Books & Reviews
“Cosmic Diaspora is Jake Marmer’s third collection of poems. It brings together fantasy, hard-boiled sci-fi, Jewish mysticism, experimental poetics, free jazz, and dark, deadpan humor. Born in the wild steppes of Ukraine, Marmer brings his immigrant experience into a cosmic, diasporic disorientation and attempts to imagine the deep future of myth, spirit, and language. In Cosmic Diaspora, you may also find more than hints of the Talmud, Midrash, and Zohar that allude to alternative realities, some of which exist alongside our own, while others are tangled within it—or are completely unrelated, made of pure Light or pure Text.”
Cosmic Diaspora will be published by the Station Hill Press in Sep 2020 and is now available for pre-order.
BLURBS:
“Cosmic Diaspora is a (literally) fantastic…. what? Book of poems/literary works? Notational record of an infinite number of possible post-poetic poetry performances? Series of QR-scanned music/spoken word performance videos? A hyper-Jewish post-Jewish science fiction fragment in talmudically-zoharically-inflected verse? Or all of the above. Jake’s language is deceptively off-handed yet precise, intelligent yet casual, prophetic yet comic. The eponymously titled opening suite is wise, weird, startling, and totally worth the price of admission, and the rest of the book, wildly different section to section, equals it. Curtain up! an artist strolls center stage.”
—Norman Fischer,
author of On a Train at Night and Untitled Series: Life as It Is
“Jake Marmer’s reflexive and visionary Cosmic Diaspora is a passionately rendered and timely exploration in verse of postmodern ritual and mutations. Marmer also takes a deep celebratory look into black holes, gravity, light years, and the cosmos. He also pays homage to some of his speculative heroes: Delany, Acker, Stein, and le Guin. And all the while Marmer hears the wisdom of the Talmud whispering in the background.”
—Clarence Major,
author of My Amputations and Reflex and Bone Structure
“From ‘harm to harmony’ and back (and back again, in rapid, infinite oscillation), Jake Marmer’s new volume, Cosmic Diaspora, outlines, with wit and a keen sense of otherness, the existential anxiety at the heart of sentient human life—an anxiety that takes on a special poignancy in the words of geopolitically and otherwise historically traumatized diasporic poets:
you’re being disassembled
into a diaspora of atoms that know nothing
of each other’s existence
before coming together again
like water poured into a new glass
without objective guarantee
of continuity
Through a series of fanciful sci-fi vignettes, a sort of ‘calligraphy of life’s post-script,’ Cosmic Diaspora explores the concept of diaspora not merely of ‘a people,’ but the contemporary experience of boundary-dissolution and dissemination of the individual-as-alien, giving the lie to the inside/outside, them/us, self/other binary around which ‘identity’ and its discontents are constructed. This is a rich, trenchant, and thoroughly enjoyable ‘record/ in conversation with its own mutation’—after all, ‘just because you were being extrapolated/ doesn’t mean you weren’t having a ball.’ Treat yourself.”
—Maria Damon,
author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries
The Neighbor Out of Sound was published by Sheep Meadow Press in Oct 2018 and is now available for order via Sheep Meadow site, Amazon – and at the upcoming of course.
REVIEWS:
In the Jewish Book Council
Book-related interview in the Jewish Book Council
In LARB
In the Brooklyn Rail
In Hevria
BLURBS:
In these exuberant, murmuring poems, Jake Marmer weaves the infinite space “between thinking and listening.” This is a nomadic poetry, stolen from the open air and tuned toward the “fractured mirrors” of ancient grammars. In The Neighbor Out of Sound, Marmer forsakes restitution and righteousness in favor of resonance, remembrance, reflex, wreckage, release, and return.
“Reading it anew, I think of Jake Marmer’s The Neighbor Out of Sound as a further & major instance of the interpenetration of old & new in the composition of works that explore the furthest limits & possibilities of poetry. The thrill, for me as it will be for others, is how he pulls together a profound feel for unabashedly Jewish images & soundings with avant-garde & jazz particulars to round out a mix of dynamic pasts & presents. The result is very much a poetry for now & a voice well worth the listening.”
“Jake Marmer’s poetry, born and reborn with three mother tongues in the post-Soviet Garden of Eden, is more angel than serpent. He writes wisdom poetry with multiple eyes and ears, wisdom chants, some wordless ghost wisdom, scat jazz wisdom (Louis Armstrong learned scat from Jewish neighbors). He is moving when he describes his ignorance and ours. He loves his neighbor as himself, even those out of sound. His love poems are wise. Marmer produces visions on the page. Whose woods are these? Who is God? Read and learn.”
Jazz Talmud was published by Sheep Meadow Press in Dec 2011 and is now available for order via Sheep Meadow site, Amazon – and at the upcoming of course.
A feature on my performance work in the Jewish Week.
Reviews:
Jake Marmer’s Jazz Talmud is a work true to its title & an extraordinary & delightful yoking together of what might seem like disparate & irreconcilable worlds. It is also a small triumph of the Fancy in full flight, comic & serious by turns & written by a practitioner who knows whereof he speaks & from where he comes. That it’s also a first book of poetry only adds to the wonder & leaves this reader for one looking forward to the career & work ahead, as Whitman once wrote for himself & for all of us, “without check with original energy.”
JEROME ROTHENBERG
Like me, Marmer is interested in, I mean, writes about, the Law, mulberries and Monk. So how can I resist him? Especially when he does it in his own beautiful way.
