For years, decades even, Rachel Edelman avoided writing poems about Memphis, the place she was raised. “For a long time, I didn’t want to write about the South or Memphis or my upbringing,” she says. Yet this January, she released her debut collection, Dear Memphis, and filled it with poems about her hometown.
Before, she says, she was taught to “avoid sentimentality. And not to write — literally — not to write poems about your grandma. And [the writings in Dear Memphis] are poems very deeply engaged with that generation, with my grandparents’ generation, and the way that I have become a culture-bearer of theirs, and so I avoided it because I was told academically that it wasn’t high-class.”
So, she did as she was taught, wrote poetry about nature, climate change, the Jewish diaspora, a reimagined Exodus. In first collection of poems, her hometown was absent, with poems, instead, like “Palinode after Pharaoh’s Decree,” “What I Know of God,” and “The Tether” about Miriam, Moses’ sister. She revised and revised, adding and cutting — mostly cutting. “I always feel like I might destroy a poem when I revise it,” she says, “but that’s the only way that I get to something interesting.”
Rachel Edelman
But, even with all that work, something was missing. As Edelman read more widely and engaged with more poets, she learned she didn’t have to choose between the “cerebral” and the “embodied.” “I opened up to writing these more personal poems. And while I don’t think that we necessarily need to lay all our trauma on the page, I think it’s okay to welcome the more fallible and the more sticky moments as they come. … I think that there’s a lot of strength in veering into emotionally fraught territory.”
Yet it wasn’t until the summer of 2020, at a virtual Tin House Summer Workshop, that Edelman would delve into that fraught territory. “[We were given a prompt to] write to somebody you’ve never met. You could write to someone who passed, you could write to a place or an idea, and I started writing ‘Dear Memphis’ poems. And then I wrote them for a few months. … I just kept going once the workshop ended.”
These poems, it turned out, would inject the much-needed energy into her pre-existing collection. They made it complete, made it something new, something that connected her ancestors’ past in a reimagined Exodus to her own diasporic present, as a former Memphian now living as a teacher in Seattle. “They felt really intimate to me in a way that was important for the rest of the book,” Edelman says. “And you’re able to see them differently when they’re in a book. When they’re carrying out a trajectory.”
The poems in the now-complete collection, Dear Memphis, “engage with a vision of commitment to diaspora,” she says. “So that is really a thread that lines up for all these poems. I also think that it’s an ethos that requires risk. It requires rejection of Zionism. And it requires a willingness to make overtures and alliances that may not work out, or that may require a lot of trust-building.”
Edelman continues, “[Memphis] feels like a diasporic home. My family lived in Memphis for five generations. I don’t know where else in the world my family has lived for that long because we are a diasporic people. And I firmly believe that Jews are a diasporic people, that we thrive in diaspora. And so, I don’t believe in a Jewish homeland, and I think it’s exciting to have many stops along our way, along my lineage.”
