Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (@ ZEEK)

Last spring ZEEK asked me to write a review of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (U of Alabama Press, 2009). Just today they have posted the review along with poems by anthology editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller:

This Jewish influence begs the question: could Robert Creeley or John Cage not be considered Jewish practitioners in regards to the qualities expressed by their work (as a student at SUNY Buffalo I recall Creeley repeatedly making the remark that he was in fact Jewish in his heart). To what extent, I might add, could Language writing, though many of its practitioners are not ethnically Jewish, be considered an aesthetically Jewish practice? Language writing’s roots in Objectivism, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding Jackson, European and Russian avant gardes, and poets such as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Larry Eigner, and Hannah Weiner definitely suggests this case of elective affinity, if not kinship itself.