Arc Magazine published a slightly shorter version of the following post here.
2006 was a bumper year for me. I became a father, I got an exciting new job, and, after 5 years of work, my passion project took off. 2006 was also the year that I met Samuel Menashe.
Menashe was a New York poet who pinged my radar when, at the age of 80, he went on a book tour to celebrate winning an unusual prize. In 2006, Menashe became the first recipient of the Poetry Foundation of Chicago’s short-lived and oddly-conceived Neglected Masters' Award. In the following couple of years, we became friendly, but it was only recently, as I moved house, that I realized one of the poems he had inscribed in my copy of his book was otherwise unpublished and, in a way, dedicated to my new baby.
Even on its face, the Neglected Masters prize was a bizarre award — as David Orr at The New York Times noted, “[t]his is what you might call the Prize for Not Getting Enough Prizes.” As well as a cash award though, the prize included the publication by the Library of America of the handsome “New and Selected Poems,” edited by Christopher Ricks. On the attendant tour, Menashe came and read at my local book store, Labyrinth Books (now Book Culture) and I went along to see what a “Neglected Master” might look like.
In a more substantial sense, I was encouraged to attend the reading by both the recommendation of Ricks whose lectures I’d attended at Cambridge University and of Donald Davie, the poet who had written the introduction to Menashe’s 1986 “Collected Poems.” I knew Davie’s work because I’d been taught by J.H. Prynne, one of his protégés, as an undergraduate and so his opinion was particularly meaningful. But that same Orr piece that lays out the “left-handed compliment” in the award’s peculiarity — goes on to ask the crucial question, “Does this collection help justify the muddled honorific that gave it life?” Of course, for every Emily Dickinson unfairly neglected in her own lifetime, there are a hundred poets rightfully neglected. Fortunately, Orr answers with the emphatic conclusion: “It does.”
It was a fun evening, September 13, 2006, three days before Menashe’s 81st birthday. I know the date because he inscribed it on the first page of the book I bought that evening. Menashe talked and read from his book in a way that was to become familiar to me. It was his gift and his shtick to have memorized all his poems. So, though the book was in front of him, he would recite in a slightly reverential singsong that highlighted each poem’s succinct prosody before lapsing into his more normal gentle brogue to explain what he was trying to do in the poem — or to recall the memory that gave it rise.
As is common for poetry readings, the event was sparsely attended which gave me the chance to talk to Menashe and explain that I was the culture editor at a small but growing journal of Jewish thought and culture and I’d love to talk to him more at some point. He was open to it and, before we parted, he wrote down a few poems on the blank pages at the end of the book. As I soon realized, just like wearing his trademark suspenders, this was a customary act of his, always reciting or writing his poems in conversations.
Menashe, who passed away in 2011, was utterly charming. Though devoid of confession, politics, plot, or modern influence — and therefore largely unsuited to the world of professional American poetry — his oeuvre is accessible and inviting to readers and listeners alike. His habit of reciting poetry without breaking conversational rhythm, but elevating it, was a treat, and his warmth infectious. In her reflection on “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe,” (for which she wrote a Foreword) Harvard professor Stephanie Burt referred to this tendency to imbue language with intensity as a type of “holiness.”
Though talking about his poetry rather than his conversation, Burt likens Menashe’s use of language to the Sabbath, as “being set off” from the mundane world. There is indeed a way in which workaday phrases are turned around and given a special aura. Burt discusses how “regular language and regular work, becomes, in the poems, a matter of sound.” She quotes an early poem, “Cargo,”
I am made whole by my scars
For whatever now displaces
Follows all that once was
And without loss stows
Me into my own spaces
For Burt, this is evidence of Menashe’s craft, it is “a graceful chiasmus, a gathering of phonemes around one metaphor, rarely equaled in English... But Menashe equals it many times: for example, in “To Open,” whose almost punningly Objectivist title belies its spirit of delight: “Spokes slide / Upon a pole / Inside / The parasol.”
His poems are, as Burt points out, “startlingly short” and the Irish poet Derek Mahon called Menashe’s process one of “compression and crystallization.” They contain no complex vocabulary nor do they require particular decoding because of their brevity. They sit there simply on the page, available at a glance, but they also reward those who want to spend more time reading them out loud or sitting quietly with them.
