Strange Land Poems

Thomas Ades' Polaris--The Metaphor of Music

2012-01-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

Part of the wonder of classical music, for me, is attending its performance live—the small meal before, the glass of wine, the movement of people into the lobbies and the hall, the mix of high and low dress, the anticipation as the musicians tune their instruments, and then the electricity as the conductor floats onstage.

The forced attentiveness.

Last night, I went to Lincoln Center to hear The New York Philharmonic perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I am, I admit, not an enormous Gustav Mahler fan. His music often strikes me as a bit ponderous. Except for his Ninth. Perhaps because it was written after the death of his daughter and with the knowledge that he too would soon die of heart disease, it is filled with grief and, as well, the wonder of being alive. Mahler died only a year after completing this, his last, symphony. The first and last movements are my favorites. Who doesn't tear up in those final moments? I recently downloaded the Ninth performed by The Berliner Philharmonica and conducted by Claudio Abbado. It might be my favorite, although many people recommend Leonard Bernstein’s 1979 performance. Of course, there are many many versions. While I haven’t heard them all, I haven’t yet heard one I hated.

Why am I writing this? Granted, Mahler’s Ninth always bears a return. But, it wasn’t just Mahler that sends me to the page. Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic’s Music Director opened the evening with the New York premiere of a 13-minute contemporary piece written by the young British composer Thomas Ades called Polaris. After the Ades pieces, Gilbert could have thrown up his hands and said, that's all for tonight folks. I would have been cool with that and felt, honestly, that I'd received more, more than my money’s worth. It was terrific.

I have always had difficulty with music as metaphor, particularly in the sense of the concrete. Music represents, evokes abstract emotion for me—joy, ecstasy, pain, sorrow,…but I am less successful at finding concrete image in the notes. I suppose I am too tied to words. I need the lyrics. Funnily enough, even lyrics in a language I don’t understand. Opera, for instance, paints pictures for me. There is something about the human voice, on the page, in the air.

But last night, the Polaris did it for me. Of course, the title refers to the North Star, or Pole Star, around which other stars appear to rotate, giving me a first image. The symphony notes also speak of navigation, suggesting the sea and some kind of voyage. But it was the music, with its recurrent theme, the departure and return to what seemed a single note (the star?), the turbulence, the interplay of a bass section set apart from the orchestra and the woodwinds like two people separated by at least an ocean, and their final reunion, that convinced. I felt as if I had been on a voyage. I felt the cold North Sea wind on my face. I heard the creak of a ship. I tasted salt! It was glorious.

Ades conceived Polaris for performance with a projected visual work by the Israeli film- and video-maker Tal Rosner. The work has been given with projections arranged in different ways, but it is also written so that it can be presented as a purely musical piece, which is what Gilbert chose to present to New York. You can see the images and a brief clip of the combined orchestral/visual presentation on the web. The film images are beautiful, but Ades’ music doesn’t require them. Perhaps, in fact, the voyage is better with images of one’s own. Judge for yourself.

2012! Finally

2011-12-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

So many things to be thankful for -- friends and lovers, decent eyesight, books, all of the books being written and read, Borges and Montale and Levine, dogs and old people, a good view and a sunny day, foggy days, all ten of my fingers, smart phones.

I am not making too many resolutions this year except to begin a novel, write at least ten poems I am proud of, be a better daughter, and not spend so much time on the internet. I will also finish reading The Aeneid. I am going to be attentive to my writing life.

Today is the last day of 2011. Tomorrow is the first day of a new year. This poem is not one of the 2012 ten. It is only the last poem I'm writing in 2011. Well, I think so anyway. There are still a few hours left. So much could still happen.

Faith

It’s already 2012 and I know too many souls
who won’t stop reading me

about the end of the world. How twelve months from now,

it will finish. Everything will finish.

With solar storms and supervolcanoes, there’ll be a rebalancing

of the universe, the dispensation of all

consciousness. All I can do is open my hands, show them

its palm and wrist, the blue rivers running

with fish, their surfacing almost a kind of forensic

defense. A prediction becoming visible. Open my hand

to catch the leaf, the ball, the full weight of light

thrown down on top of me. We all know too many souls who say

live every day like its the last. Tell them, find me

Jeremy Schwartz, even one soul who will make a fire hot enough.

Art as Something Other than Truth

2011-11-08T04:31:00.000-08:00

I want to start with a long quote from Maggie Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty. This comes from a chapter in which she discusses how artists and writers have somehow, in at least some spheres, become regarded as ‘tellers of truth.’ Or that they are at least supposed to be ‘tellers of truth.’ Whatever that means. Here’s her quote:

When it comes to art, I personally cannot see the use-value of these proclamations, nor of the related, superficially inverse claims that a culture’s artists are somehow its “priests of truth.” I don’t mean to suggest that one isn’t working toward something while working on a piece of art, something that could be called “truth” (though it might also be called “making it work,” “aesthetic resolution,” or some such thing). But to approach works of art or literature with the hope that they might deliver a referendum on truth, or provide access to Truth-truth, is to set up shop on a seriously faulty foundation. A work of art may tell us little about factual truth, or about Truth-truth, but that is no reason to banish or belittle it. So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.

She goes on to say:

By virtue of its being multiply sourced, art cannot help but offer up multiple truths. To a moralist in the market for “an ordered universe and objective truth,” such an offering can be only a contradiction in terms. Worse still, because of its episodic nature, art offers the passing impression of truth, without the promise that the truth revealed will have any lasting power.

I quote this, not because I want to belittle or begrudge artists their role in telling truth. On the contrary.

