Poetry and Pedagogy: Literary Mourning Beyond the Kaddish

• In Event: Jews, Inheritance, and Postwar American Literature

Abstract

“Had he asked me to say Kadish / I believe I would have said it for him,” Louis Zukofsky writes of his recently-deceased father, Pinchos, in “A”-12 (1951). This conditional presents a tentative and incomplete reconciliation of the Orthodox, immigrant father and his secular son, a modernist poet. “A”-12, the longest individual section of the influential poem at which Zukofsky labored across six decades, responds to his father’s death by deliberately declining to say kaddish. Indeed, Zukofsky does not write from the position of the mourning son at all but approaches Pinchos’ death as the father of his own son. Death does not present the need to bless, sanctify, and mourn (as, for example, in Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish), but must be understood through a new father’s obligations to future generations: his own child and those who will write poetry after him.

This paper shows how “A”-12 mourns without “saying kaddish” by merging fatherhood, pedagogy, and poetry. “What,” Zukofsky asks as “A” turns from the Marxist political history of his youth toward private, family memory, “shall I teach my son?” This question looms over “A”-12 as Zukofsky reads his father’s life in dialogue with the major figures of European music and philosophy. In “A”-12, poetry must teach and the poet assume the role of teacher—that is, of the Jewish father who must instruct his son in the ethical behavior imposed by a Westernized Pirkei Avot (or a Judaized Nicomachean Ethics) in which Bach and Aristotle feature as prominently as Akiva and Hillel.

I conclude with comments on the importance of distinguishing this pedagogical poetics from a poetic kaddish. By declining to participate in this act of mourning, “A”-12 allows readers to trace the borders of the kaddish poems which do. In turn, this pushes us to imagine the ways in which Jewish poetry emerges not simply through narrative content, the heritage of its author, or the language in which it was written—but on the level of genre.

Author

• Joshua Logan Wall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor