VERVE {IN} :: VERSE with Ayelet Amittay

Ayelet Amittay

“There isn't any finding God, but the search itself is a way of noticing, of being both on the inside and the outside of a mystery.”

Rosebud Ben-Oni: Thank you for being our first VERVE {IN} :: VERSE poet~ I thought we’d start off the conversation with Rosh Hashanah, as it is fast approaching. With the High Holidays approaching and as a Jewish person and as a poet, what has Rosh Hashannah come to mean to you? Yom Kippur? Do you have any traditions that you've kept over the years? What has changed?

Ayelet Amittay: As a poet, it has always felt resonant to me that Jews are known as the People of the Book. We are a people of texts and textual interpretation. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is the time when the "Book" is a central image in the liturgy; we are written into the book of life (or death, but either way, of experience) on Rosh Hashana, and we are sealed into it on Yom Kippur. The idea of the ten days in between as a time of revision is exciting and hopeful to me. T'shuvah isn't just about apology; it is a return to and rewriting of the text of our own story. I think of myself as someone who struggles with revising poems. The struggle of Yom Kippur in particular-- fasting, trying to stay with the intensity of the demands of the day-- is a reminder of how difficult and necessary revision is for me.

I've always loved the way Rosh Hashana coincides, in the US, with the fall-- the season of endings, and also the season of going back to school, which as a child was a season of beginnings. Rosh Hashana has a sensory quality to me of sweetness and warmth, echoes of the foods we eat on that day-- apples and honey, round challah with raisins, kugel. Traditionally my family and I would spend those mornings at a synagogue; we didn't belong to a particular synagogue, but the commonality among the different ones we visited was the liturgy, the singing and the rising and sitting back down in relief. 

The main thing that has changed in my experience of the high holy days, and spirituality in general, has come with being a parent of young children. Because of the needs of the children, and because of COVID, we very rarely go to the synagogue for services. Instead, I've been learning to celebrate and practice spirituality in ways that are based more in mindfulness practice, noticing and appreciating the small holinesses in each of my children. Grounding myself in their endless newness. 

RB: Speaking of Rosh Hashanah, The Akedah (or The Binding of Isaac) is read on the New Year, and your poem "Exhibit C: Issac," in which the speaker proclaims "When you took the knife, I became very still," is a moving meditation on discovery, death and faith. Can you speak on this in more depth, the process behind it? I know, initially when we met (albeit virtually), you told me that you're working on a book which centers on this story.

AA: Yes, my first book, The Eating Knife, is a textual and personal exploration of the Akedah. The story of Abraham and Isaac is so hard to understand and accept-- the way a father would willingly sacrifice his son as a measure of faith, the way God would ask that of anyone. It is one of the origin stories in Judaism. And it is also similar to my own origin story. My father, who was a deeply intellectual and spiritual person, became mentally ill when I was seven years old and became violently psychotic when I was ten. Just as we as a people must make meaning of Abraham's willingness to conflate faith and violence, I have had to try and make meaning of my father's story, where love and violence have overlapped. The book is my attempt to make sense of these overlapping stories. 

"Exhibit C: Isaac" is the moment in the book where I begin to touch the lived experience of trauma. Trauma changes our nervous system. It changes how we see and how we feel. It makes us at once more alive-- more alert, more hypervigilant-- and close to the reality of death or destruction. I have found writing persona poems in this collection has allowed me to say things about my own experience that I might not have found the words for otherwise. The book is an interpretation of the story, a d'var Torah, and the persona poem is one of the techniques that I try to use to comment by being in it-- in the story, in the text. The book began when I wrote a poem from Abraham's perspective, trying to imagine my father's point of view if he could speak to what happened in a lucid way, which he cannot in the real world. 

RB: Recently, Tupelo Quarterly published a portfolio of your poems. How would you like reades to connect them? How do they read together? I'm guessing these are also part of your forthcoming book.

