Poetry at Tikkun, the Why and the Wherefore

T ikkun: to heal, repair, and transform the world. The magazine’s title, the meaning of that word, announces its mission, its obligation. The world, it’s said, was created by ten utterances. How could they not have been poetry? Poetic utterance, inherently creative, is our common source of origin. Repair and transformation not only take place in poems, but they take place in ourselves when we read them, when we say them. We could put it more accurately: when poetry takes place, it creates place, something like a dwelling place, for mind and heart. Our everyday language is very poor, it barely gets the job done; poetry transforms such language, giving itself transforming powers, which are transitive. Poetry, of course, cannot change us unless we allow it to, unless we open ourselves to it; but it can catch us off guard. The sounds of words organized into artful sequences may have something like therapeutic properties; and what those sounds mean, what they tell us about the world, ourselves, our relations, may also inspire us to pay attention, to act, to speak up, and out. But they are also, themselves, entire worlds, made of words; and their metonymies continually enact transformation and completion, even when they remain indeterminate, unresolved, and open. Poetry has not only the capacity to help heal the psyche and transform our vision, it dramatically presents such actions; poems formally stage our comprehension, and help us see more, hear more; they help us understand others. Poems are an existential technology, of survival, progress, and growth. Tikkun has always included poetry in its pages because Rabbi Michael Lerner, from the beginning, intuited the role that poetry had to play in promoting a progressive vision. Also, he knew that readers liked poems—that they opened the magazine hoping to find a poem that might open a new window, make a new sound, present a new experience, and remind us who we are, where we come from, and why that matters. Over the years, the magazine has showcased new poems by established and younger writers, including: Yehuda Amichai, Allen Ginsberg, Mahmoud Darwish, Carolyn Forché, Shirley Kaufman, Wisława Symborska, C. K. Williams, Anne Winters, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Gail Mazur, Louise Glück, Leah Goldberg, Rosellen Brown, Marie Howe, Zelda, Marge Piercy, Jerome Rothenberg, Brenda Hillman, Alicia Ostriker, Tom Sleigh, Peter Dale Scott, Jane Shore, Maxine Kumin, Primo Levi, Philip Levine, Rodger Kamenetz, Ari Banias, Joy Ladin, Moshe Dor, Cid Corman, Gerald Stern, Alan Shapiro, Jacquelin Osherow, Susan Mitchell, Agi Mishol, Spencer Reese, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Andrea Cohen, David Gewanter, Yehuda Halevi, Thom Gunn, Reginald Gibbons, Eytan Eytan, Heather McHugh, Enid Dame, David Avidan, and on, and on, and on. I joined Tikkun’s editorial staff in 1987, and I stuck around, even after I left Oakland in the early 1990s. I had personal reasons. Not being very observant in the religious sense, by helping to edit the magazine, I was, in another sense, able to actually be Jewish in a way that’s been important to me over the years. It’s been an education, and a kind of practice that I’ve made part of my practice as a poet, a teacher, a parent, a human being. “You are not obligated to complete the work,” says Rabbi Tarfon, “but neither are you free to desist from it.” The work of poetry, the work of Tikkun, and of tikkun—these labors are ongoing, and only most meaningful when you add yourself to them. I could call it an obligation, but really, it’s been a privilege, and a pleasure. ■