Klezmetrics

By RICHARD CHESS

When I sat down to begin work on my poem “Klezmer,” I didn’t know what kind of poem it was going to be. I had been reading Whitman that summer, and I wanted to write a kind of expansive poem. I wanted its structure to be organic, its line length and stanza shape to vary, as content and feeling demanded, its movement to be driven less by causality and logic, more by intuition. To get going and to keep going, I borrowed some language from liner notes of CDs I was listening to, Brave Old World and the Klezmatics, and the late Ofra Haza, too. I also took a phrase or two from Amichai. So, on its surface and in its structure—improvisational, playing off Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in particular—the poem absorbs American, European, Yemenite, and Israeli influences. In that, the poem is a little like klezmer itself: picking up, in its travels, a good phrase or beat from here and there, absorbing it into its own story, inflecting it with the joy and grief of the long history of a people, its people, my people.

The poem made me think about how we tell our story, in music and words. What parts of the story do we protect unchanged? What parts do we change? And who is the story for? Ourselves, to keep ourselves together, to try to ensure our future? Others, to explain to outsiders who we are and to protect ourselves from them? These questions needed to be explored in this poem, too. Though I didn’t articulate these thoughts before writing “Klezmer,” they were there, I’m sure, stimulated or aggravated or both when I came across a call for submissions from a fine literary journal that initially pointed me toward the poem:

Call for Submissions

Special Issue: The World of Music, the Music of the World

BLUEGRASS POLKA OPERA RAP MERENGUE ZOUK TAIKO R&B COUNTRY&WESTERN RUMBA GOSPEL RAI JPOP CHA CHA FOLK REGGAE FLAMENCO JAZZ HIGHLIFE CLASSICAL CELTIC SALSA DISCO MAMBO ALTERNATIVE JUJU BLUES TEJANO ZYDECO ROCK CALYPSO

All these kinds of music, but where was klezmer? This call offered me an opportunity and, I thought, a responsibility: to try to prevent, at least in the pages of one American literary journal, klezmer from being silenced again.

Having brought two contemporary klezmer bands (Brave Old World and The Klezmatics) to Asheville in the late ‘90s, I was enthusiastic about the new directions of klezmer—and Jewish culture. Before his show, Frank London of the Klezmatics tried to teach a few locals how to make the kretch on their instruments (guitar, fiddle, trumpet); he tried to get them in sync with one or two rhythms used in traditional klezmer tunes. I appreciated his commitment to and respect and enthusiasm for tradition—for authenticity. And I was equally taken by the way the Klezmatics and Brave Old World received the tradition and extended it, giving it a youthful, countercultural, radical edge, incorporating into klezmer elements of rock and punk and even experimental and free jazz in songs on themes traditional and new—from exile to the dangers of nuclear power to reefer. Performing in an intimate, 500-seat, understatedly elegant theatre to a sellout crowd of mostly older, middle- and upper-middle-class Jews there for the nostalgia and the solidarity, the Klezmatics joked that their typical venue had a mosh pit down front rather than an orchestra pit. I wanted to celebrate the boldness of new klezmer; I wanted to catch some of its energy in a poem.

I doubt the editors of that particular journal meant anything by leaving klezmer off its list of types of world music. My poem was published in the special issue. But I am sensitive to merely unintentional acts of exclusion or silencing for they may reflect a broader cultural attitude. Attitude; that’s another feature of “Klezmer,” the poem, another element in the poetics I’m calling klezmetrics.