"Kabbalah Barbie" has some work to do.
After all, award-winning poet Barbara Louise Ungar has summoned her to provide an organizing principle of sorts for a book that was reluctant to fall into place.
And not only that. It's also "Kabbalah Barbie's" job to introduce readers to some heady concepts and perhaps strange words they will want to carry with them as they make their way through the three sections and 46 poems that follow.
That's a lot to ask of a poem about an imaginary doll** with a ". . . pretty little head not much/emptier than yours." But "Kabbalah Barbie" proves to be up to the task. The poem serves as something of a preface to Ungar's sixth full-length poetry collection, After Naming the Animals. The book is coming soon from The Word Works, which also published two of her previous books.
It's not that the poems in After Naming the Animals are difficult ones. They are readily accessible, sometimes laced with humor, and ranging in content from small, domestic moments (a broken cup) to the natural sciences (mass extinctions) to, sometimes, the convergence points of contemporary science (physics) and mysticism (Kabbalah).
Barbie's role in it all is to impart some overarching concepts to the reader, in her own words and in just 32 lines.
"The middle section is where the book began," Ungar explained of the grouping of poems about the vast number of living things on our planet now facing extinction and vanishing faster than we can name them. That work springs out of an idea first explored in her earlier book, Immortal Medusa, which then led to her 2018 chapbook, EDGE (an acronym for Lists of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species).
When she submitted the chapbook manuscript to a likely publisher, prepared for the long wait for a response that authors generally endure, she was caught off guard.
"It was accepted in one hour," she said.
Later, she wanted to expand the work in EDGE into a full-length book, adding material that, while differing in subject, resonated in conceptual ways.
"What I also wanted was to introduce Kabbalah ideas," that carried through the work, she said of the Jewish mystical traditions she would draw on. Ideas, that is, that emphasize the formless, timeless, and nameless nature of creation and existence, in the worldview of the Kabbalists (and in some ways of today's physicists).
"But I didn't want to sound like I was lecturing," Ungar said.
Finding the right shape and tone for the book proved to be difficult, she said, and after "trying to put it together" she decided to work with an independent editor, something she had never done before.
"We tried several things, but finally decided that the animal poems that began with EDGE would form their own section," she said. For the new collection, some of the original poems from the chapbook were retained, others were deleted, most were further edited, and new poems were added to the middle section now called “Call Me Eve” and bracketed by Section I, “Shattered Vessels” and Section III, “Sacred Shards,” each of the titles a reference to the mystical traditions.
But the matter of making Kabbalah more accessible to the reader remained.
Ungar, who had written about Barbie before--even in a poem that shared the title "Kabbalah Barbie—included in Immortal Medusa (see the video link below)--eventually hit on the idea of "putting ideas into Barbie's mouth.”
Whereupon Barbie became a font of knowledge concerning some arcane ideas that rabbis and other scholars have devoted lifetimes to over the centuries, while producing countless complex texts. Ein Sof. The Nameless. Bereishit (the first book and first word of the Torah).
That last, bereishit (pronounced b'ray-sheet) offers a lot to think about, Ungar pointed out. While it is commonly rendered in English as "in the beginning," scholars say it is more faithfully translated as "in beginning," without the article. Rather than fixing a point in time, "it's an ongoing verb form, formless and timeless," she said.
But let's let Barbie explain it further. Here is the poem:
Kabbalah Barbie The god you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either. —Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev In beginning . . . there is nothing. No-thing. We say Ein Sof, Without End, though it cannot be named or described. If I say God, you imagine a being like yourself, the way you made me, a lump of plastic molded like you, distorted. Before there was anything—but if I say before, that’s wrong, too, because there was no time, only Ein Sof. What spoke the word light, and there was light, a big (if silent) bang. Whence we sprang, each a shard of the Nameless that splintered into every name. In beginning…bereishit— we have seventy interpretations of that first word. Stories about stories, echoing creation, each of us an emanation of a tenseless verb. Language entangled with creation: each separate being, split off from Ein Sof, speaks its name but must end and return to the Nameless. So let me tell you a story, before bed, my pretty little head not much emptier than yours. What am I? A toy, a doll, frail. A mouthpiece for a child. What are you? --Barbara Louise Ungar
“Kabbalah Barbie” was originally published in Atticus Review (Dec. 2022).
And here is Barbara Louise Ungar reading the earlier “Kabbalah Barbie”
Barbara Ungar’s sixth book, After Naming the Animals, is forthcoming from The
Word Works in August 2023. Her prior book, Save Our Ship, won the Snyder
Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and a Franklin Award from the
Independent Book Publishers Association, and was a Distinguished Favorite at
the Independent Press Awards. Other poems from this book were recently
published in Scientific American, Crazyhorse, Gargoyle, Atticus Review, and Small
Orange. Earlier books include Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life; Immortal
Medusa; and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize and an Eric
Hoffer award. The Standish Chair in English at The College of Saint Rose, she
lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. www.barbaraungar.net
Just for fun . . .
**Kabbalah Barbie, the doll, may not exist, but there is another Barbie steeped in Jewish tradition. You can see Tefillin Barbie here.