Art is important not because it shows us the one version of truth; it is not important because artists are prophets are visionaries. Rather, art is crucial because it allows us to recognize other perspectives, other versions of what might be called truth. Art forces us to shift our vantage point so that our view shifts, broadens, brightens. Of course, it doesn’t mean that what the spectator sees or hears is what the artist intended. I don’t think most artists have such agendas. Art opens a door, without the confrontation inherent in most rhetoric, and the spectator is often changed, even if in only a small way.

I am entering my third week of my fellowship residency at Vermont Studio Center. I am surrounded by artists, all who are telling their version of what might be called truth. Although I don't think they would call it that. They are just laying it down, in paint, in stone, in words, whatever it is.

P.S. Maggie Nelson is, in my opinion, a genius. Her book of poetic essay Bluets is among my favorites. Her book Jane was a thriller of a poem. Anyway. Enough gushing. Go read her work.

The Quick Wit of Lydia Davis

2011-11-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, I heard the fiction writer, translator, poet Lydia Davis read her work at Johnson State College last night in Vermont. As an aside, I’m in Vermont for a month, writing poetry at the Vermont Studio Center on fellowship. So lovely! Anyway, back to Lydia Davis. I love her work, for its conciseness, for its edge, for its wit, for its dark humor. Stripped of all description, stripped of all narration, her ‘stories,’ if one dares call them that, translate the interior musings of a deliberate and attentive mind into what I want actually to call verse.

This is a very very short story poem (unpublished I think) that she read last night:

Contingency versus Necessity

He could be our dog

But he’s not our dog

So he barks at us

There is so much contained in those words as it relates to human/animal relations and love. What happened to their dog? The elliptical three lines leave us filling in the blanks. Like a poem.

She reminds me that the details left out can often be the best part of a poem. Strip it down, she seems to say. You can read more of her work here.

The Lemon Trees

2011-10-16T06:25:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a week in Florence. I am reeling. I am settled. Sometimes one must leave for a place the opposite of everything that is familiar to know what is real.

Florence is filled with art and poetry. Dante and Boccaccio, Bernini and Michelangelo. To see their work is to feel inadequate, is to feel inspired. To be drunk at 2AM in front of The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in the Loggia dei alters all your perceptions. The moon seemed full every night. I cannot write. I can do nothing but write.

To travel, to live in other countries, to speak with someone whose language is not your own, is to see the world from another chair. It is to learn how things smell differently, sometimes better, it is to relearn how to see and taste and think. Even if the experience is filtered through your own culture and biases. It changes you, not just for those few days, forever. You can’t help but carry something of the scent back with you.

For me, for me as a writer, going from place to place is crucial to my creative process. I know it is the same for others. Though not for everyone. Travel estranges everything, especially what you return to. When I returned from Italy, even wine and bread smelled differently. And lemons. I spoke with an Italian man about what I loved about Italian poetry. Most of all it is Eugenio Montale. Most of all it is his poem "The Lemon Trees." The man I spoke with knew very little English. I speak no Italian. But we both could say Montale. I pasted my favorite translation below in which the last stanza explains everything I’ve just said. Where the sight of a lemon tree can remind you of everything amazing in life, where the sight of a lemon tree can “blow your bones wide open.”

Listen, the prize poets stroll 

only among the trees 

with uncommon names: 

boxwood, privet, acanthus. 

Me, I love roads that run out 

among grassy ditches into 

mud-puddles where kids 

hunt skinny eels; lanes 

that follow field-banks down 

through beds of reeds and 

end up in back gardens 

among the lemon trees.

Best if the birds' chatter-prattle 

is hushed, swallowed up 

by the blue: then you'll hear 

- clearer in the still air – the whisper 

- of companionable branches, 

and catch a sense of that smell 

that can't tear itself from earth, 

drenching you in edgy pleasure. 

Here, by some miracle, the battle 

between one distracting passion 

and another dies down, and here 

even we who are poor pick

up our share of wealth – 

and it's the scent of lemons.

Look, in these silences 

which things sink into 

and seem on the verge of 

opening their closest secret, 

you'd expect once in a while 

to uncover some mistake 

in nature, the world's still point, 

some weak link, the loose thread 

that leads us at last 

to the heart of truth. Eyes 

rummage in every corner: 

the mind seeks agrees argues 

with itself in this perfume 

that floats – as day fades – 

over everything; a silence 

in which, in every dwindling 

human shadow, a troubled 

divinity could be seen.

But the image fades, and time 

takes us back to the din of cities 

where you see the sky only 

in bits and pieces, off up 

among the chimneys. Rain then 

wears the earth out, dreary winter 

settles down around the houses, 

light grows miserly, the soul bitter, 

till one day, through a half- 

shut gate, you see 

among the trees in someone's yard 

the yellows of lemons – 

and the heart's ice melts, 

and with their music 

the golden trumpets of sunshine 

blow your bones wide open.

Midnight Despair in the Garden

2011-09-21T00:48:00.000-07:00

I am so filled with despair regarding Israel’s prospects. I can’t seem to write poetry. I can barely read it.

I have four step-children, whom I adore, who are good and kind and deserve bright futures. They will all serve in the Israeli army. The first, the dark-haired one with amber eyes and who likes to sleep late and is the only teenage girl I’ve met who doesn’t like Justin Bieber, enters next year. At no point in the last thirty years, has Israel been so isolated. At no point, has its soldiers been so unsafe. I blame Netanyahu and Lieberman, Israel’s current Prime Minister and Foreign Minster, respectively, who together formed alliances with the Israel’s religious Orthodox parties and right-wing to obtain majority in the Knesset (the Orthodox who could care less about the futures of my stepchildren except that their taxes fund their religious schools and pay for their innumerable children). In return, the government continues to pour money into the coffers of the religious, the right-wing settlers, and those who believe any settlement with the Arabs represents existential suicide.