In his all-too-brief introductory essay to “New and Selected Poems,” (2005) Menashe talks about the unexpected way he became a poet – “One night in February 1949, I woke up in the middle of the night and there was the first line of a poem, entirely unforeseen.” More telling, perhaps, than his account of the first, unplanned arrival, is what he does with this gift. He does not “tell stories,” rather he shines and shapes, and distills daily phrases into compact, harmonious objects of meaning. Like someone who carves discarded pieces of wood into new, polished objects, his poetry recasts, and brings out the grain of everyday language. In that essay he notes that “[r]hyme seems natural to me. There is a lot of rhyme, unnoticed, in everyday speech.”
As you can hear in “To Open” that Burt discusses, the effect is somewhat like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ use of the complex Welsh system of chiming — cynghanedd — in his English-language poetry. In “The Sea and the Skylark” Hopkins writes: “Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend.” But, while Hopkins used this system as a brick to build lines into existing poetic forms through which he can investigate Catholicism and theodicy, there are no sonnets, and there is no such cosmogony in Menashe. This is not a drawback: you need no religious or poetic background to read his work and appreciate its surprising resonance. In reviewing Menashe’s “Collected Poems” in 1987, Michael Heller enthuses that “even the most disarmingly simple poem can radiate with uncanny force, as ''In Stride'' does: Streets at night like decks/ With spars overhead/ Whose rigging ropes/ Stars into scope.”
Davie — quoting Charles Olson in 1986 essay about Menashe — talks about the unit of good verse as the “syllable” but, though his syllables chimed, Menashe loved phrases. He had a knack of taking common ones (“at the edge of the world,”) and not only making you think of them anew (“At the edge/ Of a world/ Beyond my eyes/Beautiful/I know Exile/Is always/ Green with hope —” from “Promised Land”), but also coaxing them through context to align with his experience and with an insight into life. A mundane phrase became a koan.
That ability and practice sounds grandiose or complicated, but it was anything but that. Indeed he was monastic rather than bombastic. He lived in a railroad apartment, an old-fashioned layout where one room leads into another going from a front door all the way to the back wall. In “Railroad Flat” [see my photograph of his inscribed copy below] he plays on the word flat meaning both “apartment” in British English as well as a description of his affect.
“Looking at the sky
From my window seat
I am in a train
Sidetracked here —”
There’s no obscurity, just a perfect collision of the two ideas across the touchpoint of a “Railroad flat.” He is physically sitting by his home window and sitting on the train of his life, suddenly “sidetracked here — / Here a lifetime —”
He is flat, a little depressed, in this poem because he has been in his railroad apartment for decades, and indeed, as with most of us, been uncertain his entire life about what to grab, what to leave, when he should have seized the day.
“How could I know
What day was mine
To seize, let go
Where to draw the line
Between yes and no”
But the presence of the train, the track, the railroad adds an extra poignancy to the phrase “draw the line” because normally you “draw a line” to divide different sides, whereas train lines are connectors. Menashe uses only vocabulary that his neighbors would understand, he uses simple locations and ideas, but the rhetorical question he poses from his window seat is beautifully, finely constructed.
I have no recollection of why I chose this particular poem, but I asked, and received his permission to reprint “Salt and Pepper” in the Fall 2006 edition of Zeek, our publication. Again, in that poem, there’s a delightful rethinking of what it means to develop “salt and pepper” coloration as one ages. Sprinkled with double meaning, the poem notes how, with the “zest” for life developed over many “seasons,” comes a fear that, of course, with the condiment metaphor, manifests as “shaking.”
Here and there
White hairs appear
On my chest —
Ages seasons me
Gives me zest —
I am a sage
In the making
Sprinkled, shaking
At the time — and related to some of the early possibilities of the internet — there was a Jewish cultural resurgence in New York. Following David Rosenn’s Avodah in 1998 and with musician John Zorn as a surprising model, many of us were inspired to influence the world with excellence, entrepreneurial spirit and a high level of Jewish engagement. As well as Zeek, Heeb, Jewschool, Mima'amakim, and Nextbooks (the precursor to Tablet) in the writing space, the music label JDub Records, environmental organization Hazon, human rights organization Rabbis for Human Rights-North America (now T’ruah) and the egalitarian Torah communities around Hadar) — as well as many others — were founded in the first few years of the millennium.
