To Organize Beauty: The Sonnets of Mani Leyb

Toward the end of his life, the American Yiddish poet Mani Leyb turned to composing a series of intensely personal lyrics in the form of loosely connected sonnets. These he conceived as his summum opus, combining his ideas of simplicity and plainspokenness with a lifelong achievement in impressionist poetics, all within the framework of the sonnet, the token of the pinnacle of high-art achievement in Western poetry. In some of the inherent tensions between these elements we see Mani Leyb staking a claim on what it means to write poetry that was both authentically Yiddish and American.