By Jhon Sánchez
In 2015, at the Bronx Library Center, the first thing that Pinny did before starting his reading was to come around to greet each of us in the audience. Pinny writes about growing up in Washington Heights as a Jewish child, sharing experiences with people from all ethnicities. I’m Colombian, and I came to this country when I was twenty seven years old, so I never knew the Washington Heights that Pinny describes; however, when I take the 1 train, or walk all the way to Inwood Hill Park, or I cross the High Bridge to go to the Bronx, I found myself wondering where the old Shul (Synagogue) was. Once in a while, Pinny is generous enough to send his friends a poem via email. “I’m already hooked.” After a couple of weeks without a poem, I begin craving a new one. I wish all my readers to have similar sensations, so I introduce to you ‘Pinny Bulman.’ Recently four of his poems were chosen for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards and will be published this summer by Poetica in a special print collection. Pinny, thanks for granting this interview.
Your father was a poet. Can you tell us how his life and poetry influenced you in becoming the writer that you are today?
My dad, Aaron Bulman, had a profound influence on who I am as a person and a poet, although I was somewhat responsible for derailing his initial vision of a poet’s life. Before I came along, my dad had dreams of solely focusing on his writing, perhaps doing some teaching on the side. Once I was born, the first of four children, financial necessity forced him to take a job at the Equitable Insurance Company where he worked for 25+ years. Yet, he still somehow managed to keep poetry as a primary focus and write on a daily basis during the slow times at work. Each day he would return home from the Equitable and talk about the poetry he had worked on. For years I was convinced that he worked for the Equitable Insurance Company’s poetry division.
When I grew older, I started writing poetry and also had a passion for working with under-privileged children. I found myself interested to train as a clinical child psychologist but worried that this focus would derail my own dreams of becoming a writer. My dad helped me realize that my passions didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. He taught me that being a poet doesn’t mean wanting to write poetry, it means needing to write poetry, and that need would find a way to express itself regardless of vocation.
More fundamentally, my dad instilled in me a love of words and a respect for their power. A child of Holocaust survivors, he was haunted by the silencing of so many from my grandparents’ generation. His response was to break that silence through his writing. Themes of personal and collective tragedy run through his poems but never define them. My dad taught me that language can be used to process experience, to express our humanity, to make meaning, to create beauty.
Memory is essential in your pieces. What are the rituals that allow you to capture those moments? Do you meditate? Do you pray?
As an Orthodox Jew, prayer has always been a central element of my religious expression but doesn’t play an overt role in helping me capture moments and experiences for poetic expression. There is a parallel, though, between the prayer rituals in which I engage and my poetic process.
There is a high level of structure to prayer within Orthodox Judaism; exactly what one says, how one says it, and the timing of the prayer services are all highly prescribed. But the structured prayer services are also meant to provide a springboard for spontaneous creative personal prayer and spiritual expression, both during the services themselves and beyond them. In a broader sense, this relationship between structure/constraint and creativity is often central to the arts as well. So much great art and writing happens either within the boundaries of a certain artistic form or as a reaction to those boundaries.
For my own poetic process, I’ve found that, similar to prayer, it’s important for me to set a certain structured time and space to write on a consistent basis. Given how busy my work life and home life are, this time/space is most often on NYC public transportation as I travel between places. I always carry a folded piece of paper in my pocket and a pen that I’ll pull out on the bus or subway to work on a poem. There’s something that feels special and meditative to me about that liminal space, neither here nor there, and its crowded anonymity, a space so public that it feels private.
But that specific time and space for writing is really just a springboard. The consistency of purposefully working on a poem for 5-10 minutes during my commute has the effect of keeping it somewhere in my consciousness at all times. I’ll find myself spontaneously thinking of new ways to capture/express memory and experience while washing dishes or grocery shopping. This dialectic between structure and spontaneity has been key to my creative process.
The Washington Heights you describe in your poetry differs from the Washington Heights I came to know, but at the same time I recognize it. Is there a nostalgic element in your poetry?
I was born in 1974, so the Washington Heights of my childhood was certainly different than the gentrified neighborhood it’s become today. It was a place of extremes, with an electrifyingly vibrant street culture, also awash in crime, drugs, and violence. The shrinking Jewish community was close-knit, but dying throughout that era.
While there is a thread of nostalgia woven into the poetry, I wouldn’t say that it’s a primary emotion or impetus for the poems. Many of the memories captured are difficult ones, involving loss, adversity, violence, loneliness, and/or transition. The poems are my forum for wrestling with those memories and sharing them with others in a way that I hope can resonate because those challenges are part of the human experience. As a writer, sometimes creating poetry from memory can feel like a radical transformative act, especially when expressing something terrible in a form you hope will be beautiful.
Regarding your poem “cain” you say, “In a sense, the poem is an act of radical empathy; of trying to enter Cain’s head to understand his actions and viewpoint. I think that’s an important function of art, especially at a time like this.” Do you think this is a practice we need to engage to really reduce the polarization we have in this country?
Absolutely. The poem “cain” was completed in January, just before Trump’s inauguration. We live in a country and a world where people who are in power or who would like to be in power (either publically or behind the scenes) are using language and images designed to trigger fear of the “other.” Technology and social media are providing new platforms through which subtle or overt targeted messages of hate can be spread quickly.
