Jason Sommer
Jason Sommer has written two collections of poetry: Other People’s Troubles
from the University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets Series, October 1997, and Lifting
the Stone, Forest Books, London, 1991. The Society of Midland Authors has given Other
People’s Troubles its 1998 literary award for poetry. The book was also a
finalist for PEN U.S.A. West’s literary prize for poetry.
In 2001, Sommer was awarded a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Fellowship for his work to
date. He was among a select group of poets invited to read at the National Holocaust
Museum with Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz in 2000 for Speech and Silence: Poetry
After the Holocaust. He has been recognized with fellowships in Poetry at the Bread
Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences, a Writer’s Community Residency from the
National Writer’s Voice Project of the YMCA, and an Amerika House (Berlin) reading
tour of the former East Germany. Among the awards he has won for his poetry are The
Lyric magazine’s "New England Prize" and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg
Award for poems on the Jewish experience.
Sommer was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. He received his BA from Brandeis
University, his MA from Stanford, where he held the Mirrielees Fellowship in Poetry, and
his Ph.D. from Saint Louis University. His poems have appeared in many magazines,
including The New Republic, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Occident, AGNI Review, and,
in Ireland, the Honest Ulsterman. He has also had his poems broadcast on the BBC
World Service. His work has been anthologized, lately in The New American Poets,
University Press of New England, 2000. Resident in Ireland from 1974 to 1981, he taught at
University College Dublin and reviewed books for the Irish Independent. His English
versions of contemporary Irish language poems have appeared in magazines, bilingual
collections by Irish poets, and Jumping Off Shadow: Selected Contemporary Irish Poets,
an anthology published by Cork University Press.
Sommer is married to Bernardine Quinn Sommer, with whom he has three children: Matthias,
Danielle, and Benjamin. He teaches literature and writing and directs the honors program
at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri.
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A Note on the Poems
What brought me to poetry was poetry itself of course. La Rochefoucald said,
approximately, that no one would fall in love who hadn’t heard of the concept. The
idea of this particular love came to me from my mother, who read to me and then gave me to
read nursery and nonsense rhymes—the joy of which was often literally beyond
comprehension—as well as poems out of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and old
school anthologies, whose meanings I would grow into, some very soon, if they had stories:
"The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,/ The moon was a ghostly
galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,/The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple
moor,/And the highwayman came riding-/
Riding-riding…"
The Bronx streets were also full of bright bits of chant for rope-skipping and patty-cake,
and eeny-meeny or one potato–two potato for choosing up sides. Even taunting had a
certain beat. The smallest children came with the knack—it almost seemed innate: baby
baby baby, stick your head in gravy, with the trochee-assisted guarantee of annoyance.
The cadences of the Hebrew Bible and the liturgy—cantillation, song, and spoken
word—contributed to my pleasure at the pure sound and rhythm patterns of language,
pure since much of what I heard in the synagogue I wouldn’t understand until later at
yeshiva, when the story would mean as much as the word-music.
The not unalloyed pleasure of unintelligible language surrounded my immigrant father who
always found ways to practice the many languages he knew. In his conversations with his
brother, Harry, in Hungarian or Yiddish, I could hear and feel in interval and intonation
something of what I couldn’t understand, a story concealed. It was more than the
murmurous talk that ordinary adults conduct almost out of earshot of children. My parents,
too, talking together, spoke obliquely, let things slip. These secrets that I was not yet
old enough to hear, that I would sense around me in more than talk, concerned my father
and Harry in the labor camps and my Aunt Lilly, Harry’s wife, in Auschwitz. Soon
enough, at twelve or thirteen, I did begin to hear the stories—my father’s
anyway—for he spoke freely in my presence about what had happened to him and to
others. I heard the extremities that language had to bear. I heard, also, what seemed like
a charge to remember and preserve.
So early on, I had the matter but not the manner; for that I would need teachers—on
the page and in the flesh. I found them in Frost and Yeats in my teens. In college there
was J.V. Cunningham, with whom I studied poetry writing, and Allen Grossman with whom I
read the 17th century religious poets and my twentieth century contemporaries,
Lowell and Bishop chief among them. At Stanford, Donald Davie would introduce me to
English and Irish poets, and Ken Fields to many Americans to be examined in new ways,
modernists and uneasy moderns. I learned about writing and writers—and I wrote,
serving the long apprenticeship, lengthened perhaps by subject matter I was skirting.
What finally prompted me to attempt some of the poems here, much later, was a rough
coincidence of events: the discovery of Mengele’s bones in Brazil, the uncovering of
accounts of the monstrous Auschwitz doctor’s final years, and my aunt’s sudden
bursts of disclosure about her own direct experience of him, after so many years of
silence. I began to sense that the stories that belonged to others also were mine, since
they had to do with forming me. I thought I had something at last to give survivors in
return for the pain of their testimony, a story they would not themselves have, since it
was a twining of stories—theirs, mine, and the story of the story. Drawing on the
resources of poetry, I might have a chance to make something durable enough in language to
contain and give shape to experience at the junction of history and personality, a poetry
that could preserve what was placed in my keeping: the voices of the tellers and what they
told, even my voice among theirs, telling what was mine and not mine.
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