How has the Kaddish inspired fascinating, strange experiments in modern U.S. poetry? Join us to find out!

How has the Kaddish inspired fascinating, strange experiments in modern U.S. poetry? Our conversation will focus on two examples: Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (1959), for his mother, and Sam Sax’s “Kaddish” (2018), for his lover. These writers negotiate with tradition to articulate modern experiences of grief and re-imagine mourning rituals. Emotionally vehement, sexually explicit, and aesthetically daring, these two long poems help us reflect on the fraught relations between poetry and prayer, as well as between queerness and Jewish tradition. And we’ll explore the cultural importance of elegy — poetry of mourning and memory — as a way to make grief less lonely.

Taught by David Sherman, faculty in the English Department at Brandeis University. His research focuses on elegy and commemoration, literature in the criminal justice system, and literary responses to secularization. His academic book In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation investigates literary responses to the modernization of mortuary practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently writing a book on literature and secular hope. He is co-founder, with Karen Elizabeth Bishop, of a public poetry project, The Elegy Project, that puts poems in public places for strangers. And he is co-director of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative, a higher-ed in prison program.