With New York as our playground, we turned to overlooked artists and traditions for new, creative models for a vibrant Jewishness. Religion was a part of it, but not necessarily an important part. At 80, Menashe was older than anyone else involved, but he was spry and happy to be part of this new Jew scene. I hung out with him a few times in 2006 and 2007, but I already had a full-time job, a part-time job, and a new baby so my time was limited. My friend Jake Marmer, then the editor of Mima'amakim, was a grad student and not yet a father. He had more time for the friendship.
Marmer told me how one time he took a date to a Menashe reading.
“As we were walking in, he said: ‘Jacob [it was always ‘Jacob’ never ‘Jake’ just as he himself was always ‘Samuel’ and not ‘Sam’]... I need to speak about something important after the reading.’ When we approached him afterwards, having waited for all of the others to leave he said: ‘I had a great idea for your doctorate. Why don't you write it... about ME?’”
Marmer heard of Menashe through a friend at Mima'amakim who had read Menashe’s work and passed it along to him. “I found his number in the phone book and left a message inviting him to the Mima'amakim gig,” Jake told me. “He called back the ‘day of’ and said he's coming. That's how we met!”
I had heard about that same gig through more conventional channels and was delighted to see that Menashe happened to be there. That evening we heard a variety of different poets perform, including Menashe and also including Marmer’s punk-poetry band called Frantic Turtle. Mostly the poems were recited by their author alone at a microphone but not Frantic Turtle. Marmer recalls Menashe saying to him after the same gig, “I'm just an old fuddy-duddy... but why does it have to be so loud?”
Halfway through the punk poetry set I ended up outside on the quieter street talking to Menashe (“call me Samuel”) about the evening’s poetry. Though I had a poem or two published in Mima’amakim, I was not reading that night so there was no awkwardness of comparison. Our conversation started with gentle thoughts about the poets we had heard and meandered through his new poems, the state of his book tour, my new job and baby. He was not a dazzling, charismatic conversationalist, but he was a thoughtful, pleasant companion who was always listening for an interesting turn of phrase.
I had come from Leeds, England, Jake from Kirovograd, Ukraine, and others in the scene had come, as New York’s magnet had drawn us, from other states around North America. Despite, or perhaps because, he was older and came from yet another different background from even our disparate and loose grouping, Menashe fitted in.
Sometime in the fall of 2006 I went downtown to meet Samuel at his apartment on Thompson Street. He had lived in the same apartment in Greenwich Village for 50 years and it was not a cozy eating spot. As he points out in “At a Standstill” his stagnating living space was both material and symbolic —
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet—
I did not advance
I cannot retreat.
We went out to a diner around the corner and had a late lunch.
WNYC, the local public radio station, made a video of him reading that poem in his apartment at about the time I was there. They do a beautiful job of capturing Samuel’s feline grace even when ruffled by old age. But, despite its evident dilapidation, the portrayal of his apartment is kind. You can see the peeling paint and detritus, but you can’t see how pervasive it is. You see the mess but not the squalor.
When Jake and I heard that Samuel was sick, in the winter of 2006, we were upset but hopeful that he would recover and relocate. The apartment was clearly unhealthy for him. As a young man, he had come back from his time writing and studying in London and Paris and moved into a building whose poor condition his father disapproved of, even in 1956. Fifty years later he continued to live there in spartan fashion along with his solitary, large, unhealthy plant.
Just the two of them co-habited in an apartment that, not to mince words, smelled of piss. Part of his situation had come about because he was a confirmed bachelor who didn’t particularly care to take care of himself, but partly because it was an extremely cheap option for a man of few financial means. The Neglected Masters award came with a prize of $50,000 and it was easy to see how that might be all that stood between Menashe and penury. His cost of living in SoHo was close to nothing, but by the time Jake and I got to know him, Menashe was over 80 and couldn’t easily withstand the rigors of that tenement lifestyle.
His landlord saw the boutique Sixty SoHo] hotel go up next door at 60 Thompson Street and, by Samuel’s account, didn’t really care about the current residents of 75 Thompson Street, only about the earnings he might enjoy from selling the increasingly gentrified location. He may have won some belated recognition, but Samuel’s future was quite uncertain.
