The Bagel

“The Bagel” is a 13-line poem first published by David Ignatow in Notebooks (1964) and included in his 1968 collection Rescue the Dead. It immediately became one of his most popular poems as people responded to the playful scenario of the speaker chasing a bagel down the street. “The Bagel” is a strong example of Ignatow’s straight-forward, matter-of-fact poetic style which he commonly employed. The beginning of the poem establishes a realistic scenario, but near the end, the imagery becomes more surrealistic as the speaker mimics the bagel somersaulting along the street. Due to its fanciful correlation—speaker becoming bagel—the poem is often viewed as humorous. Ignatow said he wrote the poem while feeling sorry for himself, as he felt trapped in a cyclical routine. According to an interview with Gary Pacernick, poet Robert Bly called “The Bagel” Ignatow’s “good-hearted tribute to the Jewish people.” (For more on this interview, see Further Reading).

Ignatow was a Jewish poet from Brooklyn, who lived most of his life in New York City. He was inspired by the Imagists, particularly William Carlos Williams, and employed their technique of using everyday language, common subject matter, and precise imagery. Ignatow mostly wrote free verse, lyrical poetry with short lines, centering on human foibles and the struggles of working-class people in urban environments. However, his use of colloquial language and sharp imagery was common even in his later prose poems and poems about nature.

Poet Biography

David Ignatow was born on February 7, 1914, to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York. Max Ignatowsky was a Jew who had emigrated from Russian-occupied Ukraine and Yetta Reinbach Ignatow was from Austria-Hungary. Ignatowsky was a bookbinder and once in his teens, Ignatow worked with his father in the book bindery. Ignatow also took jobs as a butcher, night clerk, messenger, and salesman. During the Great Depression, Ignatow worked as a newspaper reporter for the Works Progress Administration and then as a night clerk in the New York City Sanitation Department. His literary success began with fiction when his story “I Can’t Stop it” was placed on the Honor List in the 1933 Best American Short Stories. In 1937, Ignatow married the artist Rose Graubart and adopted her son, David Jr., born later that year.

Max Ignatowsky helped finance Ignatow’s first book, Poems, in 1948. Ignatow’s early short lyrics detailed the travails of the working man and scenes of American domestic life. This debut was well-received and reviewed by Ignatow’s literary hero, William Carlos Williams, in the New York Times Book Review. Williams called Ignatow “a first-rate poet,” whose poems were “for the millions,” and praised his economy of language and everyday subject matter (in Breslin, James E. B., ed. Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, 1985, pp. 171). Blessings from his mentor aside, Ignatow did not publish another book of poetry until 1955, consumed by working as a salesman in the family’s Enterprise Book Bindery.

In the 1950s, after editing the Walt Whitman Centennial Celebration Chapbook for the Beloit Poetry Journal, Ignatow was invited to revitalize the obscure journal, helping it gain significant national attention. At the same time, he met Robert Bly and developed a life-long friendship. His second book of poetry, The Gentle Weight Lifter, was published and met with critical success. In 1956, he and Rose had a daughter named Yaedi, with whom Ignatow was close throughout his life. David Jr. had a mental episode and was institutionalized. Several of Ignatow’s poems are addressed to members of his family and explore his feelings of pain, self-blame, and joy.

Throughout his life, Ignatow wrote or edited more 27 books and received many notable poetry and writing awards including Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize, the John Steinbeck Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and both Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts grants. From 1980-84, Ignatow served as the President of the Poetry Society of America and from 1984-86, he was a member of the Society’s governing board. He found work teaching at Vassar College, Columbia University and York College of the City University, where he was a poet in residence.

Ignatow died on November 17, 1997 at the age of 83 in his East Hampton home. His last collection, Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems, posthumously appeared in 1999. Throughout his career, Ignatow remained hesitant to make pronouncements about his importance as poet, saying to Gary Pacernick, “I don’t know what it means to be a poet, I really don’t know. It means to affirm yourself, for one thing, to affirm yourself to the universe. That you’re not only a speck but you’re also a spark.” Ignatow has been lauded by many as such a spark.

Poem Text

Ignatow, David. “The Bagel.” 1968. From Poetry 180. Ed. Billy Collins.

Summary

David Ignatow’s “The Bagel” is a 13-line free verse poem without a specified meter or rhyme. The speaker stops their walk to pick up a bagel they dropped on the street. The bagel rolls away in the wind and the speaker is annoyed for having dropped it in the first place. They feel this accident is a bad omen of things to come. The bagel increases speed as it rolls and the speaker runs after it, exerting themself, lowering their body until they begin to double over. The speaker then begins to somersault, turning “head over heels” (Line 11), like the bagel. Their mood shifts to happiness.