Stumpf | Contemporary Poetry

	Contemporary Poetry : a web symposium \| Spring 2006
	Return \| Identity and Societies
	Kate Farrell: “Good Women Keep Their Clothes On: Faith, Sex, and Modesty in Eve Grubin’s Morning Prayer”
	Morning Prayer by Eve Grubin Sheep Meadow Press, 2005 Eve Grubin’s work Morning Prayer has obvious religious connotations but far from just a simple reflection on religion Grubin uses images of the sensual world to relate Judaism to the earthly. The book celebrates faith while describing the tension between dogma and reality. Using experiential reflection Grubin moves from pondering objects and concepts that are at first-glance inconsequential towards asking deep spiritual questions. Morning Prayer highlights the importance of process, the inevitability of imperfection, and the many-layered meaning attached to mundane things. The imagery is overtly sexual, sensual and unitizing. It relates that of the religious (the Torah, the Bible, prayer) with that of the everyday (dates, interpersonal relationships, and sex). Her work revels in insightful, perceptive, truths about reality and marvels at the significance of the larger mystery. In the poems “Morning Prayer,” Modesty,” and “The Date” the speaker explores similar imagery of the sensual body, the clothed and unclothed, and Biblical reference, to quickly detail the tension between dogmatic Judaism’s teaching on female modesty and the speaker’s own sexual reality. At first glance Morning Prayer leaves the reader feeling puzzled. The speaker struggles to find the most correct words to convey her complicated philosophy. One might criticize Grubin for her technique, labeling it sparse or unfinished. While there is some truth to this assessment Grubin’s practice is very much in touch with human behavior. The poem captures how one revamps and revises their opinions, along with the face with which they meet the world. In the title poem this is never more apparent. In more abstract and philosophical terms then the rest of the book, the speaker explores what’s important in both life and faith, changing her own opinion while challenging the commonly held opinions of others. The speaker demonstrates that the details of an experience explain, and can even justify, how one acts where dogma and law might chastise those actions without considering extenuating circumstance. The speaker’s tone emphasizes process and journey: “It’s not the prayer. It’s the preparation for prayer.” (1) and “Less prayer than the story. Less the story than the story underneath the story” (14-15). “Morning Prayer” introduces the multi-layered world of the work. Even explanation has underlying explanation and objects are multifaceted. In such a world it is only natural that there is a core tension between dogmatic law (the Torah) and the actual experience of life. Throughout the book the various speakers conclude that experience brings complications that invalidate a two-dimensional way of looking at things. Here, Grubin writes more conceptually than in other poems. In the rest of the book, she applies the philosophy established in this poem to the everyday experiences of speakers in her other works. In “Morning Prayer,” the reader finds the religious imagery of Judaism: “the law” of the Torah, “the clothing” of Orthodoxy, the emphasis of history, the persecution of the “Nazi,” and the quest for “peace.” As a religious concept, peace is often thought of as the ultimate destination. The speaker believes: “Not in peace, towards peace.” (12) Grubin moves away from the depressing, archaic notion that death is the only time one can rest in peace. Life becomes the ultimate journey which inevitably brings peace. Sex is a vehicle of unification between the bodily and the blessed: “Not sex, but two souls. Not ashes; /the body. Less the body than dust.” The speaker alludes to Genesis: “…Till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Preceding this somewhat foreboding allusion of the Old Testament with the comforting image of the inter-subjective nature of the spiritual sexual connection the speaker infuses hope in the earthly world while establishing the pervasive religious tone. Morning Prayer celebrates the sexual connection against a Jewish tradition that quiets and ignores female sexual urges. By emphasizing the soulful nature of the conjugal connection against the dark theme of bodily decomposition Grubin introduces the tension central to understanding where she is coming from in a long, sacred tradition that urges women to quiet such desires elevating modesty to a religious virtue exclusively for females: “It’s the battle, desire and modesty, the name” (6). Orthodox Jewish women generally do not touch, gaze at, or sit next to men other than their husbands or relatives because of the religious teachings on reticence. Jewish women, married