I remember the first time I met Yehoshua November, many long years ago
in an introductory poetry class. I went around the room asking each student
an ice-breaking question that felt, even then, a bit perfunctory: why did
they write poetry? When we came to Josh (that's what we called him then),
he said, "I want to restore the sanctity to language."
The class was startled. I was stunned, and never forgot it, partly because
over the years I have watched him wrestle to do just that. Yehoshua went
on to finish his undergraduate and advanced degrees, become a teacher,
marry and raise a family. But he has never stopped writing poetry and he
has never stopped trying to restore an essential sanctity to language.
I feel him grappling with the spiritual in every poem--as Jacob said when
he wrestled all night, "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me."
Even when the poem is about apparently mundane subjects--tennis, billboards,
Harpo Marx, a tangerine--this tension between the daily and the sacred
hums just under its skin.
Reading this glorious book of poems, one of the finest I have read in
decades, part of me thinks, well of course God is an optimist if He's still
got someone like Yehoshua November on his side. Sanctified but never sanctimonious,
many of the poems in God's Optimism dive into the subjects of desire,
longing, passion. "When I was a student/ love treated me like a road,"
November writes in "The One Who Has Left You." He goes on: "because
you will find yourself/ sitting alone in a movie house,/ watching the film
you planned to see together./ And the man on the screen/ will have dark
eyes and a distant face/ but the woman will have the eyes/ of the one who
left you." --But there is no telling when there will be a reconciliation:
"Then one day the radio returns/ in the middle of the same song,/
like a man waking to finish the sentence/ he began before his coma./ And
the lovers, too,/ take up each others' bodies once again,/ but now they
are old/ and the love making is slow and awkward, like the first time."
Many of the best poems here are love poems for his own wife, recalling
"when, despite the school of nervous fish/ that swam through my heart,/
my hand found yours/ for the first time." These are not ordinary love
poems, bound up in them are contradictions, gratitude, and a sense of having
found the bershert, or fated one: "if you must rouse me,/ please,
my wife,/ do not even place your small hand/ on my shoulders,/ but whisper
my name,/ remind me that I am such and such a man/ and you are the dark-haired
daughter of so and so,/ chosen for me/ before I took up this journey."
No book of poems can be truly great which does not stretch its attention
and compassion toward the larger world. November does this again and again.
He goes back in time to the notes his grandmother wrote his grandfather,
"Hard boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you." With
great gentleness he reaches for the gifts of his ancestors, "we push
our fingers to the back/ of our sock drawers/ and bring the ancient bow
ties to the lamp light." Or further, to the last century, the Frierdiker
Rebbe cast out of Russia, "The soul is never in exile."
He reaches outward as well, to "the nearly naked supermodel/ advertising
a watch" on a billboard, whose third marriage is falling apart. He
remembers the traveler, "in a foreign province," and his lonely
meditations: "not unlike carrying a cello/ through a winter night,/
the dark wood rotting/ in the snow." He writes with compassion about
the suicide's father; about "The dark children swimming in the ocean/
off a small town in Chile/…And what about God? If God is infinite,
we cannot explain/ the sadness of the world/ without drowning him."
To read God's Optimism is to remember what poetry is meant
to be: musical, tender, philosophical, generous-hearted. When I read November's
poetry I am ashamed ever to have called myself a poet, for I know I am
in the presence of a young master-as honest and witty as Kafka, as visionary
as Doestoevski, but with a voice and presence all his own. This book is
an astonishing debut. While rooted deeply in its Jewishness, it speaks
to people of all faiths, and of no faith. The first person (among many)
to whom I will gift this book is a lay Catholic priest, for I know it will
speak to him. There is nothing holier-than-thou in November's sanctity
of language. It is filled with contradictions and dualities, as many of
the poems' titles suggest, "Anything Infinite Must be Unknown,"
"Upstairs the Eulogy, Downstairs the Rummage Sale." I will gladly
give the book to the local Chassidic rabbi's wife, or to my wildest, most
rebellious student with pink and blue hair.
November's work has been published in the most prestigious literary
magazines, has won awards, been anthologized, and is destined to reach
an ever-widening audience. His voice is magically lyrical, "and every
voice could be the one/ that dissolves in the forest/ or the song that
holds/ the necklace of the lake." More than that, it shows wisdom
far beyond his years, for November is still a young poet, and one could
hardly expect such depths from a writer three times his age. I'll end by
quoting one of my favorite poems, "Tennis," in full:
One evening you will walk past a park
between two fading apartment buildings,
and see men playing tennis in white garments,
and long to slip out of your life,
to be buried in the white robe with no pockets,
and float like a ball
between two rivals, two great friends,
this world and the next.
What you hold in your hands, reader, is not just a book of poems, but
a treasure.
Liz Rosenberg,
July 2010