Photo credit: Gabrielle Bates
Considering Rachel Edelman for this series, I wondered how a book might be “Southern” when written outside of the geographical region, for instance, Edelman’s Pacific Northwest, which feels about as far from the gulf coastal plain region of Memphis, Tennessee, as you can get, let alone further east in Tennessee where I am. The many ways that identity might be rooted in or uprooted from region have inspired Dear Memphis, her collection of poems published by River River Books in January. Unpacking that experience as a reader has been the joy of the book for me.
Dear Memphis is a book I felt carried into; its poems driven by lyric concerns as much as telling the story of the author’s relationship to place. At the same time, with help from Edelman’s notes in the back, I found myself Googling, mostly about religious references from Judaism. I also read that the book’s cover is from a photograph of a door in downtown Memphis taken by the poet’s grandfather.
Writing about a place — here the U.S. South — can involve documenting or exploring one’s relationship to land and people, which might be accomplished anywhere, with the assistance of research and memory. But I think one of the truths we understand with more clarity when we leave are that, in most cases, those relationships aren’t fixed; they move, like people do, or they evolve, like our thoughts do over time. Maybe what we thought we saw or knew or felt is where we entered that project.
This interview took place via email in March 2024.
Despite the insistence of the poem titles, so much of Dear Memphis would seem to be about elsewhere. Can you say more about the role of Memphis in this book, or perhaps how your understanding of place (and how we write about it) has developed?
Memphis became insistent in my poems when its presence in my life became a live question. My grandmother died in December 2012, and my parents moved away in July 2015. After a lifetime of knowing Memphis as a home, being the fifth generation of my mother’s family to live there, there was no family home there to return to. The place I’d always run from became somewhere I longed toward. I had to tease out how I carry it with me.
Living elsewhere for more than half of my life, I’ve also encountered many misperceptions of Memphis and the South. I’ve explained, so many times, the urban South, the tight-knit Memphis Jewish community, the well-meaning but dehumanizing Christian evangelism. Memphis is also systematically under-resourced by the state, which makes it too poor to hide its problems—that taught me to look right at whatever a richer city tries to paper over.
Memphis roots my anger at authority, my devotion to community. So maybe the act of direct address is also one of gratitude. I come from a diasporic people; I don’t know that any of my lineages have lived somewhere as long as we lived in Memphis. I owe the place a debt I can’t settle anywhere else.
So, if Memphis is the setting in these poems, where in the city do you envision them? As a reader, I perceived Memphis as an idea evoked in image, but it was also geographically slippery to me as a city. What are some of the places there that, although the people are gone, feel like home?
The first place that comes to mind is my grandmother’s backyard, a place that I could access (some lovely artists now live in the mid-century modern house my grandparents built in 1958), but which I haven’t since the spring of 2013, just after my grandmother died. It’s canopied with tall walnut trees in the middle, hydrangeas and azaleas along the edges, and a gigantic magnolia in the back corner. Memphis is the smooth green bark and the smell of wet moss—images I’ve found kin for in Seattle.
I don’t know that I have other places that feel like home there now; I don’t know that I ever did. There are other places that feel familiar, but they never really felt like places of comfort or rest. But there are places where I began to see beyond the confines of my community and recognize who I wanted to become. The Young Avenue Deli is one: on nights when they had 21-and-up shows, my friends and I would go for dinner and quietly hang out until the show started so we could see Lucero, the North Mississippi Allstars, or Cory Brannan. I remember dancing on those linoleum floors, holding a plastic cup of Coke in my hand, feeling absolutely untethered. There was Otherlands Coffee, too, and Overland Park. Lingering at these landmarks, just outside my family’s orbit, helped me inch toward a creative life.
I also wondered if the ideas of faith you put forth are in conversation with the idea of owing a debt to where you’re from. Frequently, Biblical references or the language becomes useful, not only as markers of identity but also to understand and interrogate individual ethics in the present. Did you anticipate that when you began writing the book, or did faith emerge as a major theme as you went along?
Jewish practice doesn’t require faith; it requires ritual and community. During the decade I spent estranged from the Jewish community due to my anti-Zionism, solo Talmudic study became a way to remain in relationship with Jewish values and ethics even when I was rebuked or ignored by the people I thought were mine. I started writing Dear Memphis when I was still sitting alone with Jewish texts before I found other religious anti-Zionist Jews. That isolation lingers in poems like “To Belong Less to the Aggressor;” there’s a sense of wrestling with God as a “we” seeking sureness. I can juxtapose that with a more playful devotion in “What I Know of God,” a poem I drafted five years later in a queer anti-Zionist khevruta. In the latter poem, the “we” and “I” ricochet against each other, sure-footed even “when [God’s] foot disappears in the sand.” The first section’s rabbi figure disappears later on, while Jewish liturgy and ritual remain. Perhaps that’s a marker of how I’ve accessed a Jewish life where power is distributed more widely throughout a community.
