A New American Rebirth of Religious Poetry

American poets pioneered free-form verse. Though Walt Whitman did write sometimes in traditional rhyme and meter, he is most famous for his stunning free-form poetry. It was controversial not only for its form but for his candor about the natural...

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American poets pioneered free-form verse. Though Walt Whitman did write sometimes in traditional rhyme and meter, he is most famous for his stunning free-form poetry. It was controversial not only for its form but for his candor about the natural world of individual human experience. Critics derided him as lacking the seriousness that comes from religious discipline, understood by the measure of the day. 

But Whitman himself consistently understood his writing to be religious, and supremely so, as he dared to see the fullness of human life in a joyous way that felt to him prophetic. Speaking of those who criticized his Leaves of Grass as irreligious, he said: 

That is not my view of the book — and I ought to know. I think the Leaves the most religious book among books: crammed full of faith. What would the Leaves be without faith? An empty vessel: faith is its very substance, balance — its one article of assent — its one item of assurance.

The Beat writers and poets of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties saw themselves as heirs of Whitman. Poet Allen Ginsberg wrote:

Whitman warned that unless American materialism were to be enlightened by some spiritual influence, the United States would turn into “the fabled damned of nations.”

Ginsberg and other Beats saw themselves as trying to bring some spiritual influence. Ginsberg wrote of how Beat author Jack Kerouac explained the word “Beat”:

 “Beat” as beatific, as in “dark night of the soul,” or “cloud of unknowing,” the necessary beatness of darkness that proceeds opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.

Yet this was a form of religiosity that was so embedded in its own culture of excess that to most, their religiosity seemed either a bluff or, if genuine, cultish. Over the years, the excesses of the Beats are not so uncommon. Nor in retrospect was their religiosity mere words. But it was directed primarily towards the East. Gary Snyder went to Japan and sat among traditional Zen practitioners as a student, and Ginsberg famously wore white robes and chanted Harry Kushner [not Jared’s brother] with the hippies in Golden Gate Park. Clearly, in their art and often in their lives, their connections to Buddhist and Hindu thought and practice were stronger than to Western religion.

The Free Verse of Yehosua November

All of this should frame the accomplishment of poet Yehoshua November as evidenced in his third book, The Concealment of Endless Light.

Its free verse has the ease of expression and forthright communication of the Whitman tradition. Its emotions are identifiable beyond the confines of a well-defined religious tradition. It holds itself to an immediateness of place and time. It sees and lives within the particularity of person and of things, so that the world is not just a blur of passing insignificances but a place where revelations are the very substance of the everyday. The poet’s New Jersey is the New Jersey of William Carlos Williams and November, like Williams, finds his revelations within the givenness of this particular place. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Biblical Insights Into Immigration)

What is stunningly new is the constant reference to Western religion, in the form of the Chabad school of Chassidic thought. Chabad originated in George Washington’s day, and consciously holding itself in the 3300-year frame of reference of the entire Jewish tradition. It is heir to the kabbalistic tradition that during the Renaissance, leapt the bounds between Christianity and Judaism and inspired the thought of such crucial thinkers as philosopher Pico della Mirandola and religious humanist Johann Reuchlin.

In this great tradition, November is no dilettante. Like Milton, November is deeply learned in tradition and actively practices his faith. His poems show that the disciplines of his art and of his faith. Together, they embrace a constant devotion, which accepts as necessary both the truth of this ancient heritage and the necessity of precise and loving response to a the world as it is. November lives not in a ghetto but in 2024 America, where he writes in English, teaches writing at Rutgers University, and publishes through Orison Books for an audience not limited to those of his creed. His work is as committed as the Beats to being alive, conversational, intimate, and engaging and as committed as Milton to the constant awareness of the God of the great shared biblical tradition.

It is a marvelous marriage.

His own marriage is often his subject, seen simultaneously as fully present in this world and as heavenly luminous. Here is his poem “Impossibly”:

The way, the mystics say,

the higher parts of the soul

transcend the body,

hover above,

you sit at the dinner table

in turquoise skirt and dark blouse

surrounded by five children.

Potato flakes on the floor, fish sticks

and ketchup smears on the tablecloth,

you read a book about sharing.

Your voice—calm, measured—floats above

the disorder after a morning three daughters

hollered in the upstairs hallway,

an afternoon two sons pierced

a park’s peace

until a Chinese stranger slid

the younger one’s bike chain

back on track. Your voice

rises above the dining room,

flows from your dark body

into the air

for five young faces

rapt, impossibly, in attention

        and wonderment.

November deals with events out of the headlines as markers of eternal meaning. He wrote these lines about the mass murder at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue long before the horrors of last October 7:

3.

Now it is night. Half a block from the apartment where,

seventeen years earlier,

my wife and I lived when first wed, Jews of Pittsburgh

stand in the rain, holding candles. Eleven souls

ascend to the region of mystery

then swoop down to hover,

incandescently, over their former lives.

Away from the cameras and fanfare,

eleven bodies are ushered through

burial rituals—

pottery shards placed over twenty-two eyes,

eleven mouths.

Water poured to purify physical forms

that had, until recently, housed souls

whose last act on Earth was to whisper a prayer.

4.

There is only one story, say the mystics:

The souls of the Jewish people

throughout Jewish history

form one larger body.

The body bears more wounds

than we want to recall.

No one can explain how it limps forward

        but has not faltered.

Only truth and beauty so powerfully fused can set the horrors of our own day in the light we need to proceed.

Our religious life needs poetry. Without it, its words shrivel into cliché and we lose the core that of its gifts — the presence of the eternal in the actual, day-to-day life that is always the test of experienced reality.

More than anything, poetry brings out that most essential element of religion, its invitational core. And nothing could be more American than that, where religion has thrived because of religious freedom in a way that it has not in places where it is still joined with coercion. Given the choice, we will choose life, though the road may be long and difficult.

The light of God is endless, but in our world, it is concealed. We feel the sting, the exile of meaninglessness. But, the poet sings, this darkness is for the sake of something greater, an illumination beyond our previous ability to conceive, borne of our struggle to be who we are in full truth. It yields our redemption. (READ MORE: Civilization Means Power Used in Service to the Public)

In this book’s final poem, November speaks of a teacher withdrawing into himself, taking a long pause with his eyes closed, and then finally returning to share his discovery with his students. Let it be the last word here.

[This] is the way, the mystics say,

God, seemingly, recedes

back into Himself

until, suddenly,

after centuries,

redemption comes,

and a Divine light—

more radiant than the world

has ever known—

illuminates the universe

        that thought it had been forsaken.

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