My name is Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah, which Fernwood Press published in 2023. I’ll be blogging here at Learning To Love The Questions about the work poetry does in the world when it engages, or is engaged by, the political and spiritual aspects of our individual and communal lives. I’ll tell you the story of where the blog’s name comes from in a moment. First, though, I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself. I am recently retired from SUNY’s Nassau Community College, where I taught in the English Department for thirty-six years and where I was reminded over and over again that what William Carlos Williams said in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” is true:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

My students were not dying for lack of poetry, but I was consistently moved by how surprised many of them were at the ways in which poetry could engage the central questions of their personal and civic lives. (Please forgive the broken lineation in the above quote; I don’t have the skills to reproduce it in WordPress.)

Williams does not define what he means by “what is found there,” and I am not going to presume to do so either. Instead, I’d like to offer you something June Jordan wrote in her introduction to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People:

You cannot write lies and write good poetry…[Good poetry] is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social interaction. (My emphasis)

Truth-telling occurs in the context of a question, and “good poems”—as I understand what Jordan is saying here—offer answers to the most profound questions of our lives, questions that it can take many years, if not an entire lifetime, to presume even to begin to answer.

Thinking about what it means to live with those questions takes me back to Rabbi Wehl’s 10th grade gemara class. I’d switched from public school to yeshiva in 8th grade, in part because someone from the Hebrew School I’d been attending arranged for me to get a full scholarship for my remaining high school years and my mother and grandparents thought I would receive a better education there. I also made the switch, though, because—and this is why whoever paid my way agreed to do so—I thought both that I wanted to be an orthodox Jew when I grew up and that I might want to become a rabbi.

I was wrong on both counts, the reasons for which will likely come up in future posts, but I owe to Rabbi Wehl one of the true life lessons I learned from my time in that school. He was the first teacher to give me permission to annotate a text that I was reading, in this case our course text, the Talmud’s Tractate Beitza, which we pronounced beiyah, because beitza, which means egg, is also slang for testicle. (If you would like a really good introduction to the Talmud and its role in Jewish religious life, this episode of the Literature and History podcast is absolutely marvelous.)

Anyway, at some point early in the school year, Reb Wehl told us we should always have a pencil handy when we were studying so that we could write whatever questions we had in the margins. Some of the questions, he said, would be simple and easily answered, but some, especially as we got deeper and deeper into our studies, might become the kinds of questions that end up shaping how you live your life. “That’s why you need to learn to love them,” he went on. “Because if you do not learn to love your questions, how will you learn to love yourselves?”

Making poems is my way of learning to love the questions that matter most to me and reading poems is one of the ways I feed that love; and that love is what this blog will be about. I plan to post once a month. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you and I hope you will choose to share your thoughts with me.