HOW JOY LADIN SUMMONS THE SPIRIT

You never remember anything, do you?

How I formed you in your mother’s womb;

nursed you; bathed you; taught you to talk

So begins Joy Ladin’s extraordinary—and I do mean extraordinary, in the sense of the out of the ordinary, the uncanny—poem, “Forgetting.” Where is the voice speaking these lines coming from? A source more intimate than that of a pregnant mother speaking to the child in her womb, yet still performing a mother’s routine duties once the baby is born. And yet the voice also feels as if it’s coming from on high—to the person the voice is addressing, it’s omnipresent and omniscient. The voice of a being who can see into that person’s mind. Like the Hebrew God, perhaps, but not really, because it’s so close, so wrapped up in the weave of all that’s human.

Like Yeats, who, through the practices of automatic writing and seances, summoned spirits from outside the self to speak in his poetry, Ladin has long been developing her ability to invite the Shekhinah into her poems—and this is the voice that’s speaking in “Forgetting.”

Ladin, in fact, considers this poem to be part of an in-process, book-length sequence tentatively titled “Shekhinah Speaks.” (Another spell-binding poem in the sequence is “Comfort Animal.”) The poet intends for the poems to embody the voice of the Shekhinah, which Ladin describes as “the immanent, feminine aspect of God who, according to Jewish mystical tradition, dwells among human beings, sharing our suffering, reminding us that even when we feel exiled from ourselves, God remembers who we are and is always there to welcome us back.”

To attempt what Ladin’s attempting here is to aspire to the most ancient, sacred, and exalted reaches of poetry—to become “inspired,” we say; to become “possessed” by the muses; to have an “other” writing her verses, rather than herself. In both poetry and religion, however, to delve into such matters is to play with fire. There’s a superstition that people under the age of 40 who study Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible, risk madness, for instance. This dialectic between the risks and rewards of sacred passion drives this poem’s edginess.

Ritual practices, both as a means of controlling the spirits and summoning them, usually accompany such attempts to interact with the divine. You can see it in this poem in the ritualistic use Ladin makes of her terse, rhythmic three-line stanzas, which function sometimes as mini-chants, or as three sticks rubbed together to produce fire:

This is your anger.

This is mine.

This is me

reminding you to eat.

Turn off the stove.

Take your medication.

A dance around a campfire, a dance around a stove. Ritual may also be seen as an action repeated so often as to become automatic, again with the purpose of inviting the divine into the dance. For the poems in this sequence, Ladin’s method is to “pull words and phrases” from God’s Monologues in The Book of Isaiah and also from samplings of articles in Cosmopolitan magazine, she has written, and to “mix them together until a voice that isn't mine emerges, the way someone else's future emerges from patterns of tea leaves under a fortune teller's gaze.”

Indeed, the magical language of the poem is elevated by phrases that echo not only Isaiah but the Psalms and The Song of Songs: “led you to springs of water”; “The heavens shout; mountain becomes road”; and “I lay you down at the grass.”

Meanwhile, the poet also deploys language from daily life that might well have stemmed from Cosmo: “You’re clueless as an infant”; “sex and birds, librarians and life skills, emotions, sunlight, compassion” in line 27;” and “that’s a crush.”

Ladin recently told the editors of Poetry that her initial impulse for the poem was her experience of visiting her mother, who was suffering from dementia and who had been hospitalized because of a high fever. In those pre-Covid times, Ladin was able to stay with her mother all night and into the next day. The ensuing conversation was painfully circular for the poet, as her mother would forget things that had been said and keep returning to them.

It’s not far from that scene to the poem’s title and to its powerful images of mother-child interaction, including these lines suggesting an infant’s feelings of loss when deprived of maternal love:

Then you forget, and feel forgotten,

like an infant who falls asleep

at a mother’s breast

and wakes up hungry again.

Your mother might forget you, child,

but I never forget.

In lines like these, Ladin’s verse serves one of poetry’s most sacred duties—to memorialize, to help us to remember. More than that, they reveal the spirits of living memory: Mnemosyne and the Shekhinah, along with our earthly parents.

Photo Credit: "Keshet/Hazon LGBTQ & Ally Teen Shabbaton" by Keshet: LGBTQ inclusion in the Jewish Community is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0