Proverbs of Limbo: Poems
by Robert Pinsky
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024, 80 pp., $26.00)
According to Jewish belief (and I am certainly no expert on this), there is no such thing as the concept of Limbo. Jews do believe, however, that “all of the dead go down to Sheol” and that “this world is compared to an ante-chamber that leads to Olam Ha–Ba, (the World-to-Come),” as per My Jewish Learning, a project of 70 Faces Media, the largest nonprofit, nondenominational Jewish media organization in North America. An additional belief says that “The average person descends to a place of punishment and/or purification, generally referred to as Gehinnom” (Gehenna). Typically, the soul’s sentence here continues for a year (which corresponds to the year-long mourning and recitation of the Kaddish), after which it ascends to the Garden of Eden.
Limbo, on the other hand, is a Christian concept that generally refers to a place on the border or edge, as the Latin roots suggest, between heaven and hell. It is a neither-here-nor-there place, and it also happens to be the subject of Robert Pinsky’s first book of poems in eight years. This collection “mines and maps limbal regions,” which, for Pinsky, include “familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as limbal realities that are more personal—clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture.” The collection also “tips its hat” to William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell and continues Blake’s tradition of resisting conventional understandings of places like Hell and Limbo.
Another poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, gave us the word “proverb.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for this word is from around 1375, in Chaucer’s writing. It seems fitting that this word would be coined by a poet, borrowing from French and Latin (to “put forth” a “word”), which reflects the idea of a saying that is presented or shared, often as a concise expression of wisdom or truth. What common wisdom or truth about Limbo, then, is put forth here by Pinsky?
Pinsky, the award-winning poet and former three-term US Poet Laureate, recently retired from thirty-six years of teaching at Boston University. Growing up in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, and having attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Pinsky earned his BA in 1962 and his MA and PhD in philosophy from Stanford University in 1966, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing. He also served as editor of the 25th anniversary volume of The Best American Poetry and is the former poetry editor of Slate.
This acclaimed poet and critic offers Proverbs of Limbo, a collection that puts forth the truth about the importance of names, of voices and language, and of inheritance, and the way that somehow our own lives happen in between the lives of others.
One of the wisdom-truths that Pinsky dwells on in the collection is that our names hold significant meaning. They say who we are and where we are from; sometimes they say who we are “after” or who we are “for.” Proverbs of Limbo opens with a poem called “Poem of Names” and references grandmothers, war, estate planning, dying, and Biblical figures, and contains the line “It’s the dead people that motivate me,” which was a response Pinsky gave to a young boy during the Q&A of a public reading. That answer seems to have been the catalyst for this book. Several of the poems’ titles are simply the names of their subjects, of real people the author has known, and many others name people who have been inspiration for Pinsky or otherwise part of his formation as a person and poet.
When talking about names and all they carry, inevitably, Pinsky speaks about places and about the ways names have changed for both personal and historical reasons. In the poem “Place Name Echoes,” he writes, “Hidden in the homely consonants, echoes of blood. / Jerry Lewis changed from Levitch, Ukranian for Levi.” Later in the poem, he says, “Fate saturates names,” and he continues to trace how history can be parsed through these name changes.
In addition to places, names carry people. In a poem called “Being a Ghost,” Pinsky writes about the ghost-like existence of grief. The poem describes the experience of having the phone numbers of those who have died: “Alone without my dead to phone / I’m left adrift as when I can’t / Remember a name I know I know,” he writes. When a name is changed, when we’re grieving, who is in Limbo? In all these experiences, he finds that language is the only way we can name these feelings, but it is always imperfect—always in between the capital-T Truth of what we feel and what we’re trying to say.
Although the poems in the collection come from one consistent voice, they also include others’ voices, and they also meditate on how we speak about others—both living and dead. One poem, “The Funnies, 1949,” uses cartoons to discuss this. Pinsky writes of
………………………………………………………………….mysteries more
Telling than they looked, for a child to wonder at: intimations
In how the women were drawn. Or in the two kinds of foreigner:
Evil or funny—and was I one?—in “the poor man’s encyclopedia.”
How do we speak about others? How do we see them? At the end of a person’s life, we eulogize him. In the poem “Obituary,” Pinsky describes an obituary as “The only page that’s always about life […] / The other pages of News are all about death” and asks what is “worth saying” in such news.
Pinsky thinks about what prompted him to write about this kind of “news” in the poem “Cataract.” Towards the end of the poem, he says,
………………………………………………….Loss
Too gathers and falls. My eyes adjusted
So I could name the people and things I saw,
Murmurous comfort like chanted begats of descent.
Each name a shadow’s elegy and a presence.
Like eyes adjusting to light or dark, he seems to suggest, a person adjusts to death and loss. But this offers a new vision, which he presents in these poems like a list of descendants or a genealogy.
Pinsky’s collection ponders all these things and the importance of repeating the names and lives of people we have lost, who led to our existence. In “Repetition,” he writes,
I want to publish a book with on every page
The one same poem, all not by me but mine.
The Lamentation of the Fiery Furnace or
Tales of the Passage the Chorus of the Many
The Celebration of Ancestors Not My Blood,
Thud-Thud, the Few the Many the One the Other.
The mixed chorus on every page struggles
To repeat again the birthright I cannot claim
Without accepting the inheritance again.
Here, he mourns not just individuals but celebrates all those who have formed him. He also considers what is lost as time marches on; people forget. Even when “you lug your battered oar far inland,” oftentimes “You find a people who don’t know what the quaint /Artifact might be, although they do admire it /As a relic of that ancient rumour, the ocean.” Perhaps he sees himself as the one lugging an oar, only to find that his words seem not urgent but quaint. He seems to worry that people do not know the world about which he is speaking.
The final poem, “At the Sangoma,” addresses this more directly. Several times it repeats the line, “I asked the ancestors.” In a middle stanza, Pinsky writes, “I asked the ancestors / About their suffering.” They tell him, “Because it was ours, now / It is yours as the shape / Of your head is yours.” He then wants to know if this is true for his children. The ancestors tell him: “That / Is your problem […] / Honor it or not.” And that is what Pinsky is attempting to do in his collection—to honor the suffering and celebrate the lives of those he considers his ancestors.
Like Chaucer and Blake before him, Pinsky’s poems put forth what is commonly known and true, but something about which people need to be reminded: we, down to our names and the numbers in our phones, carry others with us. We honor where we are from and who we are from when we use our voices and language to say those names, to hold onto them. Our stories of them keep them here with us, and keep them among the living. The poet knows that a poem is a limbal place and it is there, in a poem, where we find an edge between the living and the dead.