Adam Sol

Poet, prof, point guard and dad. Not necessarily in that order. He/him.

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Good morning! A new How a Poem Moves essay has been posted. It's about a poem by Dobby Gibson that pulls back the curtain on craft. Sort of.

https://t.co/ITJ3pSSzBl

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

When the world is on fire, we need to hear from our poets. Come hear two of the best, @afmoritz and Karen Solie, at the Vic Centre for Creativity on March 19. Open to all, registration requested.

https://t.co/1iYweTogMQ

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

https://t.co/1wFxVZMXDk

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

ברוך אתה יי, אלהינו מלך העולם, מתיר אסורים

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Is anyone still on this platform? If you are, and want to hear me read some poems, come to the Tranzac on Wednesday night:

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

We really liked Transmitzvah, and this platform seems like a really good place to mention that:

https://t.co/04UvynC3hU

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Last week, I had the privilege of meeting Congressman @RitchieTorres. I learned a lot of small things and one very big thing.

I expected to meet, well, a politician, a run-of-the-mill progressive who, for whatever reason, broke from the pack on Israel, who grasped the basic point that until Hamas is removed from Gaza, no peace is possible, no rebuilding, no end to the war, because Hamas won’t let there be.

I was wrong about him. And it was the most optimistic experience I’ve had in America in recent memory.

It began with Ritchie‘s insistence that we meet in the Bronx, in his district. I figured it was a convenience, and since he’s the congressman, I trekked up to the Bronx.

Half an half into our dinner I realized that the Bronx wasn’t the location, it was the point. His support for Jews, I discovered, isn’t about Israel but about the Bronx.

We met over dinner at a little Italian place nestled among a profusion of immigrant eateries on Arthur Street - Mexican, Albanian, Italian. He talked about the astonishing diversity of the district.

The Bronx has the highest concentration of small businesses owned by multiple generations of a single family in the country. He took me to one Jewish-owned store that had etched the Star of David into the concrete at the entrance. When in the 1930s, friends warned the owners not to broadcast their Jewishness out of fear of antisemitism, they responded by carving their Jewishness indelibly into the entryway. Their current congressman - the same family still owns the place - beams with pride at a brazenness he believes defines the borough.

I think of Jews as my people. He thinks of the entire dizzying array of cultures and religions and social classes that make up the district, including a Jewish community he knows intimately and the first Catholic Church I’d ever seen in New York that was actually bustling with worshippers, as his people.

As we talked, I came to understand why he thinks so much about the Jewish experience, why he fights the anti-Israel campaign so fiercely, far beyond what might be explained by his constituents or donors. He could do a quarter of what he does and still find the same grateful Jewish donors at every turn.

But for Ritchie, it’s bigger than the Jews. It’s about the future of progressivism, and thus of America. In his mind, his Jewish community embodies progressive values, and the illiberal turn in large parts of the progressive political world are a war on those values.

He has questions and criticisms of Israel, smart ones, ones I share, and he asked about them. But he sees in the wild hatred and rage against Israel a larger war on Western liberalism. The same activist who rails at Israel’s existence, he says, also thinks America is a standing crime and calls its great promise and ethic of liberty a lie. It’s the same activist who denies that America has made massive progress in race relations over the past century.

Progressives, he told me, have to get back to believing that progress is possible.

He learned to connect these dots from Dr. Martin Luther King, who steadfastly refused to go down the left’s anti-Zionist rabbithole, saw the Jews as great allies and viewed the hatred of them as a bellwether of decline. Ritchie is close to Dr. King’s 93-year-old speechwriter Clarence Jones. I’d met a man who knew his history and defended it with gusto.

He also knew the Bronx down to the minutiae of individual family histories. Our dinner was interrupted by a patron thanking him for something (I didn’t catch what). It was slow going leaving the restaurant because every waiter knew him and wanted to shake his hand (and then got stuck also shaking mine).

And he reads. He knew more Israeli-Palestinian history than most Jews or Palestinians. His one ask of me as we parted: book recommendations.

There is another kind of progressivism, alive and kicking in working-class and immigrant spaces, and starting to fight back. Ritchie is its vanguard.

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

My newest How a Poem Moves essay is up. It brings together two short poems of pain, doubt, and hope.

https://t.co/LgBxwCAQz6

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Just in time for church! My latest How a Poem Moves essay is about confession and mischief in
@domenicahope's "Con." Enjoy!

@coachhousebooks

https://t.co/iifE8WDrBm

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Just in time for church! My latest How a Poem Moves essay is about confession and mischief in @domenicahope's "Con." Enjoy!

@coachhousebooks

https://t.co/BouIkH4rJf

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

@taratweeetz @The_Temz_Review Congrats!

[Vic College UofT @VicCollege_UofT]

Join us for the launch of the Victoria University Centre for Creativity! Enjoy cross-disciplinary discussions with leading artists and thinkers and experience a showcase of student work. May 9, 2-5 p.m. at Northrop Frye Hall (NF003). Register now: https://t.co/NDskuDSWKo #UofT

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Zadie Smith on language in the current moment.

https://t.co/rsnL4z5p6O

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

@alightupon @Arsenalpulp @CanadianPoets Congrats, Light!

[Allie Esiri, Poetry curator @AllieEsiri]

Cillian Murphy reads Yeats' masterful 'When You Are Old'

Happy #StPatricksDay!

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Dance.

https://t.co/XayNGGavO7

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

Tonight! Rawi Hage and Claire Batterhill read at @VicCollege_UofT. Full details, including link to the livestream, here: https://t.co/LfHyu5BXAw

[Ayin Press @AyinPress]

In another installment of Otiyot, Moriel Rothman-Zecher shares his poem, "Why I cannot speak in full sentences." Art by Meirav Ong.

Read the full piece here:

https://t.co/ZtmRw21al1

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

@benmitchell621 Don't write what you know; write what you are willing to discover.

[Adam Sol @adamyael]

@RjPriestpoet Yep