Zibby interviews award-winning poet and psychiatrist Owen Lewis about A PRAYER OF SIX WINGS, a masterful, moving, and timely collection written in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel. Owen reflects on the heartbreak of watching global antisemitism resurge, the personal anguish of having family in Israel, and the urgent need to record this moment through poetry. He and Zibby talk about how, interwoven with headlines, personal stories, and lyrical snapshots of grief and resilience, Owen’s poems bear witness to a year of trauma and hope.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Owen. Thank you so much for coming. I totally booked with Zibby to talk about your beautiful poetry collection, a prayer of six wings, which is so beautiful and so moving. Congratulations. 

Owen: Thank you so much. Thank you. 

Zibby: Why don't you give a, an overview of this beautiful, slim, poignant collection. 

Owen: Okay.

As so many Jews worldwide, October 7th hit all of us and the overtones to the show were haunting for most of us. On top of that, my personal story is complicated by having a daughter who lives in Israel, two grandchildren, then three now, thank God. 

Zibby: Positive. 

Owen: And so it, it's a new level of worry when you have close family.

Although everyone, all 1200 murdered that day felt like family. So in many ways the book. It blew through me. I can tell you how I found my hook into it, but it both blew through me and kept me together for that year of very intense worrying and often not knowing what to do with your worry.

Then compounded by how quickly the world turned against Israel began to see Israel as the aggressor and I lived. The epicenter, it seemed to me of the destruction of hostage posters was 79th and Broadway. And every morning the posters were ripped down, defaced, terrible words written over the posters.

You'd seen them in pieces. And the next day, dutifully put back and I was walking back from Lincoln Center one night, side to side with someone who was ripping down a poster. I was about to say something. He probably sensed the words coming out of my mouth. Fortunately, my wife pulled me back a little.

He raised the scissors at me take a step closer and I'm gonna take you out. And so it felt like the war was not just a distant war but was really being fought right here in New York and there was no separation. And my start it begins, these are my cousins. That line came to me.

My wife's has a distant cousin whose child was at, the adult child was at the festival. She got out, thank God. So that was my first line. The second, that was my first poem. The second, those haunting images of Noah Arga, the beautiful young woman being thrown over the motorcycle. And of course my first granddaughter's named Noah.

So that first poem shifts from images of Noah to my Noah, and if, and it could be that name repeats as you read. And so they're all my Noahs, right? 

The third poem, and then I thought there was it just took me away. The first hostage released was. If you can re there's an older woman who said Shalom to her captors, her name was, and in Minsk, that was our family name, so again, I had this immediate tie in, not only as a people. But as very specific persons by name, so then there was no stopping it. There was no stopping the book after that. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I've read so much about. October 7th, the aftermath, the feelings, all of it. But there was something different about this.

You not only did you in talk about your own fear as a father, as a grandfather, you also interspersed all of these New York Times articles and factual thing. So you're giving us a timeline, but you're also then punctuating it with your own sort of. Heart wounds, if you will. And then little snippets like you have this here.

I'm just gonna read this one thing. You have this one short poem called Overheard in a New York restaurant. I can't talk about Israel tonight. I know. I can't not talk about Israel tonight. I know. Can we talk about here? Sure. Let's try to talk about here. It's like you capture the moment. This is how we all feel.

Do like to talk, to not talk. Nobody knows, basically. Nobody knows how to get through this time. And that is what all of the essays the poems try to do, like to intellectualize it, to understand it, to put words to it. Even your experience at Columbia getting caught, like in the mob, talk about that scene too.

You're in it, you're really in it in every way, 

Owen: right? No that, that's I think you point out something very essential. It might seem like poetic journalism, but I was obsessed with headlines. What now? What? Now? What's today? What's today? So interspersing those headlines. I'm not reporting the news per se.

I think it's William Carlos Williams who says something like, I'm gonna paraphrase it poorly poets don't report on the news yet people die for the lack of what they bring to the news. That was a bad paraphrase, but that's okay. I get the gist. Yeah. So yeah, the headlines oriented in time and part of what I thought was.

A way of recording somewhat objectively, but subjectively, this was a year I lived through, this was a year we all lived through and at a time when the poetry establishment was really disallowing the validity of Jewish suffering and disallowing. Marginalizing the experience of Jews. It felt like this set of experiences is gonna be lost.

It has to be recorded. And I think many of my colleagues in the poetry world, I. Are really pushing for people to make statements about genocide. I just came from AWP. 

Where I guess I'm a little late to the party, but this whole concept of the weaponization of Jewish memory and the weaponization of Jewish trauma, I thought, this isn't really logical, if they wanted to call it, some people used Jewish trauma as a justification. Yes. I, there are people who do that, but to go right to that word, weaponization is fighting a battle that shouldn't be. If anything, the poets should be out front saying, let's listen to one another. 

