Green Linden Press

 Interview with Richard Jeffrey Newman on T’shuvah — May 19, 2024

Richard Jeffrey Newman has published three books of his own poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017) and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006) and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, NY, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College. His website is www.richardjnewman.com.

Catherine Fletcher: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me about T’shuvah, Richard. Your first poem, “Yom Kippur 5780,” employs the second person. While the lyric “I” does appear, the “you” point of view continues into subsequent poems and dominates the collection. In your two previous books, however, many of your poems are first person perspective. Could you talk about the use of “you” and “I,” the presence of self and other in T’shuvah—including both the conscious and unconscious choices that led you to that creative place?

Richard Jeffrey Newman: Most of the poems in The Silence of Men and Words for What Those Men Have Done draw extensively on the autobiographical details of my life, perhaps most prominently on my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. That experience frames the arc traced by the poems in each volume and, at the same time, serves as a central subtext for those pieces that are about something else entirely. I would not call any of the poems autobiographical, however, since I don’t think there is a single one that does not depend in some measure on details I invented out of whole cloth. I thought of the speaker of those poems—and maybe this is what you mean by “the lyric I”—as what Sam Hamill, in his essay “The Necessity to Speak,” called “the first person impersonal,” which he defines, in contradistinction to the I of the poet, as an invitation to the reader to enter “the experience of the poem.”

Fletcher: Yes, that’s what I’m after.

Newman: When I finished writing Words for What Those Men Have Done, I was tired of engaging so intimately with myself, so I conceived of a “palate-cleansing” project in which, to make it easier to avoid material that was even remotely autobiographical, I would address the poems to a vague, unidentified you. My goal was to see what I could learn in terms of craft, my own practice, and the possibilities of language by putting as much distance as possible between myself and the subject of those poems. However, once I started to see the second-person address as emerging not from a single speaker but rather from the different voices that a survivor of sexual violence might encounter along what is often referred to as their healing journey, including their own internal voice, I realized I was working on a book. As the concept for T’shuvah took shape in my mind, I also realized that I would need a transition from the first person speaker of my first two books to the speakers I was giving voice to in T’shuvah. “Yom Kippur 5780” provides that transition.

Fletcher: T’shuvah’s title translates roughly into English as “repentance” or “atonement.” There’s much in this work about the process of forgiveness, self-acceptance, and the possibilities for transformation. Within your journey there also are potent experiences of liminality—for example, Section 8 of “This Sentence is a Metaphor for Bridge:” “You live for the choice to give or kill this pleasure. / The pleasure lives as long as you don’t choose.” How challenging was it to find language for such experiences?

Newman: There is, or at least I hope there is, a tension throughout the book between t’shuvah as a response to sin, to having done something wrong, and the metaphor of return—in which the word is etymologically rooted—as it might be applied to healing from sexual violence, though the victims/survivors have obviously committed no sin. For me, that tension inheres in the fact that survivors often feel, or are made to feel, that we have nonetheless done something wrong—either because we were not the perfect victims or because we have internalized, or others have imposed upon us, various cultural memes that continue to stigmatize people. The liminality you refer to has been part of the book’s DNA, so to speak, since I began to think of these poems as making up a single collection.

The roots of the kind of word play you point out in “This Sentence Is a Metaphor for Bridge” actually go way back in my work. The oldest lines in the book—I wrote them more than twenty years ago—are the first eight lines of “Insomnia,” including the couplet: “The earth is moving darkness overhead. / Or darkness doesn’t move; then you’re dead.” I was writing a Petrarchan sonnet, and the constraints of the form led me to those lines. I did not become actively interested in mining the possibilities of that kind of wordplay, though, until I was working on the translations from classical Persian literature. Here, for example, are four lines from Saadi’s Bustan, written in 13th century Persia:

Guarantee the comfort of the poor;
do not permit your own comfort to bind you.
None who call your kingdom home will live at ease
if your own ease is all you choose to live for.

Fletcher: I appreciate your frankness about that journey. Regarding the idea of return, in literary circles there are some who believe the writing of poetry is healing. During a recent panel at AWP, the poet Octavio Quintanilla raised the possibility that writing enables the writer to function rather than to truly heal in the face of trauma. He spoke about “finding the poetry in an absence I cannot fill but that I hope, one day, completely heals.” What are your thoughts on this?

