The Book of Ruth: Gleanings from Many Corners with Jessica Greenbaum (Zoom)
This is a 2-session class held on April 21 and 28, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. (ET) on Zoom.
These two evenings will pair our close reading of (the speedy) Book of Ruth with diverse, contemporary poems that reflect, refract, expand or argue with the messages and themes of the text. Ruth’s compressed plot begins in famine and moves to a time and place where excess harvest is left in the field’s corners for gleaners. In between comes some famous lines transmitted from ancestor to ancestor, and food for thought about women in Tanach, and the universality of immigration, vulnerability of “the stranger,” deeds of loving kindness, deliberate family, and the forces of ill and good fortune–and of creation.
How do the poems’ craft and content conspire toward beauty and power in themselves? How do poems bring ancient text closer to our lived experience? How does the human condition show itself in each? This will not be a writing workshop, but our discussions will seek models and encouragement for those writing poems.
In each session we will read two chapters and up to ten poems I bring to the text.
No previous experience in reading Jewish texts or writing poems is necessary. Our conversation will welcome all voices from all corners!
BIO: Jessica Greenbaum’s most recent collection, Spilled and Gone (U. Pittsburgh Press) was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes (Princeton U. Press) was named a Best Book by Library Journal . Recently her work appears in Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024 and in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA (RIP) and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia and has been teaching contemporary poems in relation to Jewish text in Manhattan’s Central Synagogue and Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim for over ten years. https://poemsincommunity.org/ .
