Invitation to a conversation

“As stories of violence and images of terror continue to exercise their power, poetry, it seems to me, becomes ever more necessary. Not so much for what [poetry] can say, but for the way it’s able to invite readers into a more conversational way of being and doing.”

Thus writes the Australian Noel Rowe in his personal statement for the 7th Jerusalem Poetry Festival Anthology, edited by Ariel Hirschfeld and Agi Mishol. Rowe's words reflect a practical and relevant – but above all humane – approach toward poetry, literature and art in general in our time. Not poetry as a lofty, prophetic, heroic medium, but rather living poetry – talk that seeks attentive ears.

If we accept Rowe’s point of view, the question immediately arises about whether such a thing is possible, whether a conscious, cultural basis still exists that would allow for this intimate and indispensable conversation. It seems to me that the response of poets in general (and the poets of this festival in particular) ranges from complete resignation – barricading oneself inside language, a resignation that may stem from disbelief in the ability poetry has to influence, effect change or educate – to the attempt to overcome in any way the barriers that culture, media, and violence place in our path. It sometimes happens that the same poet may be found at both ends of the scale, proof of the constant uncertainty about whether to become involved or to isolate one's self.

Take, for example, Haim Gouri, the senior Israeli poet of the festival, whose lyric voice is completely open to the winds of change. In the first lines of his poem ‘Changing’, he presents himself as someone who has lost his previous identity: “I’ve already noted that I find it hard to recognize myself,/ that only out of habit people greet/ someone who’s no longer I.” The poet compares himself to an empire vanquished by barbarian forces, and depicts, with irony, the bureaucratic failure to find a solution: “When I apply to the appropriate authorities/ they tell me it isn’t their business, I should pray, I should apply to God./ But He too is very busy at the end of the millennium.” [Tr. Vivian Eden]

In another poem, Gouri continues in the same spirit, describing his ‘I’ as defenseless against the flood of detailed, historical images, bearing as always hints of violence, of loss and of individual as well as civic responsibility:

I am full of abandoned villages, abandoned objects,
gaping shoes, pocked bundles, shreds of woolen blankets
[…]
I meet men’s head cloths, kerchiefs, hoods and scarves;
another veil, another snood.
I meet nameless lop-eared dogs that remained to guard,
an anklet that continues, still, to seek its foot. [Tr. Vivian Eden]

The figure of the poet is revealed here in a state of continual distress due to Gouri's ethical necessity to settle scores with himself. These sharp lines are especially disturbing because of Gouri's position in Israeli culture and poetry; he is almost the last living heir to what is known in Hebrew as the generation of the ‘giants’ – those who lived and wrote of the Independence War. His words are also disturbing because the deteriorating state of the individual under attack presented in these poems serves as a metaphor for Israeli identity.

Ronny Someck’s ‘Patriotic Poem’ presents a different, humoristic and more optimistic approach to the same problem. Israel, Someck knows, is a melting pot whose bubbling heat rapidly rises to boiling. Perhaps this is why he brings into play the ethnic stereotypes which form an inescapable part of the Israeli dialogue, while lending them a personal and familial touch:

I’m a pajama Iraqi, my wife’s a Romanian gal
and our daughter is the thief of Baghdad.
My mother still boils the Euphrates and the Tigris,
my sister has learned how to make piroshki
from her Russian mother-in-law. [Tr. Vivian Eden]

In this mix of slang and poetic language, ethnicity and comedy, Someck draws himself, his world and his poetry closer to the reader, to any reader, and attempts to point to the unifying, shared experience which is foundation of difference. The poem ends with three consecutive assertions which, with great virtuosity, connect the mythic and the local, the eternal and the temporal. Writing in the first person plural while using accessible symbols serves to emphasize the complexity of the human and social reality out of which he speaks and which he addresses in his poetry:

All of us are workers fired from the scaffoldings
of the tower we wanted to build in Babel.
All of us are rusty spears
that Don Quixote threw at the windmills.
All of us are still shooting at dazzling stars
a moment before they are swallowed up
into the Milky Way. [Tr. Vivian Eden]

Another less optimistic example of the same process may be found in Rami Saari's ‘The Status of Teachers’. The poet lends his voice to a mute, anonymous teacher; his language is also hers, laying out her existential and professional distress before a faceless public:

For years I have read, studied, observed
and lived. True, they pay me
slave wages, my fate seems to hang
on financial committees, on slam dunks
from above. But what I do here every day
returns to me and you like a boomerang [Tr. Lisa Katz]

Saari here underscores the social role of the poet who may sometimes relinquish his personal voice in order to reveal those of others who are less often heard. But in contrast to the seething but joyful mash of voices Someck offers up, Saari's monologue advances step by step toward sarcasm, towards cynicism, the well-known refuge of the helpless. The last words in the poem express a bitter coming to terms with the situation, without hope for change, because the faceless crowd addressed by the speaker has long since ceased to listen:

The bell is about to ring.
I am finishing up.
You’d better take this into account.
There are places which respect their teachers,
for example,
Australia. [Tr. Lisa Katz]

Tusiata Avia of New Zealand too allows another language to enter her own in order to encourage solidarity and express protest. This time the other tongue is the language of her people, Samoan, repressed and cancelled out by the controlling power of English. Avia inserts Samoan into English – quoting, interpreting, translating – and in this way causes the two languages, each one bearing its own cultural freight, to rub up against each other, to clash, causing sparks to fly:

O is for Ola

O is for Ola, the woman who gave me life
is a pa’umuku living somewhere in Apia.
My father was a Palagi. No one knows him.
I should be grateful to be alive to have a good life to live in Niu Sila.
I should be grateful.