I also blame the Palestinians who elect rabid fundamentalist leaders who yearn for Israel's destruction. I am realistic enough to know that Israel often felt it had no choice but to react violently when the rockets were being fired, its own people were being slaughtered. But there have been moments of potential compromise. Compromise desired by good people on both sides.

There were so many missed opportunities that a little imagination and compassion could have taken advantage of. They say that many Israeli Arabs cried the night Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was murdered by a Jewish extremist, that many are still crying.

Instead, settlements have expanded 50% since Oslo, Israel is more isolated, Egypt and Turkey who once were partners at least on paper, burn down our embassies. My own father asks, what does Israel want? We have treated the Arabs so long as enemy they have become enemy.

Many Israelis and Jews dismiss Obama, who while perhaps not doing enough in terms of tough love, had Israel’s back even in the worst of times. Didn’t he sit their, his hand under his chin, while Netanyahu lectured him on the error of returning to 1967 borders? Even I couldn’t watch that charade.

Now, I feel, we are in the worst of times again.

There are so many kind, generous, intelligent people here, in Israel. I believe that even the hearts of the right wing are not evil. Why are they being gagged? Why are we letting the fanatics and ignorant decide our fate?

I wish Israel would do something insane. Assuming a Security Council vote is delayed (which it probably will be), and the Palestinians take a vote to the UN General Assembly. The GA doesn’t have the power to create a sovereign state, but it can upgrade the Palestinians’ current status at the UN from a non-member “observer entity” to a non-member “observer state.” That would give the Palestinians the same status at the world body as the Vatican (not that Catholics don't have a lot of injustice to answer for). That means it could become a member of a variety of UN organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organization. What if Israel voted ‘YES.’ The facts on the ground would not change for anyone, BUT it might force the Palestinians to begin acting like a real country and perhaps recognize Israel’s right to exist, respect borders, step away from terrorism. It might also force real negotiations on both sides, force serious people to take charge. It’s a big ‘if.’

But what if Israel does nothing?

Never-Ending 9/11

2011-09-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

New York, September 11, 2001

It’s four days after the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. I guess it’s time to come out from under the covers. Ten years sounds like a long time, and I suppose in ten years, much CAN change. It has, but in many respects, for the worse.

I started a poem four days ago on the morning of the 11^th, watching the CNN coverage of the memorial. My poem began with these lines.

I think it important to know who is being barred from the journey.

I think it crucial to acknowledge that not just anyone can go,

that some will be forced to abandon their unborn daughters

and their guidebooks,

their decapitated Barbie standing sentinel.

The nighlight left lit.

I think it imperative to go ahead and decide

who will hand out

the pieces of paper,

who will pin the note explaining what took place

to their sleeves.

Cheery, huh? It was not going to be an optimistic or happy poem, more a reflection on how individualistic our society remains, how more individualistic, consumer driven, inward our society has become in these ten years, how afraid we remain.

It’s difficult to remain optimistic when on lives in the Middle East, though even in the wake of 9/11, there were attempts. Many Israelis thought that the demise of the Twin Towers would awaken public sentiment to the threat of fanaticism and fundamentalism. That surely enlightenment ideals would rise up to defend ‘western’ liberalism and freedom, they thought. Instead, America finds itself enmeshed in two wars with no sign of success in either, fundamentalism is on the rise, the ‘Spring’ forecast by protests and revolution in Libya, Egypt, Syria gives way to chaos and increasing anti-Israel rhetoric. The Palestinians, still without a state, will likely take their case for statehood to the UN in two weeks, and Israel finds itself increasingly isolated.

At the same time, I find it difficult to agree with those who yearn for Mubarak’s return to Egypt, that Hassad crush the protests in Syria, who wax nostalgic about Middle East police-state regimes even if the populist democracies (can we call them that) replacing them attack Israel, call for its destruction. I have to believe there is something better, and not just for Israel.

I also believe that the survival and prosperity of Israel is a prerequisite for the prosperity of the US and the promulgation of the values we treasure. As Adam Kirsch writes in Tablet Magazine,

Egyptians attacking the Israeli Embassy,
September 9, 2011

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

Concomitantly, I believe that Israel relations with its neighbors will not improve until the cultivation of democratic and liberal values including respect for other religions, women’s rights, the rights of minorities cannot occur in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. The two are intertwined. This will not be an easy or short process, nor is success certain. In fact, as we have seen, the direction can be backward. But as was pointed out by Armin Rosen in another 9/11-inspired article in Tablet, these same regimes maintained their power in part by using Israel as a scapegoat or target for anger to deflect attention from their own repressive policies. They spread rumors and lies about Israel and their own policies about Israel, even as they maintained civil borders. These regimes had it both ways. I can but hope that as freedom of press and voice develop, as people begin hearing and reading other opinions beyond those fed to them, empathy and understanding may slowly develop. It will take years, decades. It may never happen. But it must.

The poem I started on 9/11 has now reached three pages and it is, surprisingly, becoming something of a love poem. There is also optimism and, at least in one part, a rising tide of community. Here’s one passage:

We were on the one highway leading to Kinneret Lake.

There were so many signs and stop lights,

all of them useless.

Traffic had backed up twenty kilometers.

Slowly word worked back window to window

of a terrible accident.

A few drivers leaned out of their vehicles,

shading their eyes, mouthing words

whose bitterness thickened the August heat, the smog

of the hundred idling engines.

The girl in the backseat looked up from the message

she was typing into her telephone,

Maybe they need help, her blue green eyes,

the sun lightened lashes,

meeting ours in the mirror.

Far ahead, smoke began to rise as one

by one, the people stepped from their cars

began running forward.

I don’t know if this passage will remain in the poem, or if I even trust it.

I guess like most of us, I want to believe in the goodness of people. I guess at some point, I have to. How’s that for an ending to this post?