But it's happening a little bit but not as much. So as, as far as this book I felt I needed to make a record.

And that was both some of the headlines which signified where we were. And my personal timeline. 

Zibby: Wow. By the way, at A WP, there was an email that went out to everybody who was moderating ahead of time, suggesting that they all stand up in support of, against the genocide and all of that.

And, it's just it, the whole thing is mind blowing how this conflict is right here. It is everywhere it is surrounding us, literally on the streets and in the business, and in the work, and in all of it. 

Owen: Yeah, I, I have to say to AWPs credit, last year, I, and I was very tense. I did a panel I led two panels.

One on the poetry of aging. That's a whole other story. The panel was called Damaged Bodies in the World, writing the Jewish Body and Body Politic. Which was really a way of saying we really wanna talk about institutional and social antisemitism as well as personal antisemitism. I was very apprehensive that our panel was going to be disrupted and AWP did a very good job this year, last year.

Anything Jewish was disrupted in, in, in a very not nice way, but they really allowed and made sure that the spaces. So I have to credit them. 

Zibby: I love it. 

Owen: Were you at AWP just now? 

Zibby: I didn't go. One of my colleagues went, but I was, I couldn't go. 

Owen: It's a lot. 

Zibby: But I got some reports. So to your own personal story, so your daughter is a musician?

Owen: Yes. 

Zibby: Can I read this? A belief in order poem that you wrote. You say a belief in order. My daughter returns to bring music to a stunned country. Her orchestra straining in every note, still echoing halls once overfilled once. Beethoven's Tempi. Fifth. I wanted to tell her to be safe. Stay in New York. She knew all. I didn't say. If I hear missiles. She stays in their midst to rally the percussions, the clear voices of a congregation of horns, flutes, luring frightened ho pos back to the singing banyans, dreaming doves to the date palms the strings, full timbers. Seeking the Autumn gardens Blue musca. The fields scented white saffron crocus, their necessary music that heals even as it anticipates the wounds.

Did I even pronounce all that right? That was so beautiful. You did it. 

Owen: You read it beautifully zibby. 

Zibby: Oh, thank you. Thank you. It can take me on the road with you if you like. 

Owen: Whoo. Are the National Bird of Israel. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Owen: And flowers were chosen, their fall flowers, but the blue and white, but yes she returned with absolutely.

I got them to come back briefly.

But they turned right around and went back. Especially as the orchestra was beginning to perform, they did a lot of outreach. This is the orchestra that plays for the Israeli opera. They have a symphonic series and such a commitment to bring art, to not let that be lost in the midst of this trauma. I was very proud of her. 

Zibby: You can feel your pride and you can feel your pain. And the coexistence of the two, I think adds so much depth, right? We want our kids to be close and safe. We want them to accomplish, we want them to do what makes them happy. And yet that instinct to protect it just doesn't go away, right?

Owen: Frank never. 

Zibby: Oh, and there, there's a bit of this, like playing music on the Titanic vibe in the poems, like what happens but she's just doing it like she's the musician. And no matter what happens, it's beautiful with the sirens that come later in the, just amazing. You have the one scene with your granddaughter's birthday party where everyone has to climb up a ladder, go into the safe room for five minutes.

Then go back down and at the end your daughter is like, why can't, why is my birth my, your granddaughter says why is it over? Why is my birthday over? And it's like that devastation paired with the bigger things that she doesn't totally realize, oh my gosh, it's really 

Owen: moving. And she says, I want another birthday.

Zibby: Yes. 

Owen: That, that's, you realize, we hear it as saying. At this moment in time, is she even gonna have another birthday? She wanted, of course, the party to keep going, right? Yes. But, oh my God, when she said that, we nearly all started crying. Her parents and I heard it. It was after, in the great sweep up after a party, and it was quite haunting how children know something.

I do think she knew something on some level.

She said, I want another birthday. 

Zibby: You also used an expression that I had not heard before, A generation's miscarriage. 

Owen: Oh yeah. 

Zibby: Talk about that. 

Owen: In the second poem where my granddaughter, I'm waiting for a lesson. She's waiting for me to speak and I'm wondering.

Is there gonna be another generation? Will there be other generations? So that this image of another Noah, under this pockmark blood pock covering, it felt like broadly, this is very specifically a miscarriage for the young people of who are. At, the age of reproduction, but it's a historic miscarriage.

