Reaching Across Languages
Poet Jake Marmer talks about his collaborations with Jewish musicians
Jake Marmer is a poet. He often collaborates with musicians, and his poetry—at least some of it—is an attempt to capture the spiritual highs he’s experienced while singing nigunim (wordless Hasidic melodies). “You’re in a certain state, like an altered mental state,” he says, reflecting on those times he was lost in Hasidic song. “I was thinking, ‘How do I approach that state or evoke that state through a poem? How do I go in there?’”
Marmer’s poetry is inseparable from his Jewish journey, and his collaborators include prominent Jewish musicians like Greg Wall and Frank London (Hasidic New Wave, Klezmatics, and many other projects), and more recently, Joshua Horowitz (Veretski Pass), and John Schott. He’s released a number of albums as well, including, Hermeneutic Stomp, which is a musical rendering of his book, Jazz Talmud, and Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire.
“There’s definitely a renaissance of Jewish culture happening,” Marmer says, noting that in Israel, that renaissance may be on purpose. “Israel is its own thing, musically, because from the beginning the people who set it up culturally were very aware of the role of the arts. That’s why you have poets on the shekels and not only presidents. There’s this sense that you have to create a culture, and the way to create a culture is through music and art and poetry and all those things.”
Marmer’s story starts in Ukraine. He left there as a teen, and—except for a year studying in Israel—continues primarily in the U.S. I spoke with him from his home in the Bay Area, and we talked about the natural link between poetry and music, the inspiration he draws from nigunim, performing his poetry with musicians, embracing improvisation, his unpretentious take on spirituality, and discovering riches at those points where languages intersect.
You’re from the former Soviet Union and came to the States when you were 15?
That’s right. I am from a small town, very provincial, in central Ukraine. There were no big Hasidic rebbes—nothing major like that—not from my home town. Its only claim to fame was that a wave of pogroms started there, which provoked one of the big Aliyah movements.
But you came to the U.S. by yourself at 15. How did you manage that?
I came on a fellowship that was specifically for kids from behind the Iron Curtain to come study in the States for high school. I came, and I was very lucky to have gotten it. I came and I thought, “I am not going back.” I was very interested in Judaism as a practice [which I first explored seriously in the States]. It was so new to me, and I was really excited about it. I wanted to live it. I wanted to study it with all of that. I chose to stay. It was a pretty clear and easy—maybe not easy—but there was a path for me to do that, and I’ve been living here since.
Was that Fellowship your first real exposure to Judaism?
Yes and no. I was already interested by then. The Soviet Union collapsed a few years before that, and something was happening. There was a Sunday school that had opened, and also my parents had some books, but those were not works like the Talmud, for example—I didn’t know anything about that—that kind of Jewish thinking. I did not have exposure to that, just general ideas, little bits and pieces and snatches of history. But religious practice, specifically, I was drawn to that, especially in the beginning, as a living thing. I really didn’t think that people were practicing it. I heard that there were, but it seemed more like a mythology, like, do people really do all this stuff? And seeing it was very powerful.
As a poet, you draw inspiration from nigunim. What is the link between poetry and nigunim, especially since nigunim, specifically, are wordless?
That’s an interesting question. When I started getting deeper into poetry—or when I started thinking of myself as a poet—I loved going to see performance poetry gigs in New York, like the slam poetry scene.
Like at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and those kinds of places?
Yeah, Nuyorican or the Bowery Poetry Cafe, to the slams they held. To me, the alive-ness of poetry—poetry that’s not just on the page or is not just read—but is read in a musical way, where music is in the backdrop of it, or you’re half-talking/half-singing it. That was a very powerful idea. In my research, looking for inspiration and exploring poets that I’ve loved, I started seeing how performance poetry in the late 1950s and early ‘60s was entangled with music, specifically with jazz. There was a sense that this music lends itself to a connection to poetry. Those poets, the Beat poets specifically, really were interested in music. They were drawing inspiration from music, and trying to find something that poetry lacked in music. The big question in poetry since the middle of the 20th century is the question of form. Once people stopped writing sonnets and ballads and said that the form could be anything—it’s not completely free in that you’re still the one in control of it—but what is the shape of the poem? Is the shape of my free verse different from your free verse? What form is it going to take? These external forms—forms that are not necessarily associated with poetry but are life forms, discourse forms—start to make their way in. Music became like an inspiration or like a resource for people.