Why I Write: Because Love is the Opposite of Underwear

2011-08-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Let me explain. You continue doing something, hopefully putting in the thousands of hours to become good at it, because you are obsessed with it, you 'love' it, it never bores you. Whatever it is--writing, playing piano, cooking chocolate cupcakes, origame,... When you become blase about something, when you no longer find it novel, when you stop noticing it, like say cotton underwear or the boyfriend whose favorite song you can't remember--you will never become excellent at it. You just don't have the commitment required. You might as well move on to a new hobby, to a new boyfriend.

Every day I write. Every day I read. It just doesn't feel like a good day if I don't. It's not just a job that I show up for. I could pay the bills some other way. I want to be excellent. I hope that my persistence, my obsession will help get me there. I believe talent and natural ability play their roles in all excellence (I mean I could never be a top sprinter or a ballerina, no matter how many hours I put it though I might be better) but 'grit' as Jonah Lehrer points out are as, perhaps more, important. Granted, you have to have at least some talent. I'm not sure how much I have, but I'm hoping my 'grit' magnifies, amplifies it enough to compensate. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking, because I couldn't stop writing poetry even if I wanted to. It's not just an infatuation.

Here's Lehrer's always-fascinating blog in which he talks about 'grit'. It gives me hope that my perspiration will pay off. Anyway, Lehrer's page is worth reading for this as well as other fascinating ideas.

Authenticity of the Expatriate Writer

2011-08-23T00:33:00.000-07:00

I’m back in Israel after being gone two months, and am thinking about self-justification. Why write? Why write about this place?

There is the issue of authenticity. I am not Israeli (OK, I have an Israeli passport but that doesn't make me Israeli). I am not Jewish. I barely speak Hebrew. I will never be Israeli, Jewish, and the chances of my Hebrew improving to any significant degree are, well, slim to none. Here, I am the eternal outsider.

Yet, I believe my perspective is, if not unique, unusual.

Exile and expatriation are conditions that have existed since the beginnings of literature. Physical and psychic distance from one’s native country can give writers/artists perspectives they did not have before. Travelers often comment that they see their own country more clearly or gain new respect/disregard for aspects of their country from another. The Roman poet Ovid, exiled away from Rome, and James Joyce, who lived most of his working life outside Ireland, are two notable writerly examples.

So too, I believe, the alienation and dislocation often described by expatriates living for extended periods in foreign countries contributes to the creative process. Not only does the experience provide fodder for the imagination, but also the eye of the outsider is often one more likely to discern the strange and unusual in what to the native appears commonplace. Certainly some of the most interesting descriptions of the US have come from foreign visitors. From the 19^th century, think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la democratie Amerique and Charles Dickens’ American Notes. From the 20^th Century, think of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York and Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay.

I only hope my American eye, my poetry, is as discerning as it takes in the Israeli landscape, or at least on my small portion of it.

I’ll add that I don’t think my poems reflect a perspective that is necessarily accurate, or at least not always. But my poems emanate from experiences uniquely mine and though filtered through the veil of my American upbringing, culture, prejudices, and religion, I have to believe they resonate, feel authentic, to those to whom I write, which largely means other Americans.

I take comfort from the idea that sometimes the foreign perspective, at first illegitimate, later appears prescient. Milosz Csezlaw, dissident Lithuanian/Polish poet and exiled to California from 1960 wrote on America (always in Polish) widely. In a book of essays published in 1967 and only re-published in English twenty years later, Milosz wrote to his foreign audience: “the fact that America is still a country of the Bible has, and will continue to have, lasting consequences. . . . America is the legitimate heir to the Judeo-Christian civilization. Therefore, it was just and beautiful that the American astronauts flying over the surface of the moon addressed the inhabitants of Earth with an old message, the beginning of the Book of Genesis.” Fifty years ago, the statement inflamed America’s critics, both domestic and foreign, yet how uncomfortably familiar it seems today.

Bathsheba Transatlantic Reviewed!

2011-08-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

I am preparing myself to return to Tel Aviv after being in Manhattan for two months. I am looking forward to a warm sea and the return of long walks with my dog. Friends tell me much is the same (isn't it always?) though the recent demonstrations against the government have caused even our neighborhood to question behavior, curbing back on spending, avoiding expensive restaurants. Though it's unclear whether it's genuine psychic discomfort or evasion. I suppose we'll see if politicians and policies change once the demonstrations die down as they already are, and, more importantly, once new elections are held.

But I had welcome news while I was packing--the wonderful literary magazine The Cafe Review included a lovely thoughtful review of Bathsheba Transatlantic in its Summer 2011 issue. I am so grateful and pleased. The Cafe Review includes some amazing writers and artists, and is always a beautiful compilation. I recommend taking a gander online and subscribing if you can. It's well worth it.

My Middle Class Bubble of Ennui (nothing to do with poetry or not much anyway)

2011-08-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've been avoiding this blog. I've felt such an enormous sense of ennui, not just about this blog (what does it matter anyway?) but in regards to making an attempt to engage the world at all. When I turn on the news, I feel I am watching some other reality that has nothing to do with mine. Or rather that my reality cannot interact or affect that reality. Two bubbles existing side by side with no overlap...

Which brings me to the reason I felt compelled to post today from my bubble of ennui...

In Israel, the middle class (Yes, that's us!!) are rising up. From their couches and comfortable seats in the cafes, they are protesting the rising cost of housing, the fact that the political system no longer represents any of their interests. It's been all over the Israeli papers and media. An essay by Etgar Keret from tabletmag.org pretty much sums it up. As one protestor from the streets says in the essay:

“The middle class is the easiest group to screw,” Alon, a demonstrator pushing a baby carriage, explained to me, “It’s hardest for them to take to the streets; the poor can go all the way—they have nothing to lose anyway. The rich can hire lawyers and lobbyists and who knows what else. But the middle class is stuck there in the middle: without the economic power required to oil the system, but with just enough to worry about losing what it has. That’s why they’ve been milking us dry for years. But it’s over now.”

