DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

 

 

The House on Fire

Poetry Reading and Discussion with Sandra Tarlin

 

Thursday Sep 2, 2pm Law Library (Library 3rd Floor)

moderator: Laura Barberan

 

The poems in my manuscript The House on Fire serve as chambers in which to struggle with the role of imagination in the wake of exile and assimilation.  The Eastern European Jewish tradition of the nineteenth century is ruptured by modernity; ritual and sacred time are disrupted by secular time and progress.  The “house on fire” represents the struggle in America not only for economic survival but also the struggle to maintain an interior world, an intellectual and spiritual life. What does it mean to explore who one loves and how one loves in the wake of a traditional upbringing? The poems explore a “before me.” What does continuity mean to the children and grandchildren of immigrants? What does it mean to lose those who worked hard to maintain community and fought for larger social change in your own family and community and beyond? What are some of our lost connections? Our vibrant multicultural world allows us to explore what genocide has erased. In this vein The House on Fire pays tribute to Marjorie Harris—beloved mentor —whose family played a pivotal role in the history of Brooklyn’s Black Hebrew Community.  The narrative poem “The Good Times Are Coming” depicts Marjorie Harris’ support of a family who has lost both parents to AIDS. The poem ends with the poet remembering Marjorie Harris’ command for her to respond to one of the surviving children:  Nodding to Ziate you say, “Explain to her what a psalm is, what inspires a poem.” Our bodies are fragile. Language and memory are mutable. What we know is consumed; we change and change the world or worlds around us.  Poetry is one way to inhabit a house with many rooms and reimagine what we have lost.

 

 

 

 

Sandra H. Tarlin is Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. She teaches composition and rhetoric, composition and poetry, and creative writing. She received her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and her M.A. from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Ark/angel Review, Bridges, Mobius, Poetica, Sinister Wisdom, and Western Humanities Review. Her work has also been anthologized in Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry and The American Dream: 40 Poems from the 2013 Alexander and Doris Raynes Poetry Competition. Her most recent publication is “A Life of Poetry, Social Activism, and a ‘Unique and Private Love’: An Interview with Naomi Replansky.” She has been the recipient of a PSC CUNY Grant, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish Experience, and the Inprint Barthelme Fellowship for poetry. Her collection The House on Fire is being submitted for publication.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.