Jazz Talmud is proof (if proof were needed) that God has a sense of humor. How otherwise account for poems with so much shpritz, so much pop, so much bebop, and so much deep digging in the wild blue yonder of Jewish dialectic? Not forgetting, either, “the odor/ of the abyss” or “the peanuts of lower Manhattan?” Read Jake Marmer (please) and live a little.
Musician and poet, Jake Marmer offers us a combo – Jazz, Talmud, and Bible. Gospel is a distant cousin. For example, “Rachmonos (mercy) Blues:” “I know a little woman,/ she got a truck full of rach-/monos, yeah a truck full of parsnips and rach-/monos wonder if she’ll park it on my street tonight.” Or try “Bachelor Haiku”: “spring evening at home / folding up the warm laundry / one unmatched sock.” His voice is unmatched: no one else is playing on his street.
Introductory notes from Steve Dalachinsky
Jazz & poetry go back to the Harlem Renaissance & to one of its creators the great Langston Hughes. Judaism & poetry go even further back to the Song of Songs & the Old Testament (at least in recorded history.) There have always been Jewish musicians, promoters writers, critics who played or dealt with jazz but few have ever mixed their ethnicity with their art. What Jake Marmer has managed to do is create a fresh, new genre by mixing the two in a very personal, intimate & at times rather disquietingly comfortable way. Being a secular Jew who writes little about his ethnicity & religion & a poet who has spent the better part of his life writing thru & about music (mostly jazz) I wanted to almost immediately & for very different reasons, intellectually & emotionally resist these poems. My instinct was to shy away from and be put off by the constant references to Judaism & Jazz & the mingling of the two genres but the more I heard Jake read them with & without great musical accompaniment & the more he explained to me what certain terms meant the more I found the work to be heart-warming, charming, stimulating, intriguing & finally irresistible, as irresistible as the man himself.
It is nearly impossible not to get drawn into Jake’s wordscapes, filled with warmth, passion, compassion & humanity where, as the title poem suggests, Jazz & Judaism intertwine, intersect, collide, melt & meld. Jake’s is a world where the angel Gabriel gets to blow his horn in a New Orleans funk band, where the “pure music of a jazz groan” comes out of a Golem in Brooklyn. Where Thelonious Monk gets to travel to Jerusalem, give directives, piano through the morning & where Jake even gets to try on Monk’s gloves. As you’ll soon find out Jake invents worlds that seem so convincingly real & presents real worlds that seem to only thrive in a fertile imagination. We are locked into places where abstraction & representation sit side by side with a perfect amount of social shifts & a sense of healing that feels just right. Jake has found a harmony & balance between all he sees & invents.
If you examine Marmer’s road map to the promised land it is fraught with “smiles” & “dried out skulls, happy to see each other.” It is an irreverent & bumpy ride since “god is a conveyer belt … a purveyor of superb nonsense” & we “ know nah / thing.” We are treated to imaginative post-post-beat sensibilities without high stylization or clichéd approaches. We feel a certain emotional vulnerability, honesty & credibility. A perplexing impact, little contradiction, very bluesy almost spontaneous feelings, much social understanding & a truly American feel for someone originally born in the Ukraine & only arrived here as a teenager some 16 or so years ago singing his own personal anthem.
Some of my favorite & I think Jake’s deepest pieces are his mishnahs. When I asked what a mishnah was he explained in an email –
“Mishnah is essentially a brief teaching, and that’s the stuff rabbis came up with and called ‘oral law’ – i.e. law that’s not explicitly in the Torah but is part of the cannon – mishnahs are the basis of the Talmud. There are practical mishnah that tell you what to use to make your candles for shabbos (seaweeds vs. animal fat?) and then others that ask whether it’s better to have been born or not, and that the world stands on charity and kindness to people who need it most. They were usually short and kinda poetic so they could be more easily memorized because at the time they were around most people weren’t literate so these were mostly passed down orally.”
And Jake’s are filled with poetry – “ There are three types of loneliness in the world: green, red and purple”; philosophy “Even silence has its laws”; practical knowledge (read the little gem “Vacuum”); teaching & learning “I don’t know what beauty is but in this heat it can surely kill you” said the rabbi to his students after changing back from a giant carp to a human being. On some levels a mishnah can be equated to a Zen koan.
This touching–on-every–aspect–of life book ends with “Family Still Life”, a short poignant deceivingly simple piece about the birth of Jake’s first child, his son Lev, a visit from Jake’s religious mother-in-law & Jake’s bike, “the angel on wheels” as alive as his son, his mother-in-law, & her wig. What is depicted here & in countless other images are scenes & observations that only someone who feels tightly yet securely wrapped in his own skin can embrace. These vacillations between the comedic & serious aspects of ritual & law can make one chuckle as well as weep & this is surely why there is always a light(heartedness) even in the darkness where even a wailing wall needs the golden sun of mornings or at least “intimations of sunrise” in order to exist.
Marmer puts it this way (in an email):
“ U know I don’t really think of myself as particularly religious – in my head I’m mostly secular (whatever that means) as I was born & brought up that way – it’s more about the reality of the myth and the tradition – it makes me happy – sometimes – I also really like turning off my phone and not thinking about $ for one day every week.”
This book is an “Alternative” to what’s out there so don’t let Jake’s words linger in your “pocket like pebbles” but allow them to, as Jake puts it “fly upwards… or at least diagonally.”
The great Jazz & Surrealist poet Ted Joans stated that “Jazz is My Religion.” I do believe in Jake’s case that to some extent this statement truly applies & that conversely “Religion is Jake’s Jazz.”
Steve Dalachinsky nyc 2011
Jake Marmer 