Isn't that the way a lot of us feel? We're afraid to risk our dwindling capital by making waves. OR, worse, instead of blaming the government for catering to special interests, wars, corporate and financial institution interests at the expense of the middle class, we resent whatever small resources go to the worse off, the unemployed, the poor, the uneducated, the immigrants. It's a form of scapegoating, to pull a term from the Old Testament.

As Etger goes on in the essay about the Israeli protests: I could sense something else underlying his words, something that is shared by all the people I spoke to at the demonstration: how alienated they feel from the Knesset that is supposed to represent them. Isreal’s parliament pushes through, on a daily basis, laws favoring the settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, and other groups skilled at lobbying and manipulating it. It has never engaged in any dialogue with the tens of thousands of people who decided one evening to take to the streets.

Substitute US Congress for Knesset, corporate interests, the wealthy, right-wing evangelicals for settlers and ultra-Orthodox and you have the situation in the US.

Etger then asks the same protestor, “What are you hungry for?”

“For a country that is a little less heartless,” he said, and gave his baby, who had just woken up, a bottle. “One that doesn’t try to push only a culture of power and force, but also a culture that values compassion. Being a Jew isn’t just being a settler, you know; being a Jew also means having compassion. I swear. You don’t believe me? Go home and Google it.”

Me too. A little more compassion, a little less heartlessness.

What to do? I don't have a plan but a few things I'm going to do: write my congressman, donate some dollars to Planned Parenthood, plan how to be in the US for the campaign season, and write a poem.

Giving Away Poetry

2011-07-24T05:50:00.000-07:00

In general, I like John Gallaher's poetry and music blog. It's almost always thought provoking and, even oftener, liable to raise to a few hackles. The latest from July 22nd didn't disappoint, "It's time for a new publishing model (give it away)"

In it, Gallaher advocates giving away written work for free. Not all work, but some it, a lot of it. He begins by citing another writer named David Pogue who also talks about giving away versions of work online. In Pogue's case, it's books on computers. In Gallaher's case, it's poetry. Here's a quote:

Amazon is set up for a version of this sort of thing (showing excerpts of work), where one can browse a few pages from many books. It’s probably about as far as Amazon can go. But publishers and authors can go further. In the way that music labels give away free samplers of their current releases, and individual artists usually have a few mp3s up for free on their websites, I think publishers and/or authors should post PDFs of a good chunk (if not all) of books of poetry.

I kind of like the idea of giving away poetry. Perhaps because my book didn't sell so well (though outside the world of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver's whose does?). But I also get how free stuff brings in new participants, or at least because of price, doesn't lock them out. I know I've found quite a few new composers, musicians, largely through free of music.

The biggest problem, at least for me and probably for others, is that the publishing world brings other benefits--some small recognition, access to marketing and readings, and, if one hopes to use their work as access to other kinds of work, a kind of validation. What would be best is if the publishers agreed to allow a certain portion of the work to be posted as a pdf, given away. I'm not talking about one or two poems, but a big chunk. If the examples Gallaher cited are to be believed, this probably wouldn't negatively affect sales. In fact, it might drives sales of books a bit and perhaps create a larger audience for poetry. In the post, Gallaher says he wants to post his work free online, though by the end admits he's not sure how, or perhaps he got cold feet. It is kind of scary. Hmmmm

A Poem for The End of Days

2011-05-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

So, the world is going to end on Sunday. At least according to one NY preacher. Why are so many of us so anxious to contemplate the end, to believe that in our lives, apocalypse? Every time there is a natural disaster - flood, earthquake, tsunami, fire, even disease - the end-of-timers and religious freaks claim that God is punishing someone for something. Whether it's New Orleans, Haiti, Japan, California, natural disasters are their god's version of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's just another form of greed. I'm better than anyone else (gays, adulterers, atheists,...) and I want my 'just' reward. Throw everyone else into the pit. I want my white velvet cushion next to Jesus, my angel wings. Anyway, I'm making plans for next week.

Of course, the whole end of times on May 21 announcement did spawn a poem or two. Here's one I wrote this week called, for now, Mercy. It probably won't make it into any book, but it felt appropriate for the time!

Mercy

I suppose I believe in evil,

or I believe in it at least as much as I do

in divinity,
and perhaps a little more than I believe

the world will end

this year on May 21^st, which was the message

printed on both sides of a sign held high by a paunchy middle-aged man,

red hair thinning, at the east entrance to Grand Central Station.

Through the white
he’d washed over the cardboard

I could make out the words this side up.

He stood there

all day. I know this because I passed him on the way in

to catch a train, the way out ten hours later. Nietzsche wrote

that weak men invent gods

because they need to punish themselves

for not being born powerful. They resent

the whip-wielding elite

and make up stories of sin

to explain the scars on their flesh. The red haired man spoke

as I walked by. He told me,

the day of rapture

is the end of God’s mercy. I believe in evil

at least as much

as I do in Dickens or at least in his Oliver Twist,

who never once in Dickens’ story held back a quid for himself.

I don’t believe anyone is that virtuous.

Nietzsche suffered

a mental collapse just three years after publishing his theory

of good and evil. They say his last act was to throw himself
weeping

between a worn-out horse and its owner who was beating

it to death. I don’t believe

anyone is perpetually punished.

Day of Regret

2011-05-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

Today marks Memorial Day (Yom Zeekaron) in Israel. Last night, there were ceremonies across the nation, or at least across the Jewish portions, honoring and remembering Israel’s fallen. The dead and injured are not considered martyrs, every mother, every wife, every father, every husband, every child, prefers their loved ones returned. Many of the televised memorials feature interviews and biographies of the bereaved. There is no joy in any of the deaths. There is a sense, however, a knowledge that those deaths are close to all of us, they are unavoidable, they could be any of us, of ours.