or unmarried, observe additional restrictions against, for example, flirting (Torah.org). The laws of modesty vary by synagogue. In conservative sects, the laws can be as lenient as limiting ones sexual partners where in Orthodox sects the laws could be a stringent as not allowing the public to see a married woman’s head, wigged or un-wigged, uncovered. Grubin titles a poem in the name of the Jewish virtue. The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance believes the “virtue” of modesty is contrary to Jewish law: “The current extreme emphasis on female modesty is a distortion of traditional Jewish values. Moreover, it is part of am unwholesome tendency which also includes rigid separation of men and women, silencing women, and disenfranchising women from their nature as sexual beings” (Fishman, 38). Even more than denying the truth of female nature the JOFA believes modesty is a means to judge peers when a woman “should require more modesty of herself than others” (Fishman, 38). The Alliance believes that modesty is part of one’s conscience, engrained in the individual and different for everyone. Grubin’s poetry is clearly aware of both the tension between natural desire and the law of modesty along with the discord felt by modern Jewish-American women over the virtues canonical significance. She chooses a woman feeling the tension between personal sexual desire and religious indoctrination to speak in “Modesty.” She begins: “Does the head covering open/ the interior eye?” (1-2). Meaning, does covering a woman’s head bring her more spiritual enlightenment or does it merely conceals who she is. Adam and Eve are introduced to incorporate both tradition and sexuality: “The painter conceals the color- Eve emerging/ from the hidden/ part of Adam- behind black paint” (3-5). The image of the “hidden part of Adam” refers to concealed sexual acts (“behind black paint”). The speaker points out that though the act was concealed it still happened, establishing a tradition of sexuality that relates modern women to the first procreator. Grubin implies that the world has always known that this has been the case since the beginning of Biblical time and gently asks why the patriarchy of Jewish Orthodoxy tends to ignore innate human truths. The poem jumps to the modern world where the sudden stop of the subway has caused the speaker and “the man [she is] with” (13) to unexpectedly touch. The woman is filled with desire: “for less than one second lightly he touched/ me as we lurched, our swoons lit” (16-17). She is guilty of immodesty (by Jewish definition) because she has gazed upon her date. The poem moves to question the law, asserting “The Torah is the body we cloth” (18). The speaker contends that the common entity of all of Judaism is the Torah thus that should be the body a believer has sovereignty to clothe. Women, like men, should be free from doctrinal judgment. The gender differentials dictated by the FOJA are apparent here. Men and women both ascribe to the religion yet men have a dominant role in the sex act. Men are allowed to freely express their desires without judgment but for women the “hidden is more blessed than the revealed (27).” Elevating modesty to a virtue for women simply denies the truth of their sensuous natures and promotes men above women in yet another instance of patriarchy. The speaker goes on to imply that the practice negates romance and leaves women voiceless to their desires: “What I don’t speak you will know” (25). It’s just as ridiculous to assume men would be able to learn of an unvoiced need as it is to assume that a women are absent of sexual thoughts simply because she doesn’t voice them. Grubin questions whether modesty should have status as a virtue by pointing out the weaknesses of valuing such concepts in this poem and painting much more rewarding interpersonal relationships in others. In “The Date,” the speaker has a sexual encounter, absent of the influence of modesty. The couple is close, kissing and gazing, the woman with exposed wet hair heaped atop her head. She and her partner have intellectual conversations about prominent Jewish figures like the author Bernard Malamud and the Biblical scholar Rabbi Rashi. They are of equal intellectual ability. Every detail seems wrought with sexuality. The rain is described as “plunging hard” and “pounding”. The man says “‘I could tie you in bed’” and the girl is filled with desire: “…it was as if/ I had already heard it soup-heat blushed my tongue/ his look searing my collarbone” (15-20). The speaker is fully cognizant and aware of her own sexuality just as the man is of his, they are sexual equals. The tone is intimate and romantic, two consenting adults enjoying both the pleasure of the others company and the gift of sexuality. The scene is just as described in “Morning Prayer” the