In my own seeking out of forms, I was thinking of quintessential Jewish experiences or Jewish forms of being—or doing something profound—and nigunim were incredible to me. My wife, she grew up Chabad, and when we would go visit my in-laws and hang at their Shabbos table and sing these gorgeous nigunim, I would be completely struck. I thought, “Holy Moly, this stuff is so powerful.” You’re in a certain state, like an altered mental state. I was thinking, “How do I approach that state or evoke that state through a poem? How do I go in there?”
That state that you’re talking about, that was just from the Shabbos table, not a Farbrengen with thousands of people?
I didn’t go to Farbrengens with thousands of people, although I’ve been to some hardcore stuff in [the religious community of] Monsey, New York, too. It was specifically the Chabad nigunim I heard at my in-laws. They’re complicated structurally, at least a little more complicated and more brooding and dark, they’re not happy go lucky. You go through something as you go through it and come out on the other side. It feels like a sense of narrative—maybe not narrative—but something happening from point A to point B, and that felt beautiful and powerful.
It sounds like you’re interested in more than just the form, but the vibe or spirit of it. Is that what you were looking for?
The vibe and the spirit, exactly, the mood of it. Maybe that is what form is as well. You could say form is a certain number of syllables or line length or whatever. Bebop is a style or form, but there is also content that is intrinsic to that form.
Although bebop is comparatively rigid. You mentioned that the Beatniks were interested in jazz, but jazz evolved from the time of the Beats. By the1960s, jazz had gone from something fixed, like bebop, to the free improvisations of artists like Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler.
True. Ayler is an interesting example. If you think about the form of Ayler, “What is the form?” The departure from the form is so vast, but you have the shadow of the form or an idea of what the form is, and those forms are really interesting. That’s when you have a sense of it, or an aspiration of that form, but it’s not that rigid.
With Ayler, the form is much more subtle, it’s implied and is emotionally felt as opposed to being played as fixed structures.
Exactly, and the fact that it’s implied—the content of it—does things to your imagination that are so powerful. Ayler’s titles as well, like “Spirits,” you feel it. Some kind of content is being communicated to you through music, or as you say, music without words, this instrumental music, and that content. It’s the profoundest thing there is, or the closest, I think, one can get to spiritual language. To me, being a poet and a seeker of such experiences, that’s where it’s at. This is where I go for those experiences. I want to translate that into language, and I want to see if I can play it through my words.
When did you start collaborating with musicians?
The big turning point for me happened when I was on a program called the Dorot Fellowship. I went to Israel for a year, and when I was there, I was writing quite a bit. I was in my late-20s by then. I was interested in poetry and music, and had done things already by then. But when I was there, I met a few people as part of the fellowship. I was engaging with various artists, and one of them was Jean Claude Jones. He’s a bass player, and he lives in Jerusalem. He’s an important figure on the Israeli jazz scene, and we really bonded. He lived a few blocks away from me, and we would hang and talk about music and poetry and play things and record a few things.
There were a few other folks there, too, who I got to meet and play with. One was Slava Ganelin, he is a great jazz piano player from the old country. He was playing free jazz in the ‘60s in Lithuania. He was a really forerunner. I’ve seen him in New York at the Vision Festival. But I had also just heard of him, because he was like an icon. I hung out with him, and studied with him. He doesn’t speak English, really, so he didn’t understand my poems, but he didn’t need to. He spoke to me in Russian. I was able to understand enough—I left too early to have the language, the conceptual language of music and philosophy—but I was able to understand him, and he guided me through different notions and ideas of what reading poetry to music might look like.
After that, when I came back to New York, Greg Wall, was the rabbi at the Sixth Street Shul in the East Village. I became involved there, and we spent a lot of time together. He introduced me to Frank London, and we started doing things together. I feel like that year in Israel was probably the real beginning of doing poetry and music more seriously. As well as hanging out with Greg and Frank and other amazing musicians who were coming through the Sixth Street Shul. It was an incredible scene for a little bit at that place, and then it was over, very quickly.
The music you did with Greg and Frank, how much of that is composed and how much is improvised?
A lot of it is written, or at least the ideas were written. I wrote a series of poems that were inspired by the Talmud. I was in Israel that year and I was thinking about the Talmud. Not just as a set of specific arguments, but as a kind of conversation, or a kind of thinking. My first book was called Jazz Talmud, because I saw a certain aesthetic correspondence between the rabbis speaking to each other in the Talmud. It’s this constant dialectic. It’s not like a monolithic text. A page of Talmud is a page of voices, of many voices speaking back and forth. They’re on the same page, but not on the same page. They are across centuries and all at the same time to each other, and to me it felt like dialogue as the key aesthetic decision. You have it in the Talmud, but you also have it in jazz. People are communicating to each other and people are talking back and forth. Different instruments are speaking to one another. I brought this set of poems to Greg and Frank, and they wrote music that responded to it.