In some way. How did we get here? There are some Israelis who just want more and more land, but most Israelis that I know really want peace and coexistence. I wanna believe that Hamas has preempted the voice of Palestinians. Certainly they have suffered terribly and in my heart of hearts I don't believe that every Palestinian is out for genocide.

They want coexistence and in fact, many Palestinians within Israel live as full citizens and value that relationship, this is like a historic miscarriage. How did we get here? 

Zibby: That's what makes you a poet, right? Is the use of words sparsely to represent so much more that. 

Owen: Go in multiple directions.

Zibby: Yes. And then the last part I wanted to read you say later, I don't know when life can return. And in this dialogue, 40 years, my friend, our grandchildren's lifetimes, not ours. Is that what you think? 

Owen: Kind of I feel like the Israel that I knew, although I have to say life springs back, at least in Tel Aviv which is what I know best, but you have a generation of traumatized people.

The children who were exposed to this how did they recover? How did they ever speak of this? And yet when you look at the history of our people. We sprung back after the Shoah in amazing ways. And I also wanna say the whole Rahi Jewish world, we sometimes only highlight the Shoah but the Mizrahi world had their own Shoah in, in the early and mid fifties.

And somehow we spring back. So maybe it's not 40 years, but it's that. Sense that just as we as slaves needed to find a new mentality, I guess I'm looking forward to the post-traumatic concept of being Jewish and coexisting and I think the Mizrahi Jews and the Mizrahi poetry, contemporary Israeli poetry is so important because just as the ashkenaz.

We have a history of living with Christians in good and bad times. They have a history of living with Muslims in good and bad times. And so I think looking a bit to their poetry is also a way, but I very much believe that deep listening, we can our diplomats hopefully will create some kind of ceasefire, but let's never mistake a ceasefire for peace. There's a lot of person to person work and I think deep listening and poetry is one vehicle into that listening that paves the way for real peace, not just a ceasefire. 

Zibby: Wow. Can you quickly touch on how you are a doctor? Like to me, doctor brain is not poet brain, right?

There is, it's an analytic, math, science, brain, and yet here you are so creative. And maybe that is totally wrong of me to even say or think. 

Owen: No. It's it takes a lifetime to master anything really. But I think that I don't really conceive of these poles of my life as different.

First of all, I'm a psychiatrist. I'm also a child psychiatrist, so listening and words being my vehicle of hearing, of healing and hearing. I mean that's been entrenched. So whether I was writing or not writing. I'm listening and I'm trying to communicate, and the child psychiatrist part of me keeps right in the foreground how important play is.

I play with my adult patients, but poetry, creativity comes out of play and that kind of open space where anything is possible. And in my academic world fortunately, I've. I've worn a few hats. My whole life I was also devoting a good part of each week to teaching, but since five, six years ago, the Columbia Medical School has a freestanding department of Medical humanities and ethics, and I began to shift my teaching into narrative medicine.

And maybe two years ago, three years ago, I was given a joint appointment. As a professor of psychiatry in narrative, in medical humanities and ethics. So it, it's all come together. The big conflict of my youth being an English professor, doctor, I get to do both. I get to teach poetry to medical students.

I have a course on adolescent development through literature and really using literature to sensitize doctors, to adolescents and being an adolescent. I'm in a fortunate position where it's all come together. It wasn't always, there were stretches of time where I just didn't write.

Being a doctor, having a young family, there wasn't a lot left over for a while. 

Zibby: Yeah. Gosh. Do you feel safe as a Jew at Columbia right now. 

Owen: At the medical school? Absolutely. They were far. I was exposed to no disruptions. Occasionally when I've had to be on the main campus. I think that there's, Columbia has a long way to go.

The, even the arrest of these students, which is deplorable I, or the process of the arrest, I have to say is deplorable, Khalil and others. I feel like if Columbia had taken charge of managing its own antisemitism. I think that there's a confusion between freedom of speech and the right for students safety to be protected.

And for education to be protected. And if Columbia University had put those two concepts first within that, yes, of course protect free speech, but free speech is not licensed to harm students, is not licensed to disrupt the education that people are paying dearly for. Interestingly, a lot of what Trump has demanded, were things recommended by the task, the university task force on antisemitism, and had they paid more attention to what the task force had recommended, perhaps it wouldn't have been in this mess and perhaps these students would not have been plucked off the street in the way that they were. So I think Columbia as a university has a ways to go in reckoning and I think when professors put politics first as their prime agenda, were in a position where these rights are forfeited. 

Zibby: Wow. Owen, this book was beautiful. I am really impressed. I appreciate your use of language to describe something that at times feels hard to articulate. So thank you very much and thanks for chatting with me. 

Owen: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. 

Owen: Bye-bye. 

Zibby: Bye-bye.