At 10AM a horn sounded, everyone stands at attention, if they are driving, they stop their cars and get out, if they are sitting, they stand up. For two minutes.

My step-daughter, who turns eighteen in five months and enters the Israeli army next year, was in charge this year for organizing the memorial for the fallen at our neighborhood’s community center. Inside, songs and poems written by Israeli pop singers, poets, and even a waitress about war and loss were written on posters and nailed to the walls. None of the words were jubilant.

The Scouts (the Israeli version of boy/girl scouts but more intense) had assembled a tent, laid out two cots, army uniforms, waiting, it seemed, for the missing soldiers. There was a guitar laid across one of the cots.

Pictures of all the men and boys from the neighborhood who’d died in Israel’s past wars and confrontations lined the walls. Most of the pictures were snapshots taken by parents, perhaps girlfriends. Only one or two showed the soldier in uniform.

I had errands to run today, which took me an hour longer than usual due to the traffic backed up miles, the cars parked on the sides of roads, near the military cemetery.

There was not a single Memorial Day sale.

What am I trying to say? I don’t know. It was/is a sad day. It is a day of remembering. It is a day of honor. It is a day of regret.

Tomorrow is Independence Day (Yom Ha-Atsmaoot). Tomorrow comes the jubilation. Today is a day of regret.

Poets and Catastrophe

2011-04-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Related to the last post about poets and protest, is the NYTimes article "The Poetry of Catastrophe." Perhaps we turn to poetry rather than prose in moments of great cataclysm because poetry, like the sword, cuts to the quick faster than a slower poison. (Though perhaps analogy here is little off, yes? Prose is not poison, nor poetry a sword, I guess I was speaking to the sharpness of the emotion. Anyway you get the 'point':).) Most catastrophes, natural or manmade, happen when we aren't looking, like 9/11, like the Japan earthquake, like the BP oil spill, like the bombings in Libya, and poetry responds, when it is done well, I think, to the sharp punch of pain and terror and confusion associated with such events. Think of Yeats, Auden, Shakespeare, Whitman. Likewise it captures the unexpected, sometimes irrational, human hope and bravery in the face of such cataclysm. Think of Hecht and Komunyakaa and Adrienne Rich.

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world."
— Adrienne Rich

The same can be said about poetry's capacity to describe revolution.

Khaled Mattawa, Poems and Protest

2011-04-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

A poet friend of mine, Marcela Sulak (who by the way is an amazing poet and you should check out her book Immigrant), recommended the Libyan-American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa. Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya and moved to America in the 1970s when he was a teenager. I have three of his books of poetry. I am ashamed I have never read him before. His work is breathtaking and innovative, and yes, political.

So many in Israel worry about what the revolutions will mean to Israel. Uncountable times I've heard, "No Arab revolution has ever been good news for Israel". Perhaps. Whatever happens, there will be pain. The only hope is that it is short-lived, and that it leads to better things for Egyptians, for Yemenis, for Libyans, for Syrians, for Jordanians.

I copied Mattawa's poem "Now That We Have Tasted Hope," just written below. It's not my favorite of his poems but it is one of my favorite statements. I love the last two lines. You can hear Mattawa read the poem on the BBC web site.

NOW THAT WE HAVE TASTED HOPE

Now that we have tasted hope
Now that we have come out of hiding,
Why would we live again in the tombs we’d made out of our souls?

And the sundered bodies that we’ve reassembled with prayers and consolations,
What would their torn parts be other than flesh?

Now that we have tasted hope
And dressed each other’s wounds with the legends of our oneness
Would we not prefer to close our mouths forever shut on the wine
That swilled inside them?

Having dreamed the same dream,
Having found the water that gushed behind a thousand mirages,
Why would we hide from the sun again
Or fear the night sky after we’ve reached the ends of darkness,
Live in death again after all the life our dead have given us?

Listen to me Zow'ya, Beida, Ajdabya, Tobruk, Nalut, Derna, Musrata, Benghazi, Zintan,
Listen to me houses, alleys, courtyards, and streets that throng my veins,
Some day soon
In your freed light and in the shade of your proud trees,
Your excavated heroes will return to their thrones in your martyrs’ squares,
Lovers will hold each other’s hands.

I need not look far to imagine the nerves dying rejecting the life that blood sends them.
I need not look deep into my past to seek a thousand hopeless vistas.
But now that I have tasted hope
I have fallen into the embrace of my own rugged innocence.

How long were my ancient days?
I no longer care to count.
How high were the mountains in my ocean’s fathoms?
I no longer care to measure.
How bitter was the bread of bitterness?
I no longer care to recall.

Now that we have tasted hope,
Now that we have lived on this hard-earned crust,
We would sooner die than seek any other taste to life,
Any other way of being human.

Melville's Persistence and, well, also a bit of Palestine

2011-04-11T22:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading Herman Melville’s 18,000 line, 150 canto poem Clarel. No one reads Clarel. I can’t even say that I’m enjoying it all that much though admit there are moments of great lyricism.

Why am I reading it? First, it’s about Palestine and pilgrimage, two of my obsessions. Second, it’s poetry. Third, because Melville wrote it long after his writing career seemed ended. Because no one wanted him to write it. Because there was no reason for him to write it—there was no money and no one, including his wife and friends, thought his writing poetry a worthwhile endeavor.

Which got me thinking about obscurity and writing.

Herman Melville wrote five books before Moby Dick. He wrote Moby Dick before he was 30. Moby Dick and his tales of whaling brought Melville fame and a bit of fortune, but two domestic books later, his literary star had plummeted. By the time he was 35, he was for all apparent intent washed up as a writer.

Melville’s spirits and health likewise plummeted. In an attempt to reclaim both, his family and friends subsidized a trip to Palestine in 1857. Melville kept journals and wrote letters but it wasn’t until nineteen years later that he capitalized on his experience by publishing his 18,000 line 150 canto poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

He tried for years to write poetry. His first book of poems went unpublished. His second, Battle Pieces, virtually unread. No one, including his wife, approved of or subsidized his poetry. In fact, Melville’s wife confided to her stepmother, “Try to not mention to any one he is writing poetry—you know how such things spread.”

Melville lectured for three years after his return drawing on his South Seas experiences and travels, but never talked about his trip to Palestine. In any event, he grossed less than $1500 in three years and three years after his return, Melville found a dull job in the New York Customs Service as an Inspector. It was the job he would retain the rest of his life.

Through all of it and until he died, Melville continued writing poetry. This time it was Clarel, his epic poem about Palestine and a young man's search for faith. While not autobiographical, the poem utilizes images and experiences from his journals. But why poetry? Why even to continue writing?

Even Melville himself said about Clarel it’s “a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines eminently adapted for unpopularity.”

Clarel was finished and published in 1876. To no one's surprise including apparently Melville's, the reception was almost uniformly negative. Writing in 1876, Edmund Clarence Stedman of the New York Tribune, wrote, “There is ... no plot in the work; but neither do the theological doubts, questions, and disputations indulged in by the characters, and those whom they meet, have any logical course or lead to any distinct conclusions.”

When Melville died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. Anyway, so back to the question regarding why I’m reading Clarel. I suppose my only answer is: for the same reason Melville wrote it.

Byron Rocks, Sort of

2011-04-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should have known this but only discovered it today: some twenty-nine of Lord Byron's poems were originally written not as poetry to be read or recited but as lyrics to be sung.

Byron wrote “She walks in beauty, like the night,” and “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” as lyrics to go with music composed by his friend, Isaac Nathan. Nathan was not only a composer, but a Jewish composer, which made both Byron's collaboration with him noteworthy and, at the time, scandalous. The collection, first offered in 1815, sold out immediately. Pirated editions, cashing in on the collection’s popularity, also sold out. And Byron and Nathan collaborated on an expanded version, published the following year.

She Walks in Beauty

You can hear several more of Byron's poems set to music at this site.

The music does, indeed, give a different kind of power to the poems. Byron wrote “She walks in beauty,” on seeing his cousin’s new wife at an evening event, wearing the black of mourning, looking beautiful and virtuous; Nathan matched that with a melody for “Lekha Dodi,” which envisions the Sabbath, arriving at evening, as a virtuous bride. Byron wrote “Oh Snatch’d Away in Beauty’s Bloom,” a mournful poem about the futility of mourning, which Nathan set to a meditative melody. “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” Byron’s dramatic retelling of 2 Kings 32-37, the miraculous plague that foils an invasion of Judah, pairs with Nathan’s dramatic music, reminiscent of Schubert’s uncanny “Erlking,” also written in 1815.

But then if it sounds so good, why did Nathan’s music disappear so completely? The paper sourced here claims anti-Semitism. Perhaps.

Paying Attention Again

2011-03-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve been gone from this page more than a month. I did a few readings. I visited friends in San Francisco. My family suffered a crisis. I feel a bit guilty even though I think few people read what I write here. Which forces me to admit I’m writing only to myself. Which is OK, perhaps even good. I’m paying attention to the idea that I feel guilty for not talking enough to myself.

It’s also hard to talk about poetry and art these days. Not only because of my unnamed family crisis but because of the revolutions occurring all around Israel, because Israel is as usual caught in the middle. There has never been an Arab revolution that’s been positive to for Israel. I’m desperately hoping that these, some of these, prove different.

Today, a bomb exploded at a Jerusalem bus stop, thirty one hurt, four seriously. Today, another eight mortar shells hit western Negev between two attacks on Be'er Sheva, and within hours of another strike on Ashdod; on Israeli lightly wounded, at least eight Palestinians killed just yesterday.

While Hamas may have pulled the triggers, it is likely Syria and Iran who planned and urged the attacks. Why now? Not that the attacks ever totally stopped, but why this hard now? Because their own people, Syrians and Iranians, are in the streets, protesting against their own governments. Because these same governments are killing their own people in order to retain power, and the only way they can possibly distract their own people from such killing fields, is by trying to turn their people’s anger on Israel. It’s an old story.

Syria and Iran want Israel to retaliate. So far, Israel has made small targeted reprisals. But even to these, Hamas responds by stating, "Israel is escalating against our people and the whole world should show their responsibility to stop this escalation." My husband says just drop one big bomb on Haniyeh’s house (the head of Hamas in Gaza), though I think he is just one of many heads. The heart lies in Tehran.

Art as Weapon

2011-02-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

Beginning in the early 1950s and continuing into the 1960s, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko—as a weapon in the Cold War. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought too.

Today I spent two hours at New York’s Museum of Modern Art trying to get my tiny arms around the museum’s amazing retrospective of Abstract Expressionism (Ten rooms! Hundreds of paintings!). While there, I got into a great conversation with one of the museum’s docents about AE and it led to the revelation above. I admit that I was skeptical. I’d heard that the US government sent musicians and orchestras on tour of the Soviet Union and Europe as a means of promoting US culture, but avant garde painting? Most Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." The most popular artist after all was still Norman Rockwell, God bless him. Moreover, this was during the McCarthy era when artists and intellectuals headed the government’s lists of suspected communists. And many of the movement’s leaders – Rothko, Gorky, Newman, Ernst, de Kooning, to name just a few – emigrated from countries where socialism and communism reigned. Granted many of them were fleeing persecution but if anything that probably made them seem more dangerous. To think that the US government backed these artists, this kind of edgy art, seemed incredible.