speaker and her love are two souls uniting both physically and intellectually. It is quite different from the guilt the speaker of “Modesty” feels at experiencing her own sensuousness in a chance, innocent, physical encounter with the man she is with. Grubin’s Morning Prayer deals with religious tradition in a modern world. The author artfully portrays the tension between religious instruction and human desire. While elements of temptation exist, the poet does not allow her speakers to be caught up in a battle of sin versus virtue opting instead to portray them as people caught in a natural web of yearning. Using allusion from both the Bible and modern works, Grubin unites the past and present problems of people within the Jewish faith, gently questioning why certain archetypes exist without being blasphemous. Using images of the clothed versus unclothed she brings to light problems with the Orthodox teachings on modesty and celebrates the beauty of human sexuality. Works Cited Fishman, Sylvia Barack. “Modesty and the Modern Jewish Woman.” JOFA Journal. (2000). 37-38. The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/108/ Prero, Rabbi Yehudah. “Light by the Doorway- Miracles of Modesty.” 1996. Project Genesis. http://www.torah.org/learning/women/class53.html Further Reading By Grubin, Eve. “Modestly Yours: Eve Grubin.” http://blogs.modestlyyours.net/modestly_yours/eve_grubin/index.html Eve Grubin’s Blog The Drunken Boat. http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/grubin.html Assorted poems from Morning Prayer Grubin, Eve & Howe, Fanny. “Theology and Poetry: An Interview with Fanny Howe.” Lyric Review Online Home. 2003. Lyric Review Journal. 2004. http://www.lyricreview.org/issues/grubin.html An Interview with Fanny Howe concerning the genres of poetry and theology About Book Detail. Review: Morning Prayer. 1997. Publishers Weekly. 12/2007. http://reviews.publishersweekly.com/bd.aspx?isbn=1931357285&pub=pw Meyers, Isaac. “Chapter and Verse: Two Poets Explore Religion.” Forward. 2006. http://www.forward.com/articles/7318 A review of Grubin’s Book. Shalit, Wendy. “The Observant Reader.” The New York Times. January 30, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30SHALITL.html?ex=1146715200&en=46c502099188e97c&ei=5070. An essay printed in the New York Times that mentions Grubin. UPNE\| Morning Prayer. http://www.upne.com/1-931357-28-5.html Assorted reviews of Grubin’s book.

	Contemporary Poetry : a web symposium \| Spring 2006
	Return \| Identity and Societies
	Kate Farrell: “Good Women Keep Their Clothes On: Faith, Sex, and Modesty in Eve Grubin’s Morning Prayer”
	Morning Prayer by Eve Grubin Sheep Meadow Press, 2005 Eve Grubin’s work Morning Prayer has obvious religious connotations but far from just a simple reflection on religion Grubin uses images of the sensual world to relate Judaism to the earthly. The book celebrates faith while describing the tension between dogma and reality. Using experiential reflection Grubin moves from pondering objects and concepts that are at first-glance inconsequential towards asking deep spiritual questions. Morning Prayer highlights the importance of process, the inevitability of imperfection, and the many-layered meaning attached to mundane things. The imagery is overtly sexual, sensual and unitizing. It relates that of the religious (the Torah, the Bible, prayer) with that of the everyday (dates, interpersonal relationships, and sex). Her work revels in insightful, perceptive, truths about reality and marvels at the significance of the larger mystery. In the poems “Morning Prayer,” Modesty,” and “The Date” the speaker explores similar imagery of the sensual body, the clothed and unclothed, and Biblical reference, to quickly detail the tension between dogmatic Judaism’s teaching on female modesty and the speaker’s own sexual reality. At first glance Morning Prayer leaves the reader feeling puzzled. The speaker struggles to find the most correct words to convey her complicated philosophy. One might criticize Grubin for her technique, labeling it sparse or unfinished. While there is some truth to this assessment Grubin’s practice is very much in touch with human behavior. The poem captures how one revamps and revises their opinions, along with the face with which they meet the world. In the title poem this is never more apparent. In more abstract and philosophical terms then the rest of the book, the speaker explores what’s important in both life and faith, changing her own opinion while challenging the commonly held opinions of others. The speaker demonstrates that the details of an experience explain, and can even justify, how one acts where dogma and law might chastise those actions without considering extenuating circumstance. The speaker’s tone emphasizes process and journey: “It’s not the prayer. It’s