Connecting the Dots

by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof

Amos Oz opens his novel, Rhyming Life & Death, with the main character, The Author, telling us the most commonly asked questions. One of these is:

Do you constantly cross out and correct
or do you write straight out of your head?

“Connecting the dots” –– a metaphor for seeing the big picture. When you were little, perhaps like me, you enjoyed one of those puzzle books with numbered dots to connect. As you drew the lines from dot to dot, wasn’t it fun to see how quickly you could figure out what it was as the outline of the object was revealed? This month I profess a belief that those of us who were good at it were destined to become poets. I thought of this last month when I read the memoir Amos Oz (nee Klausner) wrote about his childhood in Jerusalem in the late 1940s and early 1950s, A Tale of Love and Darkness. When he was eight years old, he fell in love:

She swept me away, set in motion some kind of metronome that had not stirred before and has not stopped since…

The object of his devotion? His second grade teacher, Teacher Zelda. Here is one of the lessons she imparted:

If you want to draw a tree, just draw a few leaves. You don’t need to draw them all. If you draw a man, you don’t have to draw every hair.

Ah, but here came the challenge: in this she was not consistent. When little Amos brought Teacher Zelda poems he had written…

One time she would say that at such and such a place I had written too much, while another time she would say that actually I should have written a little more. But how do you tell? I am still looking for an answer to this day…

Those of us who write poetry share that life-long challenge. As I revise my poems, I tend to do more crossing out than adding in. How about you? Also, second-grader Amos Klausner learned early on the mystery of how words work together:

I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that also was quite ordinary, all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away.

In his memoir, Oz tells us that later in life he learned that Teacher Zelda was also Poet Zelda, that her poems had been published in literary supplements and magazines, and even back in his second grade had then enjoyed a modest reputation among small circles of poetry lovers. He also found out that Teacher Zelda was a Miss Schneersohn who was related to a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis and who married a Rabbi Chayim Mishkowsky two years after Amos left her second grade classroom. In 1977 she won Tel Aviv’s annual Bialik Prize for Literature, a prize Amos Oz won in 1986. Known simply as Zelda, she died in 1984 at age 69.

Now, might I connect a few of my own dots? I went looking on the Internet for poems by Zelda and learned that her poems have been translated from Hebrew into English by professor and poet Marcia Falk. Now that name sounded familiar. I pulled off my shelf my copy of Faith & Doubt: An Anthology of Poems edited by Patrice Vecchione. There on page 60, one of my favorite poems, “Last Apple,” by Malka Heifetz Tussman, translated from Yiddish into English by Marcia Falk! Two dots connected: Zelda and Tussman. But, really three dots. Marcia Falk performs a one-woman show, Three Women Poets: A Talk and Reading, in which she presents her own poetry alongside poems by the other two women. Here she gives us a dramatic reading in the original languages as well as in her own English translations, and highlights their approaches to nature, love, solitude, and spirituality [www.marciafalk.com]

How to sign off this month? My effort to write not too much, not too little. My haiku effort to put one ordinary word next to another.

rise and shine
hyacinths and biscuits
breakfast fare

Tagged as: Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof.