Upcoming reading

POETS in PLAY: Corning’s Poetry Series | eARTS.org

Featured Reader at 7PM followed by Inspired Open Mic

Hosted by Soul Full Cup Coffeehouse | 81 West Market Street, Corning, NY

 

https://www.earts.org/poetsinplay

Upcoming reading

Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell, NY

November 10 – 3 p.m.

http://www.brighthillpress.org

New book!

From Broadstone Books in Kentucky.

http://broadstonebooks.com/Judith_Kerman_Page.html

Upcoming reading

Caffe Lena, Saratoga Springs, October 5, 2016, 7 p.m.

Also open mic

Home

Pet Peeve (wearing my publisher/editor hat right now)

One of the things that makes me nuts when I’m reading manuscripts is pages that don’t end where my copy of Word (or my Submittable feed) says they should. I get the title for the next poem, chapter or story at the bottom of the page, often disconnected from the body of the text. It’s amazing that many writers don’t know about Page Break. I don’t know how you do this on a Mac, but it must be available – on a PC, it’s EASY. No, you don’t use the Enter key to shove the cursor onto the next page. PLEASE don’t do that. Because if my Submittable screen or copy of Word isn’t set with exactly the same margins, the page break won’t be in the right place.

How to do it right? When you get to the end of the poem, story, etc., hold down the Ctrl key and hit Enter. That will force a Page Break, which will work no matter how long the reader’s page is set to be. Carries over into PDFs and makes it easy to do layout (if your book is, as we hope, accepted). But even for reading manuscripts, and whether read online or printed out, this matters to a reader.

 

How to buy my new chapbook

Tags

ecology, feminist, poetry, politics

Want to read my new chapbook, Postcards from America? Go to my publisher’s listing of the book, which includes a pay button. (It should be on Amazon.com soon, but it’s better to buy from the publisher.) Please go to my Facebook page, Judith Kerman, poet/writer to like the page and  share what you think of the book. Thanks!

New chapbook coming!

My new chapbook,  Postcards from America (Post Traumatic Press) is expected from the printer this week (today is also my 70th birthday). Keep up with this project, my readings, etc. by liking me on my facebook page.

Another birdly neighbor

A big elm near my driveway just died. Guess who came to dinner? I knew pileated woodpeckers were in the area, but never saw one close up or near my house. This is taken with my new Canon, which has a 50x (!) zoom lens. Hand-held. (Leaning against something and holding my breath 🙂

Diaspora issues

I attended an enjoyable and stimulating gathering of poets at the Gell Center in Naples, NY, this weekend. The theme was pilgrimage, which somehow hooked up to diaspora at one point, and it gave me a new idea for the “elevator pitch.” So here’s a new version:

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America is often described as a land of immigrants. It is less often noticed that America is a land of diaspora. People from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and ethnic, find themselves in an ambivalent relationship to assimilation and also to their cultures of family origin.  We work at finding a home here while also thinking about the old home place (physical, cultural, spiritual) that may or may not be possible to visit. We often feel tugged toward cultural memories that may be heavily romanticized or traumatic or both. One obvious example of this phenomenon is the situation of American Jews.  Although the dominant experience of American Jewish life is assimilation and attenuation of religious meaning, much Jewish poetry takes the religious tradition as a given. However, this leaves out the large percentage of American Jews who are secular and whose relationship to Judaism is ambiguous or conflicted.

Aleph, broken, a collection of poems by Judith Kerman, will appeal to readers, both Jewish and not, interested in the tension between American identity and the other resonances rooted in culture of origin. The book explores an unconventional but not atypical Jewish identity, one that is scientific and secular but yearning for connections usually found in Jewish observance, history and belief. These poems center around ways in which life and Jewishness are not what Kerman was taught to expect. They reflect both real and imagined personal experience, related to Judaism but also to larger contemporary issues and Kerman’s explorations of other cultures as they connect to personal identity.

Kerman was raised in an atheist home with a strong sense of history and progressive politics as part of Jewish identity. She acquired a broad knowledge of both the Hebrew Bible and Jewish culture through reading. In her late forties, she became active in Jewish religious and community life. However, the conventional understanding of Jewishness remains problematic for her, while the tradition of argument, exploration and dispute remains compelling—a challenge faced by all those who still feel rooted in their culture of origin while finding a deeper meaning in the great scope of human experience.

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Comments welcome.

More on second generation issues

My conversation with Eleanor suggests that people who are Americans assimilated from other immigrant backgrounds, whether religious or ethnic, might identify with some of the issues raised by my book, and that I should emphasize that, rather than Jewishness in particular. I’ve retitled a few poems (“Ritual Bath” instead of “Mikveh” is one such) and I will add notes at the back. But the over-all packaging is a different question. I suppose I could start my elevator pitch with this idea:

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People one or two generations from an immigrant past often feel a connection to the old religion or the old culture without being quite sure what claim it has on them and what they value in it. In the case of poet Judith Kerman, this connection is to Eastern European Judaism. But the issues raised by her collection of poems, Aleph, broken, may be of interest to North Americans from many other backgrounds who feel similar perplexities.

Many Jewish books offer relatively little to the large percentage of American Jews who are secular and whose relationship to Judaism is ambiguous or conflicted. The poems in Aleph, broken explore an unconventional but not atypical Jewish identity, one that is scientific and secular but yearning for connections usually found in Jewish observance, history and belief.

These poems, which explore the ways in which life and Jewishness are not what Kerman was taught to expect, reflect both real and imagined personal experience. Beginning with her family origins, the book grapples with such contemporary issues as sexism, antiSemitism, the Holocaust, aging and death, ecology and social justice. Kerman’s explorations of other cultures, especially Latin America, bring her back to questions of her personal identity.

Kerman was raised in an atheist home with a sense of history and progressive politics as part of Jewish identity. She acquired a broad knowledge of both the Hebrew Bible and Jewish culture through reading. In her late forties, she became active in Jewish religious and community life. However, the conventional understanding of Jewishness remains problematic for her, while the tradition of argument, exploration and dispute remains compelling. Many readers from a variety of cultures are likely to identify with her meditation on these challenges, which are faced by all those who still feel rooted in their culture of origin while finding a deeper meaning in the great scope of human experience.

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This feels a little awkward, but maybe closer. Thoughts?