AA: It's wild to look at this folio now-- all of these poems have been significantly revised, and in the book they appear in a different order. At the time the folio appeared in Tupelo Quarterly (for which I am deeply grateful), the sequence of poems seemed to me to be asking questions about God. As a child I believed deeply in God, but after my father's psychotic break I struggled a great deal with questions about how a God could exist who would allow this to happen to someone I loved so deeply. In a way the Akedah was a relief to study because it asked this same question, and didn't pretend to offer an easy answer. The five poems in the folio are each looking for God in different places: in a crab, in the coronavirus, in a child acting in a school play, in an altar. The book looks for meaning in places where we might not think to find it-- in a Hanson song, in the structure of the Talmud. There isn't any finding God, but the search itself is a way of noticing, of being both on the inside and the outside of a mystery. That is what poetry has been for me also.

RB: Has your work as a nurse practitioner informed your poetry and your poetics?

AA: I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and that work has taught me a lot about listening carefully and about word choice. Also about silence-- the same way that the line break is followed by white space, and that break and white space has meaning, silences also have deep meaning in the work I do. My clients also teach me about the ways that trauma affects language and our ability to speak. When images come at us over and over, or when they refuse to make sense or become organized, how do we make sense of that, and communicate it to another person? That question is so important to how I think about writing. I am studying to become a Lacanian analyst, since that philosophy makes the most sense to my poet's brain. 

RB: Fellow Latina here and we're about to get into it: my Mexican mother converted from Catholicism to Judaism when she married my father, who came from an observant family, before I was born and while I was raised observant, my mother's family has always been in our lives. In fact, my Judaism has survived moments of doubt because of my mother's family and love, as complicated as it is. What were your experiences like being both Jewish and Latina? 

AA: My mother was born in Curacao and grew up mostly in Caracas, Venezuela. Her mother was born in Hungary but grew up in Lima, Peru. My maternal relatives all speak Spanish (to varying degrees) and feel deeply connected to our South American origins. But my mother and her siblings, and even my grandmother, don't identify as Latines. Instead, they all identify as immigrants. To me that speaks to the way the idea of a motherland has been in a great deal of flux in our family. We have roots in Venezuela, but they don't run as deep as the experience of being uprooted does. That seems like a very Jewish experience somehow, of being "from" a people or an experience as opposed to a place. This has meant that I love Latine culture, but I don't feel I can claim it wholly. I am so impressed you found a way of making space for both at once within yourself. I read in your work the tension of being "of" or "from" multiple languages, including the language of physics and math. Monica Gomery, who writes about immigrant experience and immigrant erotics, has also taught me a lot about how to articulate these complex ideas of "fromness."

RB: You've received a fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center. What is your relationship to Yiddish? 

AA: In my family Yiddish is the unknown language, the lost language. My maternal grandfather Mendel was born in Poland and Yiddish was his first language; he immigrated to Curacao when he was around 6 years old, where he learned the language of the majority: Dutch, Spanish, Papiamento. Yiddish was the language he spoke with his parents, the language of his sister who died on the voyage to the New World. None of the rest of his descendents learned Yiddish. I attended the Yiddish Book Center's TENT: Creative Writing program, where I got to attend poetry workshop with the amazing Lisa Olstein and met some really amazing young poets. We learned a lot about the Jewish literary tradition in Yiddish while at the center, and I'm so grateful for my time there and the ways it connected me to my grandfather's world before he passed away.

RB: Before we go, can you share a couple of your favorite Jewish poets, artists and/or writers? Whose work inspires you?

AA: Besides the people I've mentioned above, I love Sabrina Orah Mark's work and the way she thinks about obsessions; Hila Ratzabi's beautiful book "There Are Still Woods"; Sean Singer's amazing book "Today in the Taxi"; Rachel Edelman's upcoming book "Dear Memphis"; Yehoshua November; Aviya Kushner; Ava Winter; Naima Yael Tokunow; we are a pretty impressive people of the book!

RB: Those are some great recommendations. Thank you so much for spending this time with me, querida~

Ayelet Amittay is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Eugene, Oregon. Her first book, The Eating Knife, will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025. Her poems appear in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, and others. She has received fellowships from the Yiddish Book Center and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. You can find her at www.ayeletpoet.com or on social media @ayeletpoet.