Samuel had gone from receiving almost no visitors before his award, to merely receiving rare visitors afterward. One of those visitors was the British-based artist Pamela Robertson-Pearse. While there, she captured his apartment in this period in her deeply sympathetic film “Life is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe,” included as a free DVD on some editions of the UK-released 2009 Bloodaxe Books version of his “New and Selected Poems.
It was no accident that Robertson-Pearse and Bloodaxe had showed as much interest as any artists or publishers from west of New York. From the time of his wartime journey over the Atlantic as the 19-year-old Samuel Weisberg — along with 20,000 other G.I.s on the requisitioned Queen Elizabeth I — Menashe enjoyed a mutual affection with Britain and Ireland.
Orr had pointed out that “as an American poet, he appears to have done almost everything wrong. He didn't teach creative writing, didn't ally himself with his more sociable peers, didn't serve on many committees and didn't finagle his way into many anthologies. He appears mostly to have just . . . written poetry.” But, though Orr was not exactly right — Menashe had indeed taught at a couple of American colleges — the life of a writer seemed more natural to the English for whom Menashe’s exoticism as an American and as a generally non-religious Jew provided quite enough fascination without more outsider status.
Whether Davie or Ricks, or Neil Astley who interviewed Menashe for the Robertson-Pearse video, many of Samuel’s champions tended to be English. He even remarked on that to me, early on, in his gentle forthright way when I mentioned my connection to Ricks. Perhaps because, with my PhD recently wrapped up, I didn’t know what I was going to write next, Samuel never proposed that I write about him — after all, I’d just met him and already published one of his poems. But, with Jake’s words in my ear, I always half expected him to make some sort of suggestion.
While eating at the diner, Samuel told me his story, including an early tale of his very first poetic champion Kathleen Raine. One of the foremost scholars of William Blake, Raine was excited by some of the poems that he sent her as his 3-month visa to the UK was expiring in 1960. Feeling a sense of urgency, Samuel missed his train and only arrived at Raine’s house in Cambridge just after she’d finished her family dinner. It was perfect timing that would have been premature if he’d caught the earlier train! At least that’s how he told the well-rehearsed story.
Despite demurring about her lack of contacts in London, Raine had clout as a professor of poetry at Cambridge and a sense of which of Menashe’s poems might interest Victor Gollancz who ran a well-respected poetry imprint. Apparently, she had enough influence and sense that her letter of recommendation, by Samuel’s telling, was enough to get him his first book – “The Many Named Beloved,” in 1961.
For the next 50 years he would be regularly, if infrequently, published by significant poetry journals with even more occasional elegant, slim monographic volumes containing his tiny, surprisingly robust, poems. In “To Open,” published by Viking in 1974, Samuel was already listed as having published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Commonweal, Encounter, The Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books and The Iowa Review. However, it took 10 years after his first book came out in London to publish his first volume in America.
Despite living on the borders of Greenwich Village, he was never a scene poet. Indeed, he was almost adoptively British. The relatively popular — for poetry, at least — Penguin Modern Poets series that came out in London in the mid-1990s curated 39 contemporary poets. Of those highlighted, only Menashe, in volume seven, was an American still living in America. As Burt points out, this sporadic recognition meant that Samuel needed to be “reintroduced over and over, in volumes whose contents overlapped, across decades, to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Right at the end of 2019, 8 years after Samuel’s death, Bhisham Bherwani and Nicholas Birns published a new “collected poetry.” “The Shrine Whose Shape I Am” was named for the poem which Dana Gioia, in the Afterword, calls “one of the finest poems on Jewish identity in English” and provides, in a small brick of a book, the poems from Menashe’s five books as well as all his previously collected and uncollected poems.
I perused the poems, enjoying the collection of “No Jerusalem But This” from 1971 which I had not previously read as a whole. That book had left a stream of poets discussing Samuel’s Jewishness but, to my mind, had obscured the many ways in which his re-setting of daily English usage was universal, not just “following his nose” as Stephen Spender remarked about Samuel’s pun on Jewish identity.
With delight, I noted that Bherwani and Birns had collected many of the poems that Samuel had inscribed in my books, “Leavetaking,” “More to Come,” “Railroad Flat,” “Die-hards,” “Birds.” I knew that in his 80s, Samuel had been free with his words and working on new projects so I wasn’t surprised to see that they had found other new poems that they considered finished. But, what I didn’t find was the poem that Samuel had inscribed to me, my wife, and daughter on September 25, 2006 along with wishes for “Long life, joy!”