This is the opposite of the practice of empathy, which involves a focus on our shared humanity. That focus then allows us to, in a certain sense, erase the boundaries between ourselves and others, to push ourselves to understand their experiences and their feelings. Art forms can play an important role in this process. When you open yourself up to a work of art, you are allowing yourself to experience the world through someone else’s perspective. Of course, art itself can be used as propaganda, to spread fear and hate, which means that artists have a certain social and moral responsibility to consider the potential impact of their work.
Many of your poems take place during your childhood. They have the quality of a child or a teenager wandering upper Manhattan but with a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish community and to your family. Do you believe all poets are children in a sense?
I think there are some qualities often ascribed to children that many poets and artists of all types try to tap into. Qualities such as the ability to use one’s imagination in a free, uncensored manner, or the ability to consider aspects of experience with a fresh curiosity and perspective. At the same time, I couldn’t have written any of these poems as a child. I often find that I can only write about things in retrospect, with the perspective that time, distance, and subsequent life experience can bring. I started writing poems based on my experiences growing up in the Heights only after the neighborhood had changed and I had grown up and moved out.
Some of your poetry is inspired by biblical readings. These poems seem to struggle with profound questions. Do you believe asking these ‘big’ questions is similar to a child’s curiosity or on the contrary is something that old ages brings up?
My wife and I are blessed with two children who constantly amaze us with the profundity of their questions, but I don’t think we ever stop asking them. To be human is to live with a certain amount of existential uncertainty. As much as the rhythms of adult life may distract us, those larger questions are always part of the context in which we experience our lives. What does evolve as we age and have more lived experience is the way we understand those questions, the ways we wrestle with (or attempt to avoid) them, and, if we’re lucky, our tolerance for leaving them unanswered.
You always share a little story behind your poems. Sometimes, I’m unable to tell which one I like the most, the story or the poem itself. Could you please share a poem with us, along with the story behind it?
I’d be happy to, Jhon. Since you referenced them earlier, I’ll share a poem from the “old shul” series. In this set of poems I reflect back on the struggling Washington Heights synagogues of my youth, especially the one we attended on 179th Street, next to the entrance ramp of the GWB. That shul was like our second home, and just as we had chores to do at home, we also had our shul chores.
Like many houses of worship, our shul had an outside announcement board with the names of the clergy, prayer times, and the bible portion of the week. Every Sunday morning, my brother and I would take turns bringing the board into the shul so it could be updated and we’d then bring the board back outside.
We hated this chore, and not only because of our general objection to doing anything on a Sunday morning not involving TV. The board was large and heavy and the stretch of 179th Street we needed to carry it down was a minefield, littered with broken glass, excrement (dog and human), used needles, and the rats who lived in the narrow strip of “garden” running alongside the shul. What made it even more frustrating was the fact that the announcement board wasn’t actually serving any practical purpose anymore. Anyone still left in the neighborhood who attended the shul received a bulletin in the mail with all the relevant information.
But deep down, we knew there was an importance to keeping the board updated. It was a way of marking our existence, of announcing the fact that we were still there, despite all the reasons not to be. At times, it reminded me of the old Sunday morning cartoons we’d watch when we were younger. The way a character could run past the edge of a cliff and, as long as they kept moving their legs and looking forward, they could defy the laws of physics. The important thing was not to stop moving, not to look down.
impr0v1sati0n
we kept updating the street-side announcement board
long after the sermons lost
their titles
when the few of us left
already knew the prayer times
and any other jews who chanced upon it
too busy figuring out where they took a wrong turn
to care about the timing of afternoon services on a tuesday
it became its own ritual
fumbling with the rusty lock
half-frozen fingers seeking a winter’s grip
to slide out the thick plastic cover
long detached from the metal frame
the awkward trot with the
heavy board down the block and
into the shul where generations of
letters and numbers in various stages of yellowing
disintegration jumbled together in
a primordial language of babel
as more letters broke
became extinct altogether
we had to improvise
an upside down backwards 7 standing in for L
1 and 3 touching to make a B
until the entire board became an improvisation
replacing something broken
that needed to be announced
even if mostly obscured
behind the growing number of scratchitti tags on the plastic cover
that told the passersby everything
they really needed to know.
Pinny Bulman is a Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award-winning poet. Many of his poems incorporate imagery from his childhood experiences in pre-gentrified Washington Heights, NYC to explore themes of personal and collective transition, displacement, and loss. In addition to the BRIO award (2014), Pinny has been the recipient of several ADR Poetry Awards (2013, 2016) and a finalist for the Raynes Poetry Prize (2015). His poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including Poetica, Red Paint Hill, The Subterranean Quarterly, Poetry Quarterly, Jewish Currents, and Mima’amakim.
For additional info about Pinny’s “old shul” poem series, including poetry and photos.
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Jhon Sanchez: A native of Colombia, Mr. Sanchez immigrated to the United States seeking political asylum. He received a law degree from I.U. and an MFA from LIU. Currently, Mr. Sanchez is an attorney and enjoys traveling and cooking in his spare time. His publications in 2017 are “The Vinegar Scent of Books,” available in Swamp Ape Review https://www.swampapereview.com/ and “Acacia and the Thief of Names,” available in Existere http://www.yorku.ca/existere/currentissue.html . Nominated for The Best of the Net Anthology 2016 and for a Pushcart Prize in 2015 and 2016, respectively. He was also awarded the Newnan Art Rez Program for summer of 2017.
