Solomon the Lover | Episode 06

The Be-Loving Imaginer

PODCAST #6: SOLOMON THE LOVER | be the scripture you sing

by

Martin Bidney

As a be-loving imaginer I get from today’s mentor, King Solomon, world-class chances to love and imagine. As one who wants to be the scripture he sings,

I get to re-sing an actual biblical scripture, the “Song of Songs” that Solomon wrote. Note how startling is the first six-liner of my singable rewrite of this Bible book! The whole song is about physical love; no god is ever mentioned. Solomon wrote the best-known love song in the world – also likely the most passionate – and in my 280 poetic responses I try to reframe the wisdom it teaches.

I’ll read, first, Chapter Three, appealing to us moderns with its recurring refrain; and then the last half – the last four page-long chapters, to show you what I mean by making the song “singable” for modern English readers, so you’ll appreciate why I wanted to reply to it not once but 280 times. I’ll then offer my “Prelude” as a mood piece, helping us picture the ancient Middle East. In (1) “Solomon, Calamus, Qalam” I relate one of the Solomonic spicy herbs, the calamus, a symbol of masculinity for Walt Whitman, to the modern Arabic word for a “reed,” used for writing beautiful calligraphy. Poem (2), “Ballad of Solomon and the Tiger,” shows my own imagination taking off! I then pay, in poem (3), a “Tribute to Solomon and Shula,” the latter lady being Solomon’s Shulamite beloved in his “song” and my own beloved in mind, as I’m identifying full-time with my Mentor, Comrade, Collaborator, Friend. In short poems (4) and (5) I offer loving wordsongs of the kind the medieval troubadour love poets made, using freshly invented new forms to create new bezels, golden gem-frames for beauty.

In poem (7) I try the bold experiment of writing up some of Solomon’s Proverbs in an ancient Greco-Roman form I’ve recently revived. For me, the Solomonic Shula has become, like Venus, a veritable goddess not only of love but of Beauty, motivating me to seek out new stanza forms for continually varied, diversified love-liness. And here, too, is my tribute to a new idea. In scripture, Solomon is credited with writing not only the Song of Songs but the Bible book of “Proverbs,” called a source of “wisdom and instruction.” Could Shula, then, be Lady Wisdom? In Jewish mystical kabbalah, God’s Bride, his emanative Female presence, is the vitalizing presence that animates the entire universe. Is the Solomonic Shula both Beauty and world-enlivening Wisdom? Of course!

In poem (12) I translate from Hebrew a hymn to the Sabbath Queen, a Shula of Loving Wisdom.