“To judge of poets is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best.” —Ben Jonson
Those of us who are not poets might remonstrate mildly, but we know what Ben Jonson means. Samuel Menashe is a true poet, and the poets have tested this claim and attested to its truth. Robert Graves welcomed him in person and welcomed his art highly, impersonally. Kathleen Raine introduced the poems to their first, their British, audience, in 1961, by way of a thought sown in Menashe’s own manner: “In a treeless waste a seed is better than a pebble.” Austin Clarke promptly alerted Irish readers to this American poetry, evoking “its suggestion of mysterious meaning” and its “axiomatic or imaginative effect.” More than thirty years later, Derek Mahon paid tribute to a world of “concentration and crystallisation,” an achievement that “opposes a tiny light to the vast orthodoxy.” Rachel Hadas and Dana Gioia are among the other poets who have testified—in terms terse and laconic—to an art that earns those epithets. Of the poets’ extended appreciations of this poet, those by Donald Davie, by Stephen Spender, and then again by Davie are excerpted here.
(1970)
One trouble is that his poems are as far from being traditional as they are from being in the fashion, or in any of the several fashions that have come and gone, whether in British or American poetry, over the last twenty-five or for that matter one hundred years. When Menashe himself is asked what tradition he thinks he is writing in, he is embarrassed and bewildered. Partly the question baffles him because the terms in which he thinks of his writing, and of writings by others, are not literary at all but as it were liturgical. And in the second place his linguistic situation is peculiar: his native tongue was Yiddish, though he was speaking English by the time he was five, and French (a language which ever since has meant much to him) by the time he was eleven.
On the other hand, though Menashe’s attitude to poetry is thus un-literary, it is very insistently linguistic; his liturgical or devotional intent is directed to releasing the worshipful potentialities of language, most often of single words placed so as to draw out the full meaning locked in their etymologies—etymologies for which he has a very sure nose indeed, being aware through his Yiddish of the Germanic root of many English words, and through his French of the Romance derivations and kinships in others.
The most masterly poem along these lines is a recent one, “The Niche”:
The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him
For here the two chains of intertwined assonance (“niche, thin, until, his, him” spliced into “narrows, hones, bones, disclose”) only point up a surprising rhyme as it were in sense as well as sound; “disclose,” the one word in the poem whose first syllable chimes with the “his” sequence as its second does with the “bones,” has a meaning that is itself “disclosed” (unclosed, opened up) as the poem unfolds or flowers towards it. And of course it is all true; the meaning of a word is disclosed to us as we narrow it down.
(The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, 1977)
(1971)
Samuel Menashe is a poet of entirely Jewish consciousness, though on a scale almost minuscule. He is not one of the prophets, concerned with exodus, exile, and lamentation: but he is certainly a witness to the sacredness of the nation in all circumstances in life and in death. His poetry constantly reminds me of some kind of Biblical instrument—tabor or jubal—and the note it strikes is always positive and even joyous. His scale is, I repeat, very small, but he can compress an attitude to life that has an immense history into three lines.
One might of course regard Samuel Menashe as a survivor. He certainly knows all about fire and brimstone and underworlds.
Nothing seems more remarkable about him than that his poetry goes so little remarked. Here is a poet who compresses thoughts and sensations into language intense and clear as diamonds and no one walking through New York streets seems to wish to chalk up on a wall—among so many things they do chalk up:
Streets at night like decks
With spars overhead
Whose rigging ropes
Stars into scope
The best of writing a review is that sometimes one can persuade someone to read something. I hope, as a result of this, a lot of people will read Menashe.
(The New York Review of Books, 22 July 1971)
(1986)
Charles Olson, in a famous essay which codified what he called Projective Verse, insisted that the unit which the good verse-writer works with isn’t the verse-line, isn’t the word, isn’t the metrical “foot,” but the syllable. When Olson read his own poetry aloud, did his way of reading reflect this conviction of his? I don’t know, for I never heard him read. The one and only style of reading that I know of, which forces the reader to attend to each and every syllable in what he hears, is the reading-style of Samuel Menashe, who for all I know has never read the Olson essay.
The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him
This, a complete poem, is not the sort of thing that usually came to us under the banner of Projective Verse. But hearing Menashe read it—eleven words, fourteen syllables—is to understand what it means in practice for a poet to compose by the syllable. The voice is enviably rich in timbre and resonance, but what matters is that it is exactly controlled. To get this poem over to an audience, bringing out how every syllable is irreplaceable in sound as well as sense, means slowing down the delivery of each sound far beyond what we are used to. Yet the accomplishment of Menashe as a reader is that he holds fast, through all these necessary retardations, to the shape of a conversational utterance, of something one might say, of (as Wordsworth said) “a man talking to men.” Hearing it read by Menashe is an experience unlike any other known to me; when the poem has been performed, one has the illusion (and perhaps it isn’t illusory after all) of having heard a very long poem indeed, and a very elaborate one.
A poet I know has said to me, admiringly and I think with a sort of shame, that the discipline of Menashe’s always very short poems is “punitive.” But Menashe doesn’t mean to punish either himself or his readers; his poems have to be compact and close because only in that way can English words—any English word, if the right tight context be found for it—show up as worshipful, as having a wisdom and an emotional force beyond what we can bring out of it when we make it serve our usual occasions. It is easiest to see this when Menashe makes play with meanings locked into idiomatic expressions that we use unthinkingly. For instance, “follow your nose”—a common expression that Menashe as a Jew, his Jewishness sealed into his physiognomy, makes composed and witty play with. Or consider “elbow-room”:
There is a pillow
On the window sill—
Her elbow room—
In the twin window
Enclosed by a grill
Plants in pots bloom
On the window sill
The pillow on the window sill is there for the widow’s elbows to rest on it as she looks out into the street; that is elbow room in a literal way we had not envisaged. And in the twin window are the plants that bloom in a pot analogous to the widow, exposing her perhaps fading bloom to the street? Or are they not, since “Enclosed by a grill,” an image of how shut up and shut off she is, capable of displaying her liveliness, and registering the liveliness of the street, only through a narrow aperture? Every window is a window-box, whenever it frames a human face looking out. But no answers are expected, or possible; simply, how much human pathos is compacted in the common expression “elbow-room” if only we will stay with it, dwell on it, convert it into an image!
This is an urban snapshot. And indeed the scene of Menashe’s poems is nearly always that of cold-water apartments in old and run-down districts of Manhattan. But for those who have no particular attachment to that or similar environments, the poems have still the absorbing interest of pressing to the logical limit certain speculations and problems of modern poetics—an accomplishment the more remarkable since the poet shows no sign of having interested himself in such matters or in poetic theory generally. He is not a “primitive,” but it will do no harm to read him as if he were. That way, one sees how seemingly abstruse considerations about how poetic language works are tied up with compassion for human suffering, and respect for human dignity.
(Foreword to Menashe’s Collected Poems, 1986)