Do you do free form as well, similar to say, freestyle rap?
It’s not freestyle rap, but this is the aspiration and what I learned from jazz. I hold that the ideal form for making art is a combination of stuff that’s prepared and stuff that’s got to happen in the moment. It connects to the moment that you’re in, and to the people that you’re with, and people who are listening, and the space that you’re in. I learned that from listening to jazz, and from going to concerts, observing people, talking to people, and reading about a lot as well. I made a decision that I wanted to find a way to do that also. I don’t rap. I respect it as a model, but I am not interested in just hinging on rhyme alone. I wanted to find other methods of improvising. The method that works for me is that I write a poem and as I read it, I am looking for other ways out of it, or other ways of connecting it to the moment that I am in. Changing at least one thing, whether it’s a rhythmic thing, or an image, or I am adding something. Sometimes it’s a lot of changes. When I am with musicians, there is a little more room to do that. If I am standing alone in front of an audience and I am reading off the sheet, it is harder to improvise. I can’t just go silent. But if I am with musicians and somebody is taking a solo, I am listening and taking notes. I am in it and I want to respond to it, and that’s what I do.
But it doesn’t have to be a change in words. Could it be, say, a change in cadence or where you put your emphasis?
It could be, although my hope is to also change the words. Not even substantially. Lenny Bruce said about his standup that five percent gets improvised. That’s very small, but it’s also not so small. That five percent wraps around the experience and becomes the frame of the experience. It becomes the thing that connects you to the moment.
How did you hook up with Veretski Pass?
I met them at KlezKanada, where I went for a few summers. I was teaching the poetry section there. One summer, they came to present their work and teach, because they are obviously so big in the klezmer community, and so loved and respected. But really, it was when I was moving from the east coast to the Bay Area. I asked my friends, “Who should I know and who should I collaborate with?” Frank London introduced me to a few people including Josh Horowitz from Veretski Pass, and also John Schott, the guitar player. John and Josh almost never played with each other, even though they knew each other. We started spending time together, and playing, and we connected. When we got as far as recording, John wrote some tracks and said, “Why don’t we ask some other folks in Veretski Pass?” Cookie Segelstein played on two of the pieces, and Stu Brotman played the ocarina on one.
Were those pieces composed around the poetry?
They were all poems that I brought to John and Josh. They each took some poems and came up with certain ideas. We then played around them, and the pieces evolved. Plus, with the mixing and layering of tracks and ideas, it changes so much from the beginning, until we get to the thing we arrive at.
How have these projects impacted you both in terms of your Jewish identity, as well as spiritually?
Art allows me to be fully spiritual, but also there is space for critique, and sarcasm, and dark humor. All of these things that generally people don’t associate with spirituality. There is a level of sincerity that people often say is intrinsic to a spiritual experience. But I feel with poetry there is room for it to be both of those things—especially Jewish poetry, Jewish art, or Jewish spiritual experience. It has that legacy of dark humor, of comedy, of social critique of maybe saying multiple things at the same time.
There can be a pretentiousness around spirituality, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
A push for purity that’s imaginary. I totally hear that. But I don’t think that these projects connect me to my Jewish life, it’s that it's nourished by my engagement with Jewishness and various forms of it. I think a lot of poets draw on mythologies, whether explicitly or not. Certain mythic characters or mythic themes or properties or language that’s associated with mythology in some shape or form, whether ancient or contemporary. I think that the forms of Jewish thought and Jewish experiences have nourished me in that way. That is where I draw certain inspiration. The types of thinking—sometimes imagery itself—sometimes it’s the cadence and the language. It’s very rich.
One of the writers I love the most is Isaac Babel. He is a great Russian Soviet Jewish writer, who captured a certain fusion of a kind of Russian that’s infused with Yiddish underneath. You feel it and it’s so playful and fun. It is subversive, and creative, and juicy, and gritty. I loved it. I think that's always true at the intersection of any language. If you live at the intersection of different languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic, or Yiddish. If those languages are relevant to you, then it becomes a very rich intersection because you can reach across these languages, or think across these languages, and I think that’s a very Jewish thing to do.
Yeshivish [an English-based fusion of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Talmudic expressions] is almost its own language.
Yeshivish for example, or post-Yeshivish, whatever name you want to give it, but it’s a language that encompasses within itself more than one. There’s the possibility of punning across different ones, too, and I think that is precious.
Photos by Cookie Segelstein
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