Jay Michaelson, editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought & Culture, writes about “People Of the Chapbook: Jewish Poets as Jewish Teachers” in the Forward to preview the Voices of 21st Century Jewish Poetry event at the Y on Jan 31 he is co-hosting with Richard Chess and features noted writers Alicia Ostriker, Rodger Kamenetz, Robin Becker, Jacqueline Osherow, Dan Bellm, Patty Seyburn, Philip Terman and Scott Cairns. An excerpt from the article:

Those concerned about Jewish continuity would do well to change our community’s neglect of poetry, because there is a vital power in the authentic, rarely heard voices of Jewish poets — both literary ones like those reviewed here, and slam, freestyle and performance poets whose work is rarely captured aside from the perfect moment onstage, when the right rhymes seem to fall from the sky and the rhythms carry them into the bones of everyone who hears.

Rarely have I felt more electrically Jewish than at these performances — alchemies, really — in which word and sound and spirit intersect, or crash, or scrape against each other to make sparks. And let’s not forget the poetry found in Jewish hip-hop artists like Y-Love, or songwriters like Jeremiah Lockwood and Basya Schechter — musicians who’ve had more success than spoken-word artists but who ought to be ambassadors for new Jewish culture and identity, sent on all-expenses-paid trips to the hinterlands of North America (that is, cities not on a coast), where they will spread a kind of light that no amount of proselytizing can generate. Poetry is no longer the province of tweed, and it is exactly what is missing from many of today’s pews and pulpits.