the preparation for prayer.” (1) and “Less prayer than the story. Less the story than the story underneath the story” (14-15). “Morning Prayer” introduces the multi-layered world of the work. Even explanation has underlying explanation and objects are multifaceted. In such a world it is only natural that there is a core tension between dogmatic law (the Torah) and the actual experience of life. Throughout the book the various speakers conclude that experience brings complications that invalidate a two-dimensional way of looking at things. Here, Grubin writes more conceptually than in other poems. In the rest of the book, she applies the philosophy established in this poem to the everyday experiences of speakers in her other works. In “Morning Prayer,” the reader finds the religious imagery of Judaism: “the law” of the Torah, “the clothing” of Orthodoxy, the emphasis of history, the persecution of the “Nazi,” and the quest for “peace.” As a religious concept, peace is often thought of as the ultimate destination. The speaker believes: “Not in peace, towards peace.” (12) Grubin moves away from the depressing, archaic notion that death is the only time one can rest in peace. Life becomes the ultimate journey which inevitably brings peace. Sex is a vehicle of unification between the bodily and the blessed: “Not sex, but two souls. Not ashes; /the body. Less the body than dust.” The speaker alludes to Genesis: “…Till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Preceding this somewhat foreboding allusion of the Old Testament with the comforting image of the inter-subjective nature of the spiritual sexual connection the speaker infuses hope in the earthly world while establishing the pervasive religious tone. Morning Prayer celebrates the sexual connection against a Jewish tradition that quiets and ignores female sexual urges. By emphasizing the soulful nature of the conjugal connection against the dark theme of bodily decomposition Grubin introduces the tension central to understanding where she is coming from in a long, sacred tradition that urges women to quiet such desires elevating modesty to a religious virtue exclusively for females: “It’s the battle, desire and modesty, the name” (6). Orthodox Jewish women generally do not touch, gaze at, or sit next to men other than their husbands or relatives because of the religious teachings on reticence. Jewish women, married or unmarried, observe additional restrictions against, for example, flirting (Torah.org). The laws of modesty vary by synagogue. In conservative sects, the laws can be as lenient as limiting ones sexual partners where in Orthodox sects the laws could be a stringent as not allowing the public to see a married woman’s head, wigged or un-wigged, uncovered. Grubin titles a poem in the name of the Jewish virtue. The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance believes the “virtue” of modesty is contrary to Jewish law: “The current extreme emphasis on female modesty is a distortion of traditional Jewish values. Moreover, it is part of am unwholesome tendency which also includes rigid separation of men and women, silencing women, and disenfranchising women from their nature as sexual beings” (Fishman, 38). Even more than denying the truth of female nature the JOFA believes modesty is a means to judge peers when a woman “should require more modesty of herself than others” (Fishman, 38). The Alliance believes that modesty is part of one’s conscience, engrained in the individual and different for everyone. Grubin’s poetry is clearly aware of both the tension between natural desire and the law of modesty along with the discord felt by modern Jewish-American women over the virtues canonical significance. She chooses a woman feeling the tension between personal sexual desire and religious indoctrination to speak in “Modesty.” She begins: “Does the head covering open/ the interior eye?” (1-2). Meaning, does covering a woman’s head bring her more spiritual enlightenment or does it merely conceals who she is. Adam and Eve are introduced to incorporate both tradition and sexuality: “The painter conceals the color- Eve emerging/ from the hidden/ part of Adam- behind black paint” (3-5). The image of the “hidden part of Adam” refers to concealed sexual acts (“behind black paint”). The speaker points out that though the act was concealed it still happened, establishing a tradition of sexuality that relates modern women to the first procreator. Grubin implies that the world has always known that this has been the case since the beginning of Biblical time and gently asks why the patriarchy of Jewish Orthodoxy tends to ignore innate human truths. The poem jumps to the modern world where the sudden stop of the subway has caused the speaker and “the man [she is] with” (13) to unexpectedly touch. The woman is