The use of Samoan nouns in the English text and her economical style, purposefully laconic, turns one’s attention to language, to speech. Using Samoan is an exorcistic ritual for Avia, personal and social at the same time: personal, because the revelation of Samoan carries with it a feeling of returning to one’s self, repressed due to social, political and familial pressure; social, because Avia exploits her command of English, her poetic talent, in order to draw the repressed Samoan alphabet to the surface and to use it to reflect, however unpleasantly, to the white society in charge.

The ambivalence of language is an idea shared by many poets, and forms the subject of Amir Or's ‘Language says’, where language is a paradox: accessible and inaccessible at the same time, abstract, almost mystical, yet nearby too and concrete, almost physical. The poem presents language as elusive yet the only way to reach the other:

beyond language, language is a wound
from which the world flows and flows.
Language says: is, is not, is,
is not. Language says: I.
Language says: come on, let’s speak you,
let’s handle you; come on, say
you’ve said – [Tr. Fiona Sampson with the author]

In Agi Mishol's ‘Many Waters’, the other at whom language is aimed is specific: the beloved. All of the workings of language are channeled toward courtship and seduction:

From the sprays of pleasure to my feet
I call to you come but also go […]

I swear on my steaming kneecaps in the water –
Pink Ararats.
I admit:
There is not a moment or even the most negated moment
That is empty of you. [Tr. Vivian Eden]

But this is only one aspect of the poem. Toward the end, it becomes clear that the mechanism of seduction and exposure is aimed at a person who, like the poet, is occupied with words, but with a theoretical, more abstract approach: “you now knead words/ And measure the distance from the absence – nothing is more present.” [Tr. Vivian Eden] The poet’s determinedly sensual and sensate language may be interpreted as a double wake-up call to the lover: to see her, the speaker herself, to love her, and also to pay attention to the physical, non-theoretical potential of language, to that profound inner space where language, spirit and body are one. Mishol’s comic closing lines, in their nonchalant yet serious way, express this complexity:

For you I whisper the word ‘owl’
Because I love what it does to my lips. [Tr. Vivian Eden]

The question of the identity of the addressee, the poetic ‘you’, reveberates when a poem addresses loss. And yes, among a portion of the festival poets one hears an explicit conversation with the dead, a dialogue that crosses the borders of time, place and logic. The poetry of Hedva Harechavi enlists the power of obsessive repetition in order to re-materialize in language what will never be again:

and longings seeped into one another
and longings connected to one another
and longings intersected one another
and longings were torn from one another
[…]

and all the longings suddenly became
a kind of broken lump, like
a shattered dog
in a private toy garden
of your own [Tr. Vivian Eden]

The Irish poet Theo Dorgan , in his moving ‘Speaking to my father’, directly faces the existential need for speech. He formulates, at the outset, the powerful desire for conversation, which in this case must cross the border between life and death. The poem begins intimately, in a kind of meditation which includes the reader, “How should I now call up that man, my father,” and moves on, as if the public pronouncement had made it possible, to directly address the figure of the dead father:

How should I sit here and explain to his shade
That, yes, this is the work I do you died for,
This is the use I make of all that sacrifice,
I move the words as you moved heavy tyres.

This conversation, which probably never took place in the father's lifetime, turns in the most natural way to a personal stocktaking with poetry and with the father; at the end of the poem, emotion connects words, poetry and biography:

Father, comrade, the same anger with the world
But not your patience moves me; I make you this,
A toy in words to re-introduce myself
And to ask, what must I do to be your child again?

The Palestinian Israeli Nawal Naffaa' is also settling scores with a father figure, and here too the father is a laborer whose work becomes, in the hands of the poet-child, a metaphor for the relations between them – relations between the older generation, humble and direct, and the new generation which is more skeptical and more bitter, enveloped in a process of doubt and distintegration. Here too, it seems to me, it is the poem that makes possible – despite the distance involved, the cynicism and the difficulties of the present time – the creation of a sheltered space where two worlds, that is, two people, may draw close.

Wave after wave
cut a channel between us
through which I hatch though the opacity of my heart
and go towards his heart
and he abandons his wooden beams
and finds my heart
My father teaches me building rituals
I teach him rituals of destruction. [Tr. Vivian Eden, Hamutal Fishman, and Maya Yerushalmi]

I cannot end this brief, and of necesssity partial glance at the festival poems without calling attention to ‘Preferences’ by the Irish poet Tony Curtis, a work that carries on a direct dialogue with the reader, free of poses and false sophistication, built entirely upon a list of the poet’s personal preferences. Here are the lines which close the poem:

I love tea on cold November mornings.
And for some reason I’ve never
understood, I love islands
and all they encircle.
I love the pure poetry of Beckett.

I am gazing out the window
at three small islands
and two trawlers
ploughing out to sea.
It is the last day of April.
The sea is smooth as a feather.

But I prefer
when it goes berserk
like a salty drunk
and rages against Ireland.

Curtis is not concerned with the question of the identity or existence of the reader; he assumes that he or she is there, attentive, perhaps sensitive in a similar way, and more than this, curious to listen to what he has to say. The common ground seems solid; it exists. And so speech flows via the simplest, most intimate phrasing of affection and predeliction. This is finally a poem of great love, for a place, a country, a person, which brings us back to the starting point: Noel Rowe’s so very wise words in praise of poetry as a continuing conversation, preserving the hope for a better future in generous human speech, even in the heart of a savage world, violent and indifferent.