Steve Dalachinsky Reviews:

Jake Marmer, Jazz Talmud (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011)

Jazz and poetry go back to the Harlem Renaissance and to one of its creators: the great Langston Hughes. Judaism and poetry go even further back to the Song of Songs and the Old Testament (at least in recorded history). There have always been Jewish musicians, promoters, writers and 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 and at times rather disquietingly comfortable way. Being a secular Jew who writes little about his ethnicity and religion, and a poet who has spent the better part of his life writing through and about music (mostly jazz) I wanted to almost immediately and for very different reasons intellectually and emotionally resist these poems. My instinct was to shy away from and be put off by the constant references to Judaism and jazz and the mingling of the two genres, but the more I heard Jake read them with and without great musical accompaniment and the more he explained to me what certain terms meant the more I found the work to be heart-warming, charming, stimulating, intriguing and as irresistible as the man himself.

It is nearly impossible not to get drawn into Jake’s wordscapes, filled with warmth, passion, compassion and humanity where, as the title poem suggests, Jazz and Judaism intertwine, intersect, collide, melt and 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 and where Jake even gets to try on Monk’s gloves. As you’ll soon find out, Jake invents worlds that seem convincingly real and presents real worlds that seem to only thrive in a fertile imagination. We are locked into places where abstraction and representation sit side by side with a perfect amount of social shifts and a sense of healing that feels just right. In other words, like good music Jake has found a harmony and balance between all he sees and invents.

If you examine Marmer’s road map to the promised land it is fraught with “smiles” and “dried out skulls, happy to see each other.” It is an irreverent and bumpy ride since “god is a conveyer belt … a purveyor of superb nonsense,” and since “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 and credibility. A perplexing impact, little contradiction, very bluesy, almost spontaneous feelings, much social understanding and a truly American feel for someone originally born in the Ukraine and only arrived here as a teenager some 15 or so years ago singing his own personal anthem.

Some of my favorite and I think Jake’s deepest pieces are his mishnahs. When I asked what a mishna was he explained “Mishnah means a 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 canon – in short, they’re the basis of the Talmud. There are practical mishnah that tell you what kind of wax to use to light candles on shabbos (goat vs. camel vs. etc.) and then others that ask whether it’s better to have been born than not and if the world stands on charity and kindness to people who need it most, etc. They were usually short and kind of 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.  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 and 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 mishna 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 and Jake’s bike, “the angel on wheels”, as alive as his son, his mother-in-law and her wig. What is depicted here and in countless other images are scenes and observations that only someone who feels tightly yet securely wrapped in his own skin can embrace. These vacillations between the comedic and serious aspects of ritual and law can make one chuckle as well as weep and 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: “Ya know I don’t really think of myself as particularly religious — in my head I’m mostly secular as I was born and brought up that way — it’s more about the myth and the tradition — it makes me happy — sometimes — I also really like turning off my phone and not thinking about money 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 and 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 and that conversely “Religion is Jake’s Jazz.”

Steve Dalachinsky is a prolific New York-based poet.  Dalachinsky’s books include his PEN Award winning The Final Nite & Other Poems: Complete Notes From A Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), poetry written while watching saxophonist Charles Gayle perform, Logos and Language, co-authored with pianist Matthew Shipp (RogueArt 2008) and Reaching Into The Unknown, a collaboration with French photographer Jacques Bisceglia (RogueArt 2009). Dalachinsky’s work has appeared in Unlikely Stories, Ratapallax, N.Y. Arts Magazine, Tribes, The Helix, Unarmed, The GW Review, Gare Maritime, Alternating Current, Bathtub Gin, 88, The Wandering Hermit Review, Mima’amakim, Lost and Found Times and many others.