Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz (born 1950) is an American poet and author. He was born in Baltimore and educated at Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in New Orleans and is Professor Emeritus, retiring with a dual appointment as Professor of English and Professor of Religious Studies at LSU where he was also an LSU Distinguished Professor and Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor. He currently works privately with clients, using dreams in a process of spiritual direction. He is best known as the author of The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. Kamenetz is married to Moira Crone, a novelist and short story writer. He is the father of Anya Kamenetz, also an author, and Kezia Kamenetz.

At the age of 16, Kamenetz entered Yale University, where he gave readings and published with poets Alan Bernheimer and Kit Robinson (later associated with the Language poets), and studied with Ted Berrigan. His first book, The Missing Jew (Dryad, 1979, was influenced by the Objectivist poets, especially Charles Reznikoff, whom he met at Stanford in 1973. Both poets relied on plain diction and paid attention to American Jewish identity and culture. Another enduring influence was Robert Duncan (poet), whom Kamenetz also met at that time, and later interviewed extensively about Duncan's interest in the Zohar and Jewish mysticism. Kamenetz typed The Missing Jew on a single continuous scroll, and the poems developed as commentaries on previous poems, as in the Jewish literary tradition of midrash. Joel Lewis, writing in the Forward, said, "Mr. Kamenetz recovers Jewishness as a field for discourse, not sentimentalized imagery. In direct and imaginative address, he puts the question of Jewishness under discussion with large parts of honesty and humor." Kamenetz continued to add to the book, and a new edition, nearly double in size, appeared in 1991 as The Missing Jew: New and Selected Poems (Time Being, 1991). His poems were anthologized in Voices Within the Ark (Avon, 1979), Jewish American Poetry (Brandeis, 2000), Jewish in America (U. of Michigan Press), Bearing the Mystery (Eerdmans), Best Jewish Writing 2003 (Jossey Bass), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being), Telling and Remembering: a Century of American Jewish Poetry (Beacon, 1997), and The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Writing (Nebraska, 1998). In The Lowercase Jew (Northwestern, 2003), Kamenetz adopted a form of verse essay to address issues of literary anti-Semitism. The title poem speaks to T.S. Eliot's use of a lower case spelling of "jew" in his poetry; another retells an incident in which "Allen Ginsberg Forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews." Kamenetz's most recent book of poetry, "To Die Next To You" (Six Gallery Press, 2013) derives primarily from his experience with dreamwork and is a collaboration with artist Michael Hafftka.

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