Vox Populi
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Chana Bloch: Memento Mori
“God blessed you with curly hair,”
my mother used to say
and dressed me like Shirley Temple.
On my bare scalp, Australia,
a birthmark that hid
in the thicket of my hair.
Unblessed in a downburst, I lost
my leafy summer, my lovely,
my crest, my crown.
I sleep in a flannel nightcap.
My wig sleeps in a closet,
comb and brush in a drawer.
I wake to a still life—
a clock that marks the hour
before it strikes.
No skull on my desk.
Just a face in the mirror,
unrecognizable.
~~~~
Chana Bloch (1940 – 2017) was a poet, translator, and scholar. Born as Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York, she was a second-generation American, the daughter of Benjamin and Rose (née Rosenberg) Faerstein; her parents were both observant Jews who had immigrated from Ukraine. Bloch taught at Mills College for over thirty years and directed their Creative Writing Program. Bloch published five collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, Blood Honey, Swimming in the Rain and The Moon Is Almost Full. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and Best American Poetry, She was co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of the biblical Song of Songs. She co-translated works by modern Hebrew poets including Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Chana’s Story, a song cycle by David Del Tredici based on her work, premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Copyright © 2017 by Chana Bloch. From The Moon is Almost Full (Autumn House Press, 2017).
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I miss her and am sorry I never got to meet her personally and say how much I love her poems.
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She was something!
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First I had the good fortune to study with Chana when I was an undergraduate at Mills College. Later, we became friends, and I was part of the “circle of care” during her long effort to survive the sarcoma: I took meals to her and when she had enough energy for conversation, I got to chat with her for a bit. She had agreed to write a blurb for my first collection, and I would have been unbelievably proud if she had lived long enough to complete it. Without a doubt, her memory is a blessing to many of us, and thank goodness there is an amazing body of work that will always us to partake of her poems, now that she can no longer read them to us.
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Beautiful, Annie. Thank you.
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Thanks for this. Bloch is another gem from the Bronx, the Boro which has also given us Grace Paley and Abel Meeropol, this last the poet who penned Strange Fruit, not to mention Fordham and Arthur Avenue, the real Little Italy of NYC.
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Spot on, Matt!
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Yes. I have just met Chana Bloch and I already miss her wonderfully while I do tell her how brilliant she is.
Right on this page she is crawling out of the skin of the Familiar to give us the Clear Signal because “the darkness around us is deep.”
Thanks for this poem and this forum.
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Thanks, Owen.
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she was such a poetic force. I know her much better as a translator. Thank you for giving us one of her poems today.
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Thank you! Yes, I was reading her translations of Yehuda Amichai decades before she sent me her first ms of original poetry. I fell in love immediately.
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which of her books would you recommend? Thanks!!
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All of Chana’s books are great! I love Blood Honey best because the volume as a whole makes a coherent argument, but Swimming in the Rain, her selected, contains the best poems she’s written. The Moon is Almost Full was written when she was dying and is full of lyrical wisdom. Please order them directly form Autumn House, if you don’t mind.
https://www.autumnhouse.org/our-authors/bloch-chana/
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Of course. I’ll have to make a choice first!!! Thanks !!
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I just checked the Autumn House website, and it turns out Blood Honey is out of stock, so I recommend Swimming in the Rain.
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thank you!!!!
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She was my friend. It is so nice to see this poem
Sent from my iPhone
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Oh, yes, Chana was a jewel.
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I wish she was still in this world so I could tell her how brilliant I think she is. “I wake to a still life, a clock…no skull on my desk…
We must put our words out to sound in our absence. It is what must be.
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I published three of Chana’s books at Autumn House, and we became good friends through the years. She was a wonderful poet, a dedicated translator and a brilliant scholar, and she always remained a kind decent person, even in her last year when she was in great pain. I miss her terribly.
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