No longer searching for the next Yehuda Amichai
“And the tool called language, what does it give us? What kind of barrier can it erect against death? If something should happen tomorrow, heaven forbid, what remains of Rafi is what is contained in his poetry. The people who encounter me in texts will encounter something of me in their lines”.
“People always want to hear about [famous Israeli poets . . . ] and aren’t interested in young ones,” Weichert told Ido Blass in a 2012 newspaper interview. “There’s no curiosity”.
“I insist on speaking about this because I think there is wonderful poetry [out there]. But unsold books are sent back to the warehouse. Bookstores don’t stock poetry for long. There are fewer and fewer newspapers and literary magazines don’t reach a broader audience. How can new poets be discovered? I’m always recommending books [to people] and I manage to persuade them. But I’m only one person. There are many who don’t know how to read the new Israeli poetry.”
Thin Lines, Weichert’s 11th book of poetry [published in 2012], is filled with moments of joy that are expressed in the poems he wrote for his [then] five-year-old daughter Dar, as well as sad ones dedicated to poet-friends who died recently – Giora Leshem and Yoram Ben Meir, works of ars poetica and poems about his Ramat Gan neighborhood.
“I don’t plan to write,” Weichert says. “When it comes to me [ . . . ] I get some paper or a [computer] screen. I publish a book when I think I have enough poems that meet a certain standard; a period is documented and perpetuated and I continue onward. There might be a next book or there might not. I’m always into poetry. When I’m not writing I teach, edit, translate and write about poetry.”
Thin Lines contains two long poems, the longest, Weichert says, he has ever written. On of them depicts a supermarket encounter with a large fish, the greater amberjack, just before the Jewish New Year. The second is about a class reunion at Weichert’s former primary school. “It was the happiest time of my life,” he says. But “meeting people from the past arouses a feeling that a Pandora’s box may open. I went there with a strange feeling, and left with a poem filled with anger about this reunion: what time had done to us and how we can never be in the same place again. While the feeling was difficult, I was glad to get the poem. I went knowing that there was a poem in it, because what do I have in common with these people, each having chosen a different path? The reunion gave birth to a startled, angry poem.”
In answer to a question about his interest in aging and the passage of time, Weichert says, “Of course these subjects occupy me, in the philosophical sense asking where I stand in relation to them. And the tool called language, what does it give us? What kind of barrier can it erect against death? If something should happen tomorrow, heaven forbid, what remains of Rafi is what is contained in his poetry. The people who encounter me in texts will encounter something of me in their lines. Death occupies my thoughts every day. I don’t always write poems about it, but ever since I was a child I have been intensely aware of time passing, and that makes me experience life in a sharp and energetic way.”
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About poetry being written by young Israelis today, Weichert says, “A lot of moving and complex things are happening. I think that the attempt to find a new [Yehuda] Amichai in every generation is a mistake, because you can’t find in the present what you had in the past. Language changes, consciousness changes, and also the way language organizes into forms. I read almost everything that is published in poetry, and I’m filled with optimism from the point of view of its high quality.”
Since poetry books don’t sell well, how can he keep his publishing house going?
“It’s hard. I invest everything I can of my not very great earnings. There is some support for particular areas from various foundations that we manage to raise or poets who write letters for us do. I recently started a Friends of Keshev group of ardent supporters, asking them for modest donations to help us to operate the press. In addition, it isn’t true that nothing sells. There are books that sell well, translated works better than Hebrew ones, and older poets sell better than young ones. When it’s necessary to take a financial risk we take bank loans and pray.”
Book of fantasies image © violetkaipa on Shutterstock
