[New-Poetry] After Babel by Leonard Schwartz

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=24865

Saying is never really obvious. My 2007 book Language As Responsibility assumed the necessity of an address to the other. Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested that the very presence of language implies the existence of an other, and therefore each utterance we make carries weight in the world: utterances that stand as if face to face, where the human face proves the existence of the other. From this premise, Language As Responsibility combined three forms of address to the other: conversation, proposition, and poem. The first section was an interview with the Israeli poet and peace activist, Aharon Shabtai, the second an essay on Arabic and Israeli writing in translation, the third section one of my poems. In the poem I misquote the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Early in the last century she wrote, famously, "all poets are Jews.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080317/0d3dc329/attachment.html