filled with desire: “for less than one second lightly he touched/ me as we lurched, our swoons lit” (16-17). She is guilty of immodesty (by Jewish definition) because she has gazed upon her date. The poem moves to question the law, asserting “The Torah is the body we cloth” (18). The speaker contends that the common entity of all of Judaism is the Torah thus that should be the body a believer has sovereignty to clothe. Women, like men, should be free from doctrinal judgment. The gender differentials dictated by the FOJA are apparent here. Men and women both ascribe to the religion yet men have a dominant role in the sex act. Men are allowed to freely express their desires without judgment but for women the “hidden is more blessed than the revealed (27).” Elevating modesty to a virtue for women simply denies the truth of their sensuous natures and promotes men above women in yet another instance of patriarchy. The speaker goes on to imply that the practice negates romance and leaves women voiceless to their desires: “What I don’t speak you will know” (25). It’s just as ridiculous to assume men would be able to learn of an unvoiced need as it is to assume that a women are absent of sexual thoughts simply because she doesn’t voice them. Grubin questions whether modesty should have status as a virtue by pointing out the weaknesses of valuing such concepts in this poem and painting much more rewarding interpersonal relationships in others. In “The Date,” the speaker has a sexual encounter, absent of the influence of modesty. The couple is close, kissing and gazing, the woman with exposed wet hair heaped atop her head. She and her partner have intellectual conversations about prominent Jewish figures like the author Bernard Malamud and the Biblical scholar Rabbi Rashi. They are of equal intellectual ability. Every detail seems wrought with sexuality. The rain is described as “plunging hard” and “pounding”. The man says “‘I could tie you in bed’” and the girl is filled with desire: “…it was as if/ I had already heard it soup-heat blushed my tongue/ his look searing my collarbone” (15-20). The speaker is fully cognizant and aware of her own sexuality just as the man is of his, they are sexual equals. The tone is intimate and romantic, two consenting adults enjoying both the pleasure of the others company and the gift of sexuality. The scene is just as described in “Morning Prayer” the speaker and her love are two souls uniting both physically and intellectually. It is quite different from the guilt the speaker of “Modesty” feels at experiencing her own sensuousness in a chance, innocent, physical encounter with the man she is with. Grubin’s Morning Prayer deals with religious tradition in a modern world. The author artfully portrays the tension between religious instruction and human desire. While elements of temptation exist, the poet does not allow her speakers to be caught up in a battle of sin versus virtue opting instead to portray them as people caught in a natural web of yearning. Using allusion from both the Bible and modern works, Grubin unites the past and present problems of people within the Jewish faith, gently questioning why certain archetypes exist without being blasphemous. Using images of the clothed versus unclothed she brings to light problems with the Orthodox teachings on modesty and celebrates the beauty of human sexuality. Works Cited Fishman, Sylvia Barack. “Modesty and the Modern Jewish Woman.” JOFA Journal. (2000). 37-38. The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/108/ Prero, Rabbi Yehudah. “Light by the Doorway- Miracles of Modesty.” 1996. Project Genesis. http://www.torah.org/learning/women/class53.html Further Reading By Grubin, Eve. “Modestly Yours: Eve Grubin.” http://blogs.modestlyyours.net/modestly_yours/eve_grubin/index.html Eve Grubin’s Blog The Drunken Boat. http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/grubin.html Assorted poems from Morning Prayer Grubin, Eve & Howe, Fanny. “Theology and Poetry: An Interview with Fanny Howe.” Lyric Review Online Home. 2003. Lyric Review Journal. 2004. http://www.lyricreview.org/issues/grubin.html An Interview with Fanny Howe concerning the genres of poetry and theology About Book Detail. Review: Morning Prayer. 1997. Publishers Weekly. 12/2007. http://reviews.publishersweekly.com/bd.aspx?isbn=1931357285&pub=pw Meyers, Isaac. “Chapter and Verse: Two Poets Explore Religion.” Forward. 2006. http://www.forward.com/articles/7318 A review of Grubin’s Book. Shalit, Wendy. “The Observant Reader.” The New York Times. January 30, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30SHALITL.html?ex=1146715200&en=46c502099188e97c&ei=5070. An essay printed in the New York Times that mentions Grubin. UPNE\| Morning Prayer. http://www.upne.com/1-931357-28-5.html Assorted reviews of Grubin’s book.