Just a stitch to add to the Jewish practice paragraph: I do, of course, owe the community that raised me for teaching me to engage Jewish texts ravenously and with all my critique.
Absolutely — the elision possible in the popular usage of the word “faith” is one demonstration of how important precise, accurate language is in our/this conversation.
I appreciate the way you trace your engagement with Judaism over several poems. What becomes clear in that tracing, too, is that this book was written over a period of time. Can you tell us the story of Dear Memphis’s making? Did it exist in other forms besides this one that readers are fortunate to hold? Was the process of writing it linear?
Thanks for noting that distinction! It’s key, I think, to understanding how Christian hegemony works: the idea of religious “faith” comes from the Christian traditions of confession and testifying, which require belief. Judaism tends to focus more on action.
The first poem I wrote in Dear Memphis is “Palinode After Pharaoh’s Decree,” which I first drafted in the winter of 2015. It was longer — at least double its sixteen lines — to start and then became longer still. It was published under the title “For We Were Slaves” (which now makes me wince) in a now-defunct journal. The palinode was the opening section, followed by a series of narrative sections depicting the Passover Seder. Years later, as I was reading it in context with the manuscript and leaning toward trashing it, I realized that the spark of that poem lived in a single, brief vision of what the liturgy might have otherwise been.
I revised many poems first on their own, then in concert with the book as a whole. The “Dear Memphis” poems were different: they all happened at once in the late summer and early fall of 2020. I’d been sending out a manuscript called “Another Exodus,” but after writing that series, something shifted. My relationship with Memphis turned from outright rejection into a relationship with more reciprocity. The last poem I wrote in the book was the “Dear Memphis” poem that begins “Seasick in the car wash,” which came months after the rest. Those epistolary poems would’ve felt too insular as a standalone project, and I needed to cut about half of that first manuscript (I’d grown past it), so one day, walking in Volunteer Park, I heard myself tell my friend Gabrielle Bates (before I’d said it to myself), “I think the book is called Dear Memphis.” There’s more gentleness in “Dear Memphis” than there was in “Another Exodus.” I’m proud of the softness it found.
I found myself reading and re-reading poems at Dear Memphis’s midpoint and end, “The Portrait,” and then, of course, the last poem in the book, “Down This River.” Both address the relationship between the artist and the passing on (or bearing) of a culture, or ancestry, or history—do they contradict? The last line of “The Portrait” is “I won’t reach for my mother’s arm. / I won’t paint another picture.” And the last line of “Down This River” is “How, when she and I / slipped in hip-high, out I’d carry her.”
In the lines you quote, I feel a tug between two senses of inheritance: the first, inheritance as property; the second, inheritance as embodiment. “The Portrait” addresses the speaker’s sense of removal from a painting of ancestors she never knew as she and her mother drive the painting to a museum. The more context she reveals about that artifact, the more loaded it becomes with a history of ownership and violence. The distance between the speaker and the mother at the poem’s end refuses to reconcile with a history of domination. “Down This River” enters a memory of standing in a flooded ditch in the speaker’s grandmother’s backyard. It’s a channel that the speaker feels a part of, a place she’s seen change year after year, season after season. Within the rush of water from the sky and the land, she chooses the streams she enters. She and her grandmother both “slipped in hip-high”—neither is spared the experience of falling. So when the speaker says, “I carried her,” the inheritance is borne through close proximity and shared slippage rather than “another picture.”
I also wonder if you could talk about your positionality around “the South” as in the U.S. region and your feeling of being both inside and outside that region. To what extent is it home?
The question of “the South” drives the book; I don’t know that I can answer it briefly! I’ve lived outside the South for more than half of my life now, for 14 years continuously. I formed there, and I’ve crafted my home elsewhere.
I’m visiting Memphis, for the first time in seven years, for two readings next week. As I’ve been planning those events, I’ve spoken to organizers on the ground to learn who’s doing what to stand against the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing Nakba. Here in Seattle, I’ve built communities with whom to stand in Jewishness and Palestine solidarity, but in Jewish spaces in Memphis, I’m told it’s difficult to even make the name “Palestine” heard. Ahead of that visit, I’m working on ways to speak about preserving Palestinian life and seeing Palestinians as divine and holy while also keeping an audience from dissociating! I want to be present with them in a shared discomfort; I want to believe that we can meet there.
Read more about Rachel Edelman on their website.
POETRY
Dear Memphis
By Rachel Edelman
River River Books
Published January 23, 2024
Southern Review of Books 
Nice post 🌹🌹
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