Rodger Kamenetz


Philip Levine: '1949, Miami Beach. Zero.'

By Rodger Kamenetz

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Philip Levine was born in Detroit in 1928. He has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, an American Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards and a Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize. On August 9, 2011, Levine was named the next U.S. Poet Laureate.Read More


The Rich and the Bloody

By Rodger Kamenetz

The Rich and the Bloody
How does poetry serve, since, as W.H. Auden told us long ago, it “makes nothing happen”? That is the question behind Adrienne Rich’s most recent book, which comes as a summary of all she has learned in the course of giving us 30 books of poetry full of commitment to the art and its relevance. I find in her work always great strength, of mind and of ear. She does not seek to be obscure or to write for trivial reasons; her poems emerge from personal need and urgency.Read More


Cry Out for the Fate of the Tibetan People

By Rodger Kamenetz

Next month at Seder, we will recall how Egypt made the lives of the Children of Israel “bitter.” We will remember how “the children of Israel groaned… and cried out” and that “God heard their moaning.”Read More


In the Presence of Genius

By Rodger Kamenetz

What is there to say? Prodigious, brilliant, David Shapiro has lived in many worlds of art, including music and painting. Shapiro is also the author of four books of criticism: on poet John Ashbery, and on artists Jim Dine, Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian. In total, there are 20 books to his name, including translations, editions, and collaborations with painters and poets and philosophers and aestheticians. But poetry is at the center of his work — not poetry simply as a formal activity, but as a way of thinking and a way of feeling, and even of being. This new collection is a chance to look back at the published work of the past 40 years, since it includes a selection from his previous nine books, and a sheaf of new poems.Read More


PSALM 151

By Rodger Kamenetz

What Men WantThe talk between them at the table, three pairsof men and women, husbands and wives,was of men and women, husbands and wives,and therefore edgy, so he beganhis contribution to it cautiously:an anecdote of several years before,he thought perhaps his wife recalled —about the way that men will lookat womenRead More