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Let us return to Michael Heller’s poem “Mappah”: “No one can safely say where the sacred leaves off, where the profane begins.” Neither invisible priest not ecstatic scribe, Heller, along with a number of other poets I will now consider, occupies a different position in regard to the matter of poetry and belief. These poets respond to matters of spirituality with penetrating skepticism, still respecting the enduring desire for belief. Investigating this desire, they produce, almost in spite of themselves, a kind of modern wisdom literature, addressing the same abiding questions posed by Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job. Matters of faith and doubt are almost never resolved; what counts, rather, is the poet’s testimony, and the linguistic turns which result from the need to establish a ground of discourse following in the wake not merely of disenchantment and secularization, but often of historical catastrophe.³

One of the most influential and widely read poets seeking this ground is George Oppen. Drawing from both Marxism and phenomenology, Oppen’s poetry, which he explicitly describes as “a test of truth,” insistently moves toward the “metaphysical.” It is a word to which he has recourse at a number of important points in his work, despite his insistence that his goal, as he writes in his poem “Route,” is “The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present the circumstances” (Oppen 2002, p. 194). Oppen’s rejection of theology does not preclude his enduring concern for the transcendental horizon of poetry. Indeed, Henry Weinfield calls Oppen’s famous “Psalm,” “one of the great religious poems of the twentieth century,” while at the same time explaining why “it is by giving up the quest for transcendence—for God—that we solidify our faith in existence” (Weinfield 2009, p. 188).

Oppen’s metaphysical concerns were deepened by his friendship with William Bronk, and the challenge which Bronk’s radically skeptical poetry posed to both Oppen’s Marxism and his earlier Objectivist stance.⁴ Bronk’s skepticism, however, is simultaneously a sort of via negativa; it borders on a mysticism reminiscent of the medieval Cloud of Unknowing. “If to know is noble // It is ennobling” (Oppen 2002, p. 183) declares Oppen in Of Being Numerous; whereas for Bronk, in “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge,” there is “No one to know and nothing knowable. / Oh, we know that knowing is not our way” (Bronk 1981, p. 136). Bronk celebrates the endless perturbations of human desire; we hunger to know, knowing that we cannot. Yet when Bronk turns his attention to religious motifs, as he does often, he reaches, almost in spite of himself, a mystical quietude:

Blessed art thou, oh God, in thy impotence.

If there is another way to live, as we wish

there were, we would. What more were there?

Love God. We are at one in this.

(Bronk 1981, p. 187)

These lines come from “He Praises Nescience and Impotence,” but Bronk also encourages us to “Draw Near with Faith”:

The stew, the wine: we take these sacraments

to our comfort. And talk awhile. What do we mean

to say? We don’t know this, or what

our comfort is. We take it anyway.

(Bronk 1981, p. 191)

Here, the sacraments seem secularized—a dinner party and not a mass—but our hungers of the body and the soul are somehow satisfied in this poetic transformation.

These exchanges of the sacred and the secular, momentary revelations which unsettle both belief and disbelief, are the hallmark of this kind of poetry. Oppen in particular becomes an important influence on a number of poets who are drawn almost irresistibly to these matters. Michael Heller, who was mentored by Oppen, often brings Kabbalah and Buddhism into play in elegant, philosophical poems which maintain a directness and a concern for material reality true to his Objectivist roots. “Commentary Is the Concept of Order for the Spiritual World” begins

If these streets, this world, are the arena,

then each person passed, each bidding building

unentered, leaves room for ruminations

illumined by an edge, a backlit otherness

positing a liberty to think or not think…

(Heller 2019, p. 188)

Here, “the arena” of the bustling city, with its crowds and buildings, presents itself as a meditative space and an opportunity to achieve a mindfulness which in turn leads Heller to an almost mystical intuition of “a backlit otherness.” Ruminating upon this otherness, the poet comes to

a sense of world-depths that no longer crowd the mind,

thus a rich compost of the literal

of what is said.

(Heller 2019, p. 189)

Harvey Shapiro, who was also close to Oppen, likewise finds unlikely moments of revelation in the urban world. Consider “Lower East Side”:

On Houston Street, walking west,

the moon coming up over Katz’s Delicatessen,

we pass a synagogue ancient as Tiberias.

You don’t have to be touched

by the hand of God

to pick up on these New York clichés.

We get finished walking the dog

and climb to your Catholic-kitsch apartment

where your Mother of God helps me out of my clothes

and history and the ruined smell of these lives.

(Shapiro 2006, p. 184)

On the Lower East Side, rich in ethnic memories, the religious signifiers (the synagogue, the hand of God, and what I assume to be a statue of the Virgin Mary) seem to be undermined by the secular New York clichés (Katz’s Delicatessen, walking the dog, the tenement apartment with its Catholic kitsch). But there is a lingering sense of the sacred here toward which the poem can only gesture. For Shapiro, Katz’s Delicatessen is as much holy ground as the synagogue. His lover may or may not be a practicing Catholic, but like Shapiro, she is still rooted in her religious tradition. The Jewish poet’s desire for his Catholic lover frees them from “history and the ruined smell of these lives.” Their sexual relationship is both profane and sacred; transgressive in Jewish and Catholic traditions alike, it is redemptive, for they are momentarily taken out of the fallen world of historical and personal ruin.

Redemptive yearning also permeates the poetry of Chana Bloch, a third Jewish poet roughly of the same generation as Shapiro and Heller. The uncanny power of Bloch’s poems, which often engage Jewish ritual, belief, and religious texts, springs from her combination of verbal clarity and spiritual ambiguity. As Maeera Shreiber notes of her work, “A cursory glance at the poems composing her oeuvre might suggest that Bloch is largely a maker of domestic lyrics.” But as Shreiber goes on, “these lyrics come into focus as vital additions to the body of writing called wisdom literature” (Shreiber 2018, p. 43). Nowhere is this more evident than in “The Converts,” set among fasting congregants in the synagogue during the Yom Kippur service:

Only the converts, six of them in the corner,

in their prayer shawls and feathery beards,

sing every syllable.

What word

are they savoring now?

If they go on loving that way, we’ll be here all night.

Why did they follow us here, did they think

we were happier?

Did someone tell them we knew

the lost words

to open God’s mouth?

The converts sway in white silk,

their necks bent forward in yearning

like swans,

and I covet

what they think we’ve got.

(Bloch 2015, p. 59)

Here, wisdom arises out of bittersweet humor: on the one hand, there is something charming about the converts’ enthusiasm, at least from the perspective of the hungry poet and the other Jews who have been attending Yom Kippur services all their lives. On the other hand, Bloch is touched by these young converts with their “feathery beards” and “their necks bent forward in yearning / like swans.” What moves her is that spiritual yearning which has led them to convert, a hunger that she and the rest of the congregation seem to lack. Ironically, their desire, and their belief that their newly found faith will provide “the lost words / to open God’s mouth,” reawakens her desire, ironically leading her to “covet / what they think we’ve got.” But that desire in itself is never satisfied, and therein lies the dark wisdom of Bloch’s poem.