Ian Dreiblatt
Seen on these playlists
forget thee
My book FORGET THEE is an imagined ride through the collapsing horizons of the present, in the company of a series of interlocutors from the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterrean worlds. It’s hard to really say where any writing “comes from,” but as the work in the book began to coalesce I was thinking a lot about how astounding it is that we improvise whole primordial lives out of of all things language, with its fractal contingencies and absolute instability, and wanting to say something into that feeling. I was also wondering what it’d be like to meet the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor in a diner in Jersey, what kinds of things she’d say. The book looks into these and other questions of transcendence while careening through a civilization in which common human drives like war, exploitation, and sociality are mystifyingly subordinated to the sanctity of corporations, while divinities — the corporations of the past — gaze on in bemused half-sympathy. There’s a lot more there, too, like “guacamocracy” (yum?) and Billy Joel watching the apocalypse from his private obelisk. Anyhow, here are a couple poems from the book, offering, I hope, some whiff of the icky, based city of gods it attempts to summon. (PS Queens > Jersey dinerwise, for the record.)
—Ian Dreiblatt
View playlistThese Are a Few of My Favorite Jews
With antisemitism on the worldwide rise and attacks in my hometown of Brooklyn, NY scaring people in ways they may have not imagined would reach such startling heights, it seemed an appropriate moment to highlight and give praise to some of my favorite contemporary Jewish poets. Recently Ariana Reines described in a characteristically heartfelt post that she felt grateful for a review that highlighted and understood her within a context of Jewish and Judaic thought in part because it highlighted something that can sometimes feel closeted even when loudly proclaimed or pronounced. While I make no claims to try and know or understand what each of these poets' relationship to their religious background might be, I've often wondered what might bring us all together, if there could be such a thing as a Jewish poetic sensibility and what is at stake, what it means to even have the inclination towards this question? Just last night at the Poetry Project David Henderson said that if you live in New York long enough you are basically Jewish. I'm sure we've all heard some coy version of this half-joke before and while we Jews may seem aplenty in NYC, this comment struck me as particularly unaware of what it is like to be Jewish in any city or state right now. And maybe, though I'm not letting Henderson off the hook entirely, in some way it is because we talk about our jewishness so little. So I ask again, what does it mean to claim or divvy out jewishness for a city? for a mindset? for a poem? This list is just a sampling, for there are many more Jews that I love that did not make this small playlist, many more that I don't yet know exist.
View playlist