This week seems to have been a busy one, with regard to the Tuesday Poem. The subject matter is a couple of months early, but then had it been posted "in season" I probably wouldn't have seen it. You see, if all goes well I will be in London, England on Yom Kippur -- or Yom Kippurim (יום כפורים), as the Hebrew Bible actually puts the term (as plural "atonements", not a singular "atonement").

There are many referents in Schultz's poem not only to the synagogue liturgy of this day, but to the Hebrew Bible as such, since the liturgy itself refers to a surprising diversity of biblical texts. The more one looks at what texts are cited, the more depth one can see in Schultz's choices. For once here is a Tuesday Poem that I can neither dismiss as half-baked nor discard as too divorced from my own background for me to understand. I can see that Schultz has done his homework, and done it both well and with heart.

In looking for references to the liturgy, I ran across this site, which lends some "un-Orthodox" perspectives on it (including some poems). This could make good supplemental reading.

But this post is really based on some thinking I did in my errand-running today. First thought: Is this poem just another paragraph of well-written prose reworked into mediocre poetry? I think not. There is much feeling in it, much euphony, and much language that is plain but far from casual. It wouldn't surprise me if my dear collegue Foobs (and perhaps a few others) would dislike the modern style; and if the content were as trivial as is often true on Tuesdays, I too might be tuning up my rhetorical guitar for yet another lay because of that very combination of plain style and dull content. But I was touched immediately by "Yom Kippur", and I only grow more so as I reread it. I can't say that about most poems I read here on Tuesdays.

Second thought: It is a truism in musicology and linguistics that the more linguistic information a song has, the less musical information it has and vice versa. The same seems to be true concerning linguistic information and (for want of a better phrase) formal poetic information in a poem. From that perspective, "Yom Kippur" compares more to Psalms 51 (which Suzanne Haik-Vantoura put into score form, and which Gilles Tiar sang for me so beautifully, but which has never been recorded) and less to Psalms 130 (which was both arranged and recorded under Haik-Vantoura's supervision). Both of these Psalms have to do with repentence, the first more explicitly than the second. Psalms 51 has a great deal of linguistic content, yet not much variety in its poetic form, and its melody its self-abasing even by King David's standards -- so the whole "art song" is self-abasing (which fits the circumstances). Whereas Psalms 130 verbally is simple and to-the-point, yet has greater formal variety in less space, and thus leaves more room for "music for its own sake".

In this light, I believe Schultz more than succeeds in what he sets out to do. His text is fairly reserved with regard to formal devices, which gives him more freedom to play with ideas as such. And though MaryAnn might not like the way I choose to say the following, this kind of interplay between poetic form and linguistic (and semantic) content is part of what I mean when I say that form follows function in effective poetry.

From my vantage point, at least, I count this as by far the best poem that I've seen on Tuesdays since I came to Poems Fray, with the exception of some notable works by (ironically) some of our historical Fraysters. And I'm as shocked in saying that as you may be shocked in reading it. I don't hand out praise to the Tuesday Poems lightly.

It seems that Mr. Pinsky has done the impossible: he has given Slate la creme de la creme of his inbox (as he usually does in other venues) rather than la mush de la slush (as he usually does here). Brace yourselves -- Dante's Hell has entered a new ice age.

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"Yom Kippur"

By Philip Schultz
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008, at 6:55 AM ET

Listen to Philip Schultz read this poem.

You are asked to stand and bow your head,
consider the harm you've caused,
the respect you've withheld,
the anger misspent, the fear spread,
the earnestness displayed
in the service of prestige and sensibility,
all the callous, cruel, stubborn, joyless sins
in your alphabet of woe
so that you might be forgiven.
You are asked to believe in the spark
of your divinity, in the purity
of the words of your mouth
and the memories of your heart.
You are asked for this one day and one night
to starve your body so your soul can feast
on faith and adoration.
You are asked to forgive the past
and remember the dead, to gaze
across the desert in your heart
toward Jerusalem. To separate
the sacred from the profane
and be as numerous as the sands
and the stars of heaven.
To believe that no matter what
you have done to yourself and others
morning will come and the mountain
of night will fade. To believe,
for these few precious moments,
in the utter sweetness of your life.
You are asked to bow your head
and remain standing,
and say Amen.