Poetry: Music, Patience and Form

Sarah: I started teaching creative writing based on Tanach [Hebrew scriptures: Torah, Prophets, Writings] to high school kids in an after school program, but it took years before I incorporated the process I taught them into my writing. At first, I thought poetry was coming from a different spiritual energy and Judaism would dry it up, especially the brand of Judaism I began to find myself more and more involved in. And yes, being in an Orthodox Jewish environment, before I was grounded in who I was, did stop the poetry. I tried to write but garble came out, words that couldn’t describe what I was feeling or communicate it to anyone. However, I still had the yearning to persevere in the writing. I entered an MFA program and eventually was able to write poems that connected my Judaism profoundly to my feelings. Bridges published a few of these poems, inclusing “The Ritual Bath.” As I wrote that poem, I discovered spiritual meaning out of difficult emotions I felt during the process of immersing in the mikvah.