The Ciphered Psalms of Lionel Ziprin
To speak of Lionel Ziprin is to commune with the obscured twilight of American letters, where orthodoxy collapses and a luminous heresy of the spirit begins. Born in Manhattan in 1924 and raised in a Lower East Side steeped in Jewish mysticism, Ziprin’s life orbited a series of spectral lodestones: the poetry of the infinite, the living memory of Kabbalah, friendship with Thelonious Monk, the esoteric sounds of his grandfather’s phonograph recordings—all woven into the strange warp of his life’s tapestry. He emerged as a poetic voice during the 1950s, orbiting the edges of the Beat Generation, admired but largely unread, a cryptographer of gnostic Americana.
Ziprin published sparingly. His debut collection, “Songs for Schizoid Siblings” (1962), compiled a selection of ecstatic verses saturated in biblical cadences and the sonic grammar of Hasidic chant. Yet he retreated soon after from the public literary life. Operating not unlike a 20th-century Baal Shem Tov in disguise, he worked in a kosher wine shop and obsessed privately (and prodigiously) over manuscripts that few would see. By the time Ziprin died in 2009, countless unpublished works languished in boxes, scripts composed on yellowing typewritten pages, often inscribed with Kabbalistic diagrams in the margins.^1
What can be derived from such a figure, so deliberately errant? Let us first listen.
From “Songs for Schizoid Siblings,” consider the following stanza from the poem “Proem for Littlest God”:
> “The day has risen muttering the Tetragrammaton,
> and all the alphabet ran past me weeping,
> I touched the sky and found it made of bones,
> and sang for those who cannot speak to sing.”^2
This stanza exemplifies the elusive sonic volatility typical of Ziprin’s work. The poem brews a potent mixture of personal revelation and ancestral incantation, detonating meaning along unstable seams. Each line is both coded and emotional—a kaddish for the unspeakable.
It is difficult to pin down whether Ziprin should be read through the lens of psychedelia, liturgy, madness, or mysticism. In truth, he demands all four. His writing structure bears the influence of prophetic mode: an unfiltered monologue of a god-drunk scribe, insistent on wrestling scripture into the shape of contemporary agony.
Ziprin lived with ferocious attention. Friends often noted his encyclopedic recall of Hebrew texts and alchemical treatises. During the 1970s, he became immersed in sound projects, attempting to preserve and remix the Yiddish chantings of his grandfather, Rabbi Nuftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia. These musical sessions, featuring drones and harmonics years ahead of their time, formed part of Ziprin’s vision of a prophecy-based aesthetic, which he once explained in a letter to a collector as his effort to “translate the vibrations of Heaven into the instruments of Earth.”^3
Clearly, creation and translation were always synonymous for Ziprin.
In a manuscript fragment titled “The Gospel According to Zip,” we find a confession wrapped in gnostic denim:
> “I mistrust language, and yet I wed it nightly—
> for all revelation must pass through the fog-machinery
> of vowels and veils.”^4
This admission opens a philosophical corridor fundamental to understanding Ziprin: the paradox of encryption. His verses are often syntactically deranged, rhizomatic in motion, pressing the reader to experience language not as a stable code but as a series of phonetic hauntings—ghosts trapped in phonemes. Language, for Ziprin, was a Golem: constructed, alive, and unpredictable in purpose.
And here is where reflection must move past biography and into metaphysics.
Let us return to that numinous line:
> “I touched the sky and found it made of bones.”
Time collapses in this fragment. Ziprin is caressing the firmament with ancient fingers, only to find mortality embedded within divinity. This inversion is instructive. It suggests a cosmology wherein God is no longer distant but corporeal, fragile, breathing through the cracked jawbones of prophets and madmen.
As I sit beneath the raftered dome of the Moonmoth Monestarium, reading Ziprin aloud amid the dust of oaks and cloud shadows, it becomes impossible not to question—who is this littlest god who haunted Ziprin’s margins? Is it the spark of Shekhinah, or something older, a deity fragmented on purpose within language itself?
A little god, perhaps, hidden in the letters. In the Kabbalah’s notion of Tzimtzum, God withdraws in order to make space for creation. Ziprin seems to practice a similar poetic discipline: withdrawing sense so that spirit may enter. As scholar David Meltzer once claimed of his friend, “He enacted the ancient trick of erasure that reveals.”^5 Each poem becomes a sonic vessel, delivered without instructions, requiring the reader to consecrate meaning through a private magick.
It is difficult to offer a singular interpretation for Ziprin. He was at once the scribe of secret alphabets and a New York mystic leaning over loaves of rye bread. Yet his legacy—though uncanonical—culminates in an urgent form of philosophical refusal. The refusal to be categorized. The refusal to abandon the sacred in an age of ironies. The refusal to strip language of its right to bewilder.
Ziprin may not ask us to follow him into the labyrinths of the sacred made audible. But he does ask us to listen, with the whole body, as if waiting for rain that knows your name.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, esotericism, Jewish mysticism
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^1 Joshua Cohen, “The Mad Mystic of the Lower East Side,” *The Forward*, September 24, 2009.
^2 Lionel Ziprin, *Songs for Schizoid Siblings* (Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1962), p. 14.
^3 Alan Licht, *Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories* (Rizzoli, 2007), pp. 102–104.
^4 Manuscript fragment, Lionel Ziprin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
^5 David Meltzer, Introductory Remarks in *Lionel Ziprin: Selected Poems 1940–1975*, unpublished manuscript, 1989.