On Poems And Other Words
Jane Medved
In Hebrew the word for “world” has the same source as the word for “hidden.” A semantic clue that there are forces in play beyond what we can perceive. This tension between the seen and unseen has always fascinated me. I am drawn to the permeable membrane between the material and spiritual worlds.
Many great writers have explored this duality. The poems of Rumi and Rilke immediately spring to mind. But my favorite sources of inspiration are traditional Jewish texts: two thousand years of reflection on the connection between time and spirit, space and soul, matter and infinity, destruction and repair.
I love poetry and lyric essay for their ability to contain these multiple realities, to create worlds where contradiction illuminates rather than constrains, where the strange is expected,
the unexpected often familiar, and one can stumble upon suprising truths that are somehow already known.
photo by Rebecca Sigala
Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (Grid Books 2024) Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press). Her translation of Wherever We Float, That’s Home (Maya Tevet Dayan) won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize (Saturnalia Books 2024) Her work has appeared in the anthologies: Breaking The Glass: Contemporary Jewish Poetry (Greentower Press 2023) and Ache: The Body’s Experience of Religion (Flipped MittenPress) Her awards include winner of the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B.McCabe Poetry Prize – Honorable Mention. Her translations of Hebrew poetry can be seen in Hala, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Copper Nickel. She is the poetry editor of the Ilanot Review and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
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