When I mention my involvement in Mima’amakim to people they often remark, “I didn’t know you wrote poetry!” To this I am always forced to reply that no, I don’t really write poetry, and we’re probably all better off for it. However, I’ve always been drawn to Mima’amakim and the world of emergent writers in general because I read poetry, and I love it, and because I think it infuses the world with rhythm and order and beauty and the like. I don’t write it because I don’t think I’m very good, but also, more importantly, when the kind of events happen to me that make people want to write I think I just want to pick up the phone and chat. Or listen to music, or even read a poem. Yet I occasionally worry that there’s something boring, even parasitic, about being a reader of poetry.

Less than a century ago, this was far from the case. Fireside poets like Robert Frost read on the radio and captured the attention of Americans using poetry as a form of entertainment. However, something happened around the middle of the twentieth-century. A recent New Yorker review by Louis Menand (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all) of a book called The Program Era offered an interesting history of the boom in American creative writing programs that began after World War II. It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that the notion of a “workshop” or of a writing class in general came into parlance at all. It goes without saying that organic forms of this were probably taking place throughout history, but still it seemed that something changed when writing began to be taught in college. It seems silly to say that “writing” suddenly became something apart from reading; in order for reading to take place, of course, writing needs to happen - careful, thoughtful, crafted writing. However, the notion of writing as something you “do” on the way to being a lawyer or doctor, as a major or minor, or as a form of personal therapy and expression, these terms only really made sense in the beginning of the century. And as Menand noted in the article, this was a wonderful thing. This was something that could challenge the illusion that any work of art is somehow sacred or self-contained. A creative writing class can break down a seemingly insurmountable barrier between our selves and the written page. Everything, we learn, is subject to revision; every piece can benefit from the insights and comments of participants in the workshop; everything can be tweaked, tightened, and rewritten. This new ethos was what made it possible for organizations like Mima’amakim to exist, and the founding of hundreds of creative writing departments throughout the country.

However, although this new way of thinking about writing was a great stride toward creating an exciting, democratic culture of art in America, it also came at a price. I don’t actually know whether the price was a necessary one to pay, but as Creative Writing departments and English departments began to establish themselves as different, and it became entirely feasible for someone to write more often than they read- to write because it’s an independently important form of expression- reading began to pay a price.

While there are active poetry-writing circles and communities all over America, the reading of poetry has fallen into a state of disrepair. To make use of a personal, somewhat unscientific, statistic: after six years of riding on New York City subways, and spending much of that time stealing glances of fellow rider’s book-flaps, I think I may have seen an adult book of poetry once. Not very scientific, but I would imagine that everyone writing nowadays (including novels and short stories) has asked his or herself the question of who exactly is reading.

I’m not going to say that this new culture has arisen due to the popularity of creative writing classes, it’s even possible that these developments happened concurrently and independently. But as a community committed to writing I think we need to be careful, if only for practical reasons (but also for deeper ones), that we don’t become writers at the expense of being readers. Or to put a more positive spin on it- we need to find a way to read poetry that feels as creative and nourishing as writing. If not then the gap will continue to widen, and we will all experience more of the frequent suspicion that three quarters of audience members at open-mike readings are there because they are waiting to read themselves.

It is regarding this that I think we can learn a lot from Jewish tradition- particularly the Rabbinic culture of reading and rereading earlier texts and imbuing them with all sorts of meaning. For Rabbis, and scores of writers and artists throughout history, creativity was always inextricably tied up with reading- to the extent where sometimes the most fantastic literary fabrications were themselves couched as a form of reading. While I sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I don’t really write poetry, I only read it, I imagine if I was a scholarly male living in 2^nd century Babylonia I would have the opposite concern. However, a creative community that is too beholden to reading without leaving room for imagining would leave us with a similarly unfortunate gap. But that didn’t happen, or at least our wealth of Rabbinic literature is testament that this gap was bridged, even obliterated at times- until being a scholar became similar to, even interchangeable with, being a writer and creator of literature.

That, I suppose, is the kind of conversation that I wish existed today. When I started teaching English I remember planning to make sure creative writing would be a major part of my curriculum. “Break away from the staid words of dead white men!” I thought to myself, I wanted them to realize that the study of literature was a conversation that anyone can become a part of. But I soon realized, that even wonderful, brilliant teenagers, can traffic in staid clichés and tired tropes, and that there’s a crispness and relevance to the writing of many famous white men. Only occasionally did I see a real continuity between the reading we did in class and the writing I saw, and I realized that this kind of writing, while often interesting and fun to read, was not participating in a conversation at all. It was talking to itself.

Once again, I’m not really sure what the root cause of all this is, or even whether it is much of a reason to get riled up. But as a Jewish art journal, or a journal filled with poems that are consciously and sub-consciously in dialogue with other texts, we are in a unique position to combat this trend. I think there’s a common feeling that while writing is something that takes great discipline and care, poems, once written, are there to be “listened” to. This is good because poems should above all be sources of pleasure.  But it’s also a problem. A lot of the great pleasure that comes out of writing is precisely a product of the hard work that goes into it. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same for reading, but I think it can be. Creative reading means looking at a text with the same kind of energy and vitality we bring to other artistic pursuits.
Sarah Rindner was Editor-in-Chief of the 2009 Mima’amakim Journal.