for both privacy and time. These go hand in hand for me. I have always had trouble knowing how to talk about my work, to frame it, to give it context and meaning, to understand it myself. In the relentless “publication” of a weekly workshop, I found myself reaching for easier frames. But the poet’s notebook was just a notebook. And part of the practice was to let it accrue for days, weeks, even months, before returning to it to find the poetry. This remains the primary structure of my writing practice. It has allowed me to not prefigure understanding. And it is, for instance, how the poem “Midrash” came to be.
HFR: What are you reading?
JD: I’ve been on an essay kick lately. Right now I’m reading The Land is Holy by Noam Keim, which I am feeling a lot of kinship with. And I just finished NOLA Face by Brooke Champagne, which I absolutely loved, and felt a completely different kinship with. One thing both these books share is that they are intermittently bilingual, with French threading through Keim’s essays and Spanish through Champagne’s. They are also exploring family dynamics and personal histories with a tremendous courage and honesty that I aspire to. In other words, these are books I will return to. I imagine in a few years you could ask me this question and I’ll answer, “I’m rereading The Land is Holy by Noam Keim and NOLA Face by Brooke Champagne.”
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “The Unwound” and “Midrash”?
JD: I wrote an early draft of “The Unwound” in March 2022 after the Babyn Yar memorial in Kyiv was attacked by the Russian military. My writing practice is usually very process oriented, with language in notebooks transforming onto the page and then transforming again into a poem. But every once in a while, a draft of a poem just emerges. This was one of those instances. Something about memory, the memorial itself, being destroyed in another war, in another invasion, moved me in that moment. But I felt the poem didn’t exactly work. My position to the text, to the idea of someone else’s mother, in reference to Babyn Yar, felt too easy. No one in my community would have felt differently than me: it was a tragedy.
Then a few months later, in November, I read that the Israeli military had destroyed 2000 olive trees in Qarawat Bani Hassan in the occupied West Bank. Olive trees grow very slowly and must be cared for across generations. They are a key element of Palestinian culture and economy. In the original draft of the poem, the trees had been willows, but in the later draft they became olive trees. Suddenly, the unknowable being enacted, the pain of someone else’s mother, the unsettled position I might inhabit in this poem, and the emotional conflict with my own community about this destruction, made sense.
“Midrash” came together very differently, through the process of lines in a notebook being rendered and reimagined in different guises until a poem emerged. Midrash is a form of Jewish dialogic exegesis, or interpretation. What has always been so compelling and intuitive about the technology of midrash to me is that it preserves and codifies the disagreement itself, and it is a generative process which is attuned to the multiplicity of language. In other words, the meaning, the interpretation of a text, requires disagreement, play, and transformation. I would go so far as to say this is the only way I know how to make meaning.
Even though these poems have different compositional histories, there is a resonance to their concerns. In some sense, the trouble I described above in understanding “The Unwound” as about Babyn Yar, only to later understand it as about Qarawat Bani Hassan, is embodied in “Midrash.” That which is distant becomes a lacuna, a hole, an absence, and eventually, the name of another.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
JD: I am working in a similar practice I’ve been in, accruing writing over the course of weeks or months, and then drawing from the reservoir of it for poetry. I have recently found a resting place with a poetry manuscript called Wicked Children, which contains both of these poems. Wicked Children draws from many facets of Jewish tradition and experience, and technologies of Jewish meaning making. It contains a lot of myth and metaphor. The poems I’ve been making in the last few months are a little more direct and personal. If my writer’s group is any indication, I am just as hermetic, dialogic, averse to resolution, and inscrutable as I’ve always been, but the pallet of language and experience is much more grounded in the personal rather than the collective, or the imagined, or the inherited. I will sometimes joke that I am going through a Celan phase (see “The Unwound”), but I feel at the moment most in touch with the late work of George Oppen. Who knows what will come of this.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
JD: What do I want to share? That every day I pray for an end to the genocide in Gaza, that Palestine will be free, and that Jewish people, communities and institutions will figure out how to escape Zionism before it destroys us.
A few years ago, the title poem of my manuscript, Wicked Children, was published in Heavy Feather Review. In the poem, two sad children are blindfolded, spun around until they’re dizzy, and sent off to find each other and shake hands. I stole this idea from a lesson plan I found in my mother’s copy of Teaching the Jewish Holidays: History, Values, and Activities by Robert Goodman. But in the poem, when the children find each other, instead of the questions about Jewish holidays from the original lesson plan, they ask each other: “Will we escape Zionism?” In asking the question, they become freed of the sadness that consumed them at the beginning of the poem, even though their community is furious.
A friend of mine sometimes says that we can’t worry about saving Judaism when the more urgent task is to end the occupation of Palestine and the genocide of the Palestinian people. But I see no contradiction here. It is impossible for me to imagine the liberation of Palestine without the liberation of Judaism from Zionism. At the same time I want to emphasize I’m not ignorant to the urgency of the moment. We must stop this genocide. We must work to save people’s lives (there is no more Jewish concept in my mind than pikuach nefesh—the principle that to save a life exceeds any other commandment). I confess, I am mostly at a loss as to how, other than giving money directly to people through gazafunds.com. Other than saying “Free Palestine.” Other than sitting in the street, on the quad, making demands, making life difficult for the warmongers. I confess that I don’t know if it’s possible, but the only thing that’s let me imagine that it’s possible—that the genocide will be stopped, that Palestine will be free—is the sound of another person saying “Free Palestine,” and the sight of people sitting in the street, making demands. Let’s take each other’s hands and ask, “How will we escape Zionism?” I need your help and you need mine too.
Jonathan Dubow (he/him) has recent work in the Crab Creek Review, Grist, Jewish Currents, manywor(l)ds, and elsewhere. He lives in Schenectady, New York, and teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY.
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Heavy Feather Review 