Newman: I am deeply suspicious of the way this idea—that writing poetry is healing or that writing “enables the writer to function”—instrumentalizes art-making as a therapeutic tool. I do not mean, obviously, that being able to articulate one’s interior experience in a poem cannot be helpful in healing from or otherwise coping with trauma. Poetry therapy—like dance therapy or art therapy—is a real thing, after all, but it takes place in a context where the work of healing, not the work of art, is the primary goal. I was not able to write the poems in my first two books that deal explicitly with the sexual violence I survived until I had the distance from that experience provided by whatever measure of healing I had already achieved. Another reason the lion’s share of T’shuvah is written in the second person is that the poems, in my mind, are addressed to an older version of me, to the person I was while I was going through the process the book traces.

Fletcher: Are you leaning toward art for art’s sake then?

Newman: Not really. Writing poetry is a political act that, in one way or another, either sustains or questions the status quo. To me, theorizing the making of poetry as a therapeutic act feels like participation in the medicalization of the body that John O’Neill talks about in Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society. “Through [the medicalization of the body],” he wrote, “we are socialized into bringing every stage of the life cycle… into the administration of bureaucratized centers of professional care…”  When poets talk about their work, theorize about their work, promote their work within a therapeutic framework, they seem to me, at the very least, to be adopting the language of medicalization; and just as the medicalization of the body is meant to tame the body politic by making the state the caretaker of us all, I think seeing poetry in this way ultimately tames poets and poetry.

Fletcher: One of the many things trying to tame us. In “Insomnia” you write: “It isn’t just the clock that measures time.” Indeed, though there seems to be movement forward through the book’s four sections, present and past often fold into one another within individual poems, as in “What Will Not Let Itself Be Washed Away” and “A Dream in Three Parts.” On the other hand, the eight short sections of “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life” have a timelessness about them. How does time function in this collection and why?

Newman: To the degree that T’shuvah is about the interior process of coming to terms with the trauma of sexual violence, it only made sense that there should be movement back and forth between the past and the present, since coming to terms with trauma by definition means understanding not only how your present has been shaped by your past, but also how the experience of trauma has in some ways frozen you into the past and prevented you from moving forward into a future you have chosen.

Like “This Sentence Is a Metaphor for Bridge,” I think the sections in “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life” are spoken by different speakers—though not necessarily one speaker for each section. What you call timelessness derives from the absolute certainty each of the speakers in “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life” has about the rightness of what they have to say.

Fletcher: “The path you weave / back and forth / across this page,” “Pick up your pen.” “Build yourself a line / that won’t efface itself.” Your use of the meta-literary is significant in this collection. On one hand, you embrace the acts of creation and reinvention via language; on the other, you reject God by turning away from sacred texts and rabbinic exegesis, “determined to keep faith only with yourself.” This made me think of the Jewish tradition of the book, as well as literary engagement with it—especially the work of French poet Edmond Jabès. What’s your relationship to this tradition?

Newman: When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rabbi, not necessarily the leader of a congregation, but someone who had received smicha—ordination—because I was convinced I would only learn to be at peace with myself in an orthodox religious practice fully informed by the kind of Jewish learning ordination would require. Back then, in no small measure because of how dirty and ashamed I felt as a result of what the men who violated me did to me, I wanted—I needed—guidelines for what it meant to live an unambiguously good life, and I saw the potential for that most clearly in being an observant Jew.

At the yeshiva high school I attended, I learned Torah, the practice of studying religious texts and the commentaries written about them. It’s done in order to make the tradition and practice of Judaism your own. In 10th grade, the boys—religious studies classes were gender-segregated—had a teacher named Rabbi Wehl. In trying to impress upon us the value of articulating, on our own terms, any and all questions we had about the texts we were studying, he once said, “You have to learn to love those questions, because some of them will be with you for your whole life, and if you don’t learn to love them, how will you ever learn to love yourself?”

I left the scaffolding of orthodox Judaism behind a long time ago, but I have carried with me Rabbi Wehl’s implicit endorsement of language not just as a way of saying what you mean but also as a means of exploring the questions that give life meaning. In that sense, writing poetry is my way of loving those questions—though Rabbi Wehl would no doubt consider sacrilegious the way I do it, since it is almost completely divorced from an orthodox Jewish context.

Fletcher: I noticed a number of visual motifs in this book: paths and roads, wings and sky, along with pairs of opposites like walls and doors, dark and light. Do your poems usually begin with images, with lines, or another way? Please share a little about your process with us.

Newman: I’d say my poems begin in the rhythm and music of the line. I know I’m working on a poem—as opposed to a piece of prose—when I can harness that sound and movement in shaping the language of the next line, and the line after that, and so on. It is the precise opposite, in some ways, of what Lewis Carroll meant in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when he had the Duchess say, “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.” It’s not, of course, that I pay no attention to meaning in this process. Rather, it’s that I know I’m working on a poem when I can treat the line as a measure in the musical sense, whether that means working in a fixed form, where I know how many beats there are per line, or in free verse.

