On making new poems from the Old Testament
Including notes on what makes a poem Jewish, a poem that appropriates lines that is also appropriate to today's themes, and more
As I write poems for The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined, I find myself wondering if there are uniquely Jewish forms of poetry or a particularly Jewish relationship to poetry.
There is plenty of scholarship on this topic, but for now I’ll share a few juicy tidbits I’ve collected:
As in most sacred traditions, Jewish texts, prayerbooks, and liturgy are packed with poetry. Some forms that crop up repeatedly from ancient times to the present include: acrostics (in which the first letter of each line spells out a word), abecedarians (in which words beginning with the letters from A to Z, or Aleph to Tav in Hebrew, start each line in order), and piyyutim (poetic works of devotion, which date back to the 3rd through 6th centuries). That last one was a new one on me.
Poetry was used as a medium for delivering oracles in Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cultures. This makes intuitive sense to me, as poetry supercharges imagery, language, and emotion and their mysterious powers of manifestation.
The poems in the Bible are among the oldest parts of the text. Again, this makes sense, doesn’t it? Before we humans became literate, the structure, rhythm, and form of poetry would help people memorize the oral histories and spiritual knowledge they wanted to preserve and pass along.
This isn’t a definitive list — I’m learning along with you! If you are familiar with specific poetic forms that are associated with biblical or ancient Hebrew traditions, please share!
If the form fits …
In today’s poem, “Terah’s Daughter,” I use the form of the cento to dream into lines from Genesis that launch Sarah and Abraham on a journey to leave their home and settle (in) another land.
In a cento, the poet takes lines from other poems to create something unique. In this case, I borrowed lines from 13 poets of diverse time periods and backgrounds, plus a verse from Genesis, to knit together something new.
This form seems fitting for a poem in which the promise and possession of land, which was at the time inhabited by another people and their culture, ultimately seed the complexities and conflicts inherent in Sarah and Abraham’s story — and which continue to this day.
Listen to today’s poem, ‘Terah’s Daughter’ by Tzivia Gover
“Terah’s Daughter,” Copyright Tzivia Gover, all rights reserved.
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