Harry´s Blog

by David B. Axelrod

It was a very good summer for me in 1982. My career was taking off as a poet with a big New and Selected Poems just published and lots of performances. One prominent venue on Long Island, Guild Hall in fashionable East Hampton, scheduled me to perform and it was particularly gratifying as I would have so many friends and even some senior poets and mentors in the audience.
I had already lived on Long Island for a dozen years and the renown poet, David Ignatow, had taken me under his wing. By then, he was in all the anthologies, as often for the poem about chasing a bagel! He’d won awards and grants, but to me he complained, “Never the Pulitzer.” Other senior poets presided in the Hamptons-like Michael Braude, Simon Perchik, Kenneth Koch, Phil Appleman, H. R.Hayes, Amrand Schwerner, Richard Elman, Stanley Moss, Frank O’Hara, Harvey Shapiro. Even John Hall Wheelock elderly as he was, was still actively writing.
Guild Hall was well-attended the night of my solo performance. I don’t call myself a performance poet, but I am known for my repartee between poems-even some jokes and “shtick” that liven up my presentations. I was particularly on the mark-or so I thought-that evening. Certainly, the audience laughed, and as is always the measure, the laughs were “on cue”-with me, not at me!
It ended with some gratifying applause but even before I could make my way off stage I saw a flange of three poets aiming at me at. It was Dave Ignatow, Michael Braude and Si Perchik rushing me from the back of the hall. They were visibly agitated. Reaching me, surrounding me, they said, all but in unison, “How could you do that?”
“What did I do?” I asked, concerned I had crossed some unseen line of political correctness or propriety.
“You said all those Jewish things. You should never do that.” They were clearly horrified.

It had never occurred to me that would be an issue. The book had a little section of poems “For my Family” which even included a series of three poems for Jewish holidays. In the course of the reading I told a story about my Lithuanian Orthodox Jewish grandfather, Louis Axelrod, and even used a Yiddish accent. I read a poem about Hanukkah and my Russian grandfather Philip Kransberg and did a little shuckle that he used to do when he lit the menorah.
“It’s the kiss of death,” the threesome told me. Oh, how upset they were. How concerned I’d sunk myself. “Don’t you understand?” they berated me. You can’t ever get ahead if you are known as a Jewish poet.
Later, Dave Ignatow told me he really believed that folks like Untermeyer, a king maker in his days of his Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry, and Robert Lowell with his “Brahmins,” were the ones. “I’d have had the Pulitzer if not for being Jewish,” Ignatow said. (Louis Simpson, got one, but he converted!)
Not long after, I picked up Howard Nemerov at the Port Jefferson, Long Island train station and hosted him for a reading at an event I sponsored. At a private dinner with me after, at which he drank more than his share, he was talking freely so I asked him, was it so? Was it so dangerous to be publicly Jewish as a poet. “Oh yes, absolutely,” he said. “Look at me,” he said. “What do they call me? An ‘epigramist’?”
Well, what can I do? I have a cousin who is very assertive about his Jewishness. I’ve told him about anti-Semites I met over the years; folks who wouldn’t rent an apartment to me if they knew I was a Jew, or even let me stay in their motel.
“I’d have taken them by the collar and punched them in the face,” my cousin hollered.
“I told them I was Welsh and got the place I needed to stay,” I confessed. But I’m no self-hating Jew. I may not be at all religious but I grew up glad for my cultural roots and there is one thing I also know. Try as a Jew may, pretend, put on airs, deny… One day just one little “Oy” will creep out and it will all be over!
That’s why I figure I might as well shout it out, even at a fancy East Hampton performance.

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David Axelrod was born in 1943 in Beverly, Massachusetts. He resides in Selden, Long Island where he is Suffolk County Poet Laureate (2007-2009). Axelrod has published eighteen volumes of poetry, the newest of which is The Impossibility of Dreams (www.ahadadabooks.com). He is founder/Director of Writers Unlimited Agency, Inc., publisher of Writers Ink Press, and president of 3WS, World Wide Writers Services.
He can be found on the web at www.writersunlimited.org/laureate