It seems to be Samuel’s revisioning of William Blake’s “Infant Joy” and, as Birns told me, was probably part of the “Triptych” poem series that he was writing about his mother.
Infant Glee
She runs from me
Her legs afoot
In new selfhood —
She does not see
What is not good.
It’s still rough, the notches are not fully polished. But it has Samuel’s trademark rhymes (“me” “see”; “hood” “good”) as well as the slight twist of expectations around “afoot.” We find, as the line turns, that “legs” are “afoot” because of both the commonplace — physical location of feet at the end of legs — and the observed: her legs are “afoot” or “happening”because they are how she “runs” to give her agency and “new selfhood.”
That word “selfhood,” when pushed ever so slightly by being the pivot of the poem, also offers a double-meaning. With just a dash of stress it becomes not just an abstract noun referring to the quality of individuality, of agency, but also a “hood” of the “self.” This hood means that she “does not see / What is not good.” So, unlike the pure, innocent joy of Blake’s two-day old child, “I happy am, / Joy is my name,—” Samuel’s infant’s glee is not just the speechless delight of a child, it is willful blindness by dint of a developing ego.
The last time I saw Samuel was in a Veterans’ Administration hospital in midtown Manhattan. Jake had reached out in the fall of 2007 and said that Samuel had been ill and had somehow reached out to Jake to tell him where he was. Samuel was worried about his health. When we got there, gained entry, and eventually found him — despite being neither Veterans nor family — he looked ill. His warmth and tendency to linger on words was now tinged with anxiety. His small but robust frame was now gaunt. He had shed his braces and pounds of weight he could ill afford. He had told us the previous winter that he thought his December 17 show at the Bowery Poetry Club would be his last but, at the time, I thought he was exaggerating. This time, not.
In my memory, the VA hospital was unlike any other hospital I have ever visited. There were steel hallways and beds but almost no people: neither patients nor staff. It felt like Samuel could expire at any moment and no one would notice: no friends, no family, no ward-mates, no medical staff, no poets. He was pleased to see us: he still had a joie de vivre and a disinclination to talk about the specifics of his illness. He asked after our young families and our careers: Jake’s band!
The lack of people in the hospital must have dented his quality of life, but I think what most worried him was being forgotten as a poet. This vocation that he never knew was possible — he had thought that “poets were dead immortals” — had maintained him for half a century. Over that time, as first Ricks, and then Bherwani and Birns had shown, Samuel had turned and turned everyday English and found that, under our noses, in our very mouths, were profound insights into how we could understand the world.
When he finally passed in 2011, I had lost track of him in the labyrinthine VA system. He had stopped calling Jake and there seemed to be no trace of him in his old flat on Thompson Street – I received no response to the Hail Mary letter I wrote there in 2008. By 2011, anyway, the whole street had changed and any whiff of poetry had been wiped away. But Ricks’ Neglected Master title seemed to have done the trick. Remembrances sprung up all over the lettered world, from the Guardian to The New York Times, to the Forward, to Bloodaxe Books and Poetry America.
Like the Biblical forebears he sometimes echoed, or Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Blake, Menashe’s work exists in the context of millennia, not decades. His language is contemporary, but somehow eternal in the way that meditation can exclude contemporary society. At one meeting, shortly after suggesting that Jake write his doctorate on him, Samuel gave me annotated copies of theses written by Irish poet Joseph Woods and Hebrew translator Jessica Sacks about his “Jerusalem” collection. He wanted his work to be absorbed by conversation, he wanted it to ascend into academia. On the Woods thesis he notes with annoyance, “I’ve just telephoned Poetry Ireland of which Woods is the Director, but he is away on holiday.”
Samuel was both modest and deeply ambitious. He knew that everything had already been seen and done millennia ago, but thought that his work of bearing witness was still of great value. He wrote a poem in one of my copies of “Neglected Masters” that is as apt an epitaph as any for a man who bequeathed us small, but beautifully formed, gems of perception.
Nothing New
Prophets foretell
And priests agone
And where men dwell
Their works are known —
How good it is to know
That nothing new is told
That all was done before
I was born to behold
The sky at dawn once more
Not knowing how or when
Now becomes then.
