Slamming poetry at Flatbush

Yeshiva competition highlights the value of poetry as a cultural mirror.

By ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD
Painting by Avi Katz (photo credit: AVI KATZ)
Painting by Avi Katz
(photo credit: AVI KATZ)
I ARRIVED early at the Flatbush Yeshiva in Brooklyn. The blasts of Arctic air outside the Avenue J station made me think of my vile winter ascent up Jessup Avenue as a boy attending Yeshiva Zichron Moshe in the Bronx. Only there were no young poets then named Chezky, Suri, Shoshi, Natalie, Abby and Zack. Names that leaped out at me from the printed sheet I was given, which included my own name as one of three judges of the poetry slam that brought me here.
I was guided to the downstairs annex by a relay team of friendly teen-age girls in long skirts whose hands I had to remember not to shake. Encountering non-sexualized adolescence in a co-ed high school setting was illuminating.
All these loose-limbed, talkative, hardly over-spiritualized daughters (sons, too – Flatbush is co-ed) of modern Orthodox Jews swimming in their parents’ waters.
I laughed to myself thinking that the conservative moral code they navigate must make them seem, in the eyes of some secularists, as extreme as anarchists.
The poets were divided into three groups, consisting of students from eight Jewish high schools. The group I was to judge (I dislike the notion of poetry as competitive, as a word sport of sorts, but it pleases me that poetry has suddenly become popular in yeshivas all across the metropolitan area) consisted largely of girls, as did the other two groups.
This popularity is partly due to the efforts of two former Yeshiva University students, Aaron Roller and Hillel Broder.
They were involved with the now-defunct poetry journal Mima’amakim (From out of the depths, a reference to Psalm 130: “From out of the depths I called to you, God), created as a forum for publishing Jewish poetry and art with a religious orientation.
About five years ago, they cofounded the Yeshiva High School Poetry Slam, a competition designed both to encourage religious literary expression and to educate potential poets about traditional poetic verse forms. As Roller, the man who ignited my interest in the competition, explained in an article on the Orthodox Union website, “We wanted to help students take ownership of their religious experience through thinking deeply about their lives and developing creative ways to express their values and sensibilities.”
My group and its constellation of listeners assembled in a sprawling space large enough almost to have been a converted gym. The subject for the day was identity. Not Jewish identity necessarily – for teenagers, identity in all its forms assumes centrality.
The first poem, which was read, by an olive-skinned Syrian girl (the neighborhood is a Syrian Jewish stronghold), was received with the customary finger-clicking that translates in the yeshiva poetry community as approval.
Is there a reason
My beliefs sound like treason
To you? My religious adhesion
Doesn’t differ much from what you believe in.
Getting spit thrown in my direction,
Feeling avoided, like I’m an infection.
Being called a negative reflection
Of our people as a whole
A lifelong writer of prose, I came to poetry in old age, after the drowning of my younger brother. For a moment, I tried to imagine what it might have been like, studying in a poetry group at school, like this girl and the other yeshiva kids. With my rebellious streak, I probably would have ended up an accountant. But it is a positive indicator for Jewish culture that yeshiva students are joining poetry clubs the way other adolescents gravitate to sports.
Hearing the students read, reemphasized for me the value of poetry as a cultural mirror.
It served to break down any stereotype one might have about orthodoxy among the young Orthodox. Like the lines of this wild poet, a girl in her late teens, whom I voted the best of my group:
Over size and yellow hair?
And if all my soul I laid bare,
I still wouldn’t understand
How I dare
To question the overly plump mouth
that takes in air,
Or the way it lets out swear
Words like carbon dioxide
The finger clicking for her took on an intensity I transposed in my imagination to a Talmud class, in which an unusually skilled textual interpretation would be greeted in the same way as a brilliantly worded sonnet.
Audience support for their peers that included chanting their first names, as if they were star athletes, gave the slam a festive atmosphere. As a writer and a reviewer of poetry, I am forever being reminded of its hyper-marginal status.
To find myself at a slam among the Orthodox, where poetry is embraced as a vehicle for spiritual, intellectual and ethical creativity, is to arrive in a land I did not find on any detractor’s map.
Not unlike the established poets I know, the fledgling poets here took pleasure in referencing the venerable forms of their craft. One young finalist (we three judges sorted out the finalists like vexed Talmudists) recited a poem alluding to Terza Rima, a form I only became aware of three years ago. Another, a boy, wearing a kippa like all the boys, began by saying, “I have written a sonnet. But no one wants to hear a sonnet.”
Immediately, a chant rose up, as if from some ancient British poetry academy, “Son-net! Sonnet! Son-net!” When the winner was declared (only one poet- of-the-day winner! How could we have done such a thing!), the young woman, suppressing tears of impossible joy, collapsed into her friend’s arms as if she had just won an Oscar.
Before her ecstasy could congeal, Ariela Robinson, the director of the Flatbush poetry group, announced, “Now we will daven mincha.”