"without self, without center"
Rich, Ammons, Pagis, Forché, Menashe
Adrienne Rich:
A.R. Ammons:
Dan Pagis (tr. from Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell):
The Sharpener is a reader-supported newsletter. If you get value from these newsletters and want to support my work I encourage you to take out a paid subscription.
Carolyn Forché:
Samuel Menashe:
About Sean Singer
Sean Singer Editorial Services
Subscribe to The Sharpener
The paid-subscriber version of The Sharpener includes craft pieces on craft, writing problems, information about professional literacy and labor issues for writers, and detailed citations and analyses of the poems I’m reading.
Testimony is written by a Holocaust survivor, in Hebrew. The words "in the image", appear in Genesis, where its written God created humankind "b'tzelem" in his image. And the 3 letter root of "tzelem", image, also contains the word for "shade" in Hebrew. And Btzelem in today's Israel/Palestine is also the name of one Israel's oldest human rights organizations. Btzelm works supports the rights of all people living in Israelf/Palestine and opposes and documents the human rights violations and atrocities committed by the Israeli government, soldiers and settlers. Dan Pagis died before the organization Btselem was formed. But for me, a Jew in 2022, the reverberations of this powerful spare poem reached that far.