All men and women are to each other the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; and when this life we share wounds one of us, all share the hurt as if it were our own. You, who will not feel another’s pain, no longer deserve to be called human. Written by […]
What I’m interested in here is the way the failure of this poem, which I see as a failure of craft, can be used as an object lesson in how not to write a politically engaged poem, unless of course you want your poem to be propaganda.
That’s the question Tricia Knoll‘s poetry group responded to just before she read my introductory post from last month. She thought it was a pretty cool segue from her group’s question to this blog’s title—Learning To Love The Questions—and she was nice enough to take the time to write me about it. I also thought […]
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 […]
Learning to love the questions, a phrase that captures one of the enduring lessons I took away from my time in a yeshiva high school, also embodies the role that poetry—writing it, reading it, sharing it—plays in my life. I look forward to sharing my thoughts about this with you starting in July. Till then…