In prose, just to make the contrast, the rhythm I work with is the rhythm of the sentence, and how that rhythm builds the rhythm of the paragraph, and how that rhythm builds into the rhythm of thinking that leads a reader through the essay.

Fletcher: Let’s circle back to your work with classical Persian literature and your collaborative translations. You and I have spoken about how, for a time, you felt the influence of the Sufi poet Attar’s voice on your own. What influence, if any, did Attar have on this new collection?

Newman: This is such a complex question, not least because of the way that word “collaborative” needs to be unpacked. As you know, I was originally commissioned to produce these translations, despite the fact that I am neither a fluent speaker of nor literate in Persian, by the now-defunct International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC). ISIC’s goal was to have a native-English speaking poet use scholarly translations that are widely accepted as accurate, but that a general readership would be unlikely to enjoy, to produce literary translations that could stand on their own as contemporary American poetry. Whatever influence making those translations has had on my own work comes not from a direct engagement with Persian literature, but rather from reading very closely the versions of the poets I’ve worked with—Attar, Saadi, Ferdowsi, and Rumi—that the initial translators constructed in English.

I think it’s important to offer that acknowledgment for the sake of transparency and because the style, voice, and diction of the translations I used as “trots” often reveal more about the conventions of translation being observed by the English translators than about what the poetry might have sounded like in the original. John Andrew Boyle’s translation of  Attar’s Elahi Nameh (The Book of God), for example, makes the poet sound more like the King James Bible than the master of economical storytelling that Attar was. So, when I say that I felt Attar’s influence on my own work—and I could say the same thing about Saadi —I’m referring not to the poetry per se but rather to the one-step-removed sense I had to make of who these poets were, what they wrote about and why they wrote, and why their work was worth translating in the first place.

That said, I’d point to a few things that I think carried over into my own work and into the poems that appear in T’shuvah in particular. First, Saadi and Attar are both what we might call didactic poets, along the lines of Alexander Pope and John Dryden. I think both sequences in T’shuvah owe the explicit didacticism in some of their sections, as well as the didactic tone overall of the different voices within them, to my encounter with this aspect of Saadi’s and Attar’s work. Second, all of Attar’s work in particular is devoted to illuminating the Sufi path of enlightenment. The image of the path that occurs in T’shuvah does not come only from my work with Attar—the notion of “return,” after all, implies the existence of a path; and the Hebrew word for Jewish law, halacha, means “the way”—but it was in Attar’s work that I first encountered its use in the making of poems.

Finally, the Sufis understand the quest for oneness with God in explicitly erotic terms. Sexual encounter becomes in this framing—at least as I have understood it—a metaphor for both a path towards that oneness and a means of achieving it. Minus the religious-mystical component, that is almost precisely how I have long understood the role sex has played in my own healing, as both a path and means of self-knowledge and of claiming for myself, on my own terms, the physical presence in the world that the men who violated me tried to deny me. I think this idea is more explicit in my other two books, though it may run through T’shuvah as a kind of subtext.

Fletcher: Recently composer Owen Bloomfield set selections from this collection to music to create the piece “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life.” Could you talk a bit about this collaboration, including the recent performance?

Newman: This question would be a lot easier to answer if Owen and I had actually collaborated, by which I mean engaged in a project where we interacted in order to produce the final composition. In reality, I sent him some poems in response to a call he put out on Facebook. Owen then chose what he liked and composed the music for four instruments and a narrator. (He wrote a blog post about the process of setting the text.) This work was performed by The _____ Experiment in Kitchener, Ontario, on April 19, 2024.

There are eight sections in “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life,” and Owen’s solution was to write a separate piece of music for each section. Within each section, each part could be played by any instrument and each bar of music could be repeated as many times as the performers wished, allowing for a truly dynamic relationship between the spoken word and instrumental parts of the performance. I think this strategy captures well both the way each section of “Do Not Wish for Any Other Life” can stand on its own and the way you can riff almost endlessly in interpreting the aphoristic nature of lines like “Metaphors cost what love’s last kiss redeems.”

Fletcher: That sounds fascinating. Finally, would you share what’s next for you?

Newman: I’m at work on two different projects, one explicitly intended for publication, the other one just for me. For the first project, I am in the final stages of revising and submitting poems that emerge from a daily writing practice I kept throughout all of 2020. For the latter project, I am making my way through Miller Williams’ Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, which I have had on my shelf since the 1990s and writing one poem in each form in the book. I’ve named the file in which I am keeping these poems “Finger Exercises.”