Wikipedia offers a good beginning list of Jewish American poets–the big hitters like Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, Gertrude Stein, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky–all the names you’ll probably see listed a lot as Jewish poets to read, and rightfully you should. Many of their works are quite phenomenal.

But it was not Jewish poets who first turned me to poetry with the intensity in which I now engage with the craft. (Much later I discovered Hacker’s work, in which she writes about her experiences with cancer). It was poets who wrote about illness, most of which I was finding in writings by queer men of color, writing about HIV/AIDS–writers like Rafael Campo, Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs. Later, it was in my 20th century African-American literature course, where I read two poets–Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde–both of whom wrote about living with cancer and the impact of illness on the female body. I turned into their works as one of the only places I knew to find an entry way to feel what I still could not express about my own experiences with illness. It was there that I finally came back alive. Truly the best of poetry, the best of art is it’s ability to push the boundaries of our worlds, and that it does so through reminding us of our very being and livingness.

So I offer you two poems by Clifton and Lorde, two astonishing literary poets whose stories and words and risks and beauties live in me as much as the works of Rich and Rukeyser–they aren’t the poems I wanted to offer, but my books are in boxes, and nonetheless, I adore these poems as well:

* * *
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

~Lucille Clifton

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Listen to Audre Lorde read: “A Song for Many Movements”