Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Professor of English and was Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She lectures on modern and contemporary American poetry at Oxford University, UK. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other places. Her work is represented in a number of anthologies including Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry ; Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice; and Poems of New York (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets).
Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and Now (University of Miami Press, 1996).
Judith Baumel was born in The Bronx in 1956. She attended The Bronx High School of Science, Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. She combines her urban, Jewish upbringing with her early academic work in the physical sciences. Her work is about memory and accommodation, about greed and hunger, lust and rage. At times funny, at turns, deeply spiritual and philosophical, Baumel confronts a range of contemporary subjects, from race relations to motherhood, modern Jewish experience to popular music. She has received awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Recognizes Its Own, Laurence Goldstein Award in Poetry from MQR, and fellowships for residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Millay, among others.
THUMBS UP
On certain fall mornings it's possible to walk Eighteenth
from Tenth to First into a white sun blinding the tunnelled street.
From within that obliterating light come shades,
figures loading and unloading cargo, holding briefcases or babies,
leaning on fire trucks. The hints of two seasons cross in the air,
as, on either end of the extreme school year,
shuffling curious September or restless June,
the humid New York heat will descend on classrooms
where even under high ceilings the thick air becomes torture.
Onto the old half-varnished seats little legs pour moisture
through the clean wool plaid of new school clothes, thinking
New Year's, thinking Columbus Day, thinking Thanksgiving,
or through cotton sundresses, waiting for hydrants and hoses and
pools,
and the teacher despairing, shuts the lights for an illusion of
coolness.
In the gift of half dark children rest their heads on desks, some
brood,
some notice the vegetable smell of soft old wood.
They all begin Thumbs Up: Heads down, fists closed, thumbs
up, one child wanders the room to touch a random waiting
thumb
whose owner may go down the hall to the water fountain,
return, and touch another, and so through slow and slower time
all thumbs, all mouths are touched, each knowing
the approach of the next, subtly, through that dark flow,
each growing up into the shuffle of new mornings gnarled
with purpose, out on the streets, watching the world's
business emerge from the shadows, come into relief, stop caught,
go past, and be finally as brilliant, seen backward, as Plato
taught.
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