I met a poet friend of mine for coffee, told him the story, and he said, “Yes, it’s true; the US government saw modern art as a means to fight off the commies.” Why was I the last to hear of this?

Of course, US sponsorship wasn’t altruism or prescience, that’s for sure. Apparnetly, they did it because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete. Pollock as propaganda. I loved it. Of course, Pollock never knew about it.

At first, government support for all such arts programs was open. Examples of government projects included an animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, sponsorship of American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring program. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

Not surprisingly, ordinary Americans and not a few Congressman were irate at governmental backing of modern art. One upset congressman declared: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." Doesn’t this statement sound as though cut from yesterday’s newspapers? (See my post a couple weeks ago about threatened cuts to The National Endowment for Arts).

The program went clandestine. The Central Intelligence Agency was put in charge and set up what it called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Orwellian, yes?), and it’s ranks included a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists, all of them run (without their knowledge) by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen literary and art magazines.

The organization put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).

The public didn’t know about CIA backing, Congress didn’t know, even the artists didn’t know.

I’m not sure how much monetary support the CIA actually ended up providing individual artists—certainly most modern artists were poor and didn’t receive widespread recognition until either late in their careers (de Kooning, Newman) or until after their deaths (Pollock, Rothko). The CIA didn’t make Abstract Expressionism. I’m absolutely sure it would have succeeded with or without CIA support, though perhaps London’s Tate Museum wouldn’t have seen it so early. But, the CIA funds did help place modern art in all sorts of public venues -- the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. The CIA may have bankrolled assassinations in foreign countries, overthrown governments, sold weapons to terrorists, etc., but it also provided a dollar or two (even if with ulterior motives) for modern art. Made me feel a little affectionate.

Anyway, what I’m also wondering now is why MOMA decided to do this enormous AE retrospective now? Why now? Perhaps to remind our government how important art and its support actually are? Not just as a means of enriching each of our lives, but as a way to remind ourselves and even our enemies that we, meaning our country, supports expression and freedom in all its myriad flavors. Without that freedom, there is no true art, there is no true creativity, there is only propaganda and stagnation. Well, maybe. Anyway, it’s a fabulous retrospective.

My name is Mubarak, king of kings, look on my works...

2011-02-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

The events in Egypt over the past 19 days reminded me that the world doesn't love anything forever. Time is not an argument. The world will revolve again regardless of the merit of one’s beliefs and way of life. And sometimes revolution works in ways that seem toward the better. I suppose we'll see. As went Ozymandias, Pharoah of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, so goes Egypt's modern-day equivalent Hosni Mubarak. Here's Shelley's poem in Mubarak's honor....

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Killing Creativity

2011-01-31T16:15:00.000-08:00

I tremble when I hear on the news that many of our politicians want to radically reduce, even eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, essentially eliminating art from the public mall. I know America is facing fiscal crisis. I know that hard choices must be made. Yet I tremble at how easily some contemplate eliminating the miniscule funding ($167 million in total, which is negligible rounding error in the $3.83 trillion US national budget) that helps pay for museums and theaters, arts programs and community libraries, poetry and painting and art in schools. I recognize that the ‘far right’ (sometimes self referenced as the ‘real’ Americans) resents that a few dollars find their ways into the pockets of artists whose work they consider obscene, pornographic, or atheist. But actually most NEA and NEH dollars are for programs whose worth goes far beyond the act of creation (and we can argue the value of providing a few dollars to help talented artists pay rent) to fund programs that bring in audiences, tourists, rippling across a community and creating jobs, political leanings nonwithstanding.

Beyond this fiscal shortsightedness, I tremble because when we so marginalize and hold in disregard the artist and the act of creativity, we are allowing ourselves, all of America including the ‘real’ Americans, to fall farther into the pit of alienation and despair.

What makes a human, what separates the human from the animal, is imagination. The ability to imagine, to envision, what it is to be someone else is at the center of everything when we talk about being human.

Without imagination, there is no empathy. What is empathy anyway? It is the capability to share another’s emotions and feelings. In other words, it is the ability to form a mental image, sensation or concept without actually living that person’s life. In other words, empathy is imagination.

Which is why we need art. We need art because art is the human endeavor that most stretches and requires the development of imagination. We need to create art. We need to receive and respond to art. Without art, without paintings, sculpture, without books and poetry, we are less human. Without art, we have less empathy, less empathy for each other, and for the world in which we inhabit. Without art, we might as well get down on all fours with the sheep and the wolves hunting them.

The Weight of Old Work

2011-01-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

When Jewish German poet Paul Celan visited Israel in 1969, Israeli audiences begged him to recite his poem “Death Fugue” (“Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime / we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night / we drink and drink”). He refused. Celan’s host and the people arranging his readings and meetings demanded he read it. He refused. Not once did he read that poem to the Jews in

Israel

. After two weeks in the Holy Land, Celan abruptly returned to Paris. Ten months later, he jumped to his death in Paris’ Seine River (“we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie”).

Israel

was not the only audience Celan denied “Death Fugue.” During the last decade of his life, in fact Celan refused to allow the poem to be further anthologized or read. Why? Based on translator and biographer writings (e.g., Pierre Joris), Celan didn’t want to be associated with what was already being called Holocaust Poetry (as a Jewish survivor of that horror, no one can blame him). Moreover and perhaps more importantly, he felt, according to Joris, that the constant focus on that one poem stole attention from his other later work.

In a similar way, the classical Russian composer and musician Sergei Rachmaninoff came to loathe his famous Prelude in C-sharp minor as it, he said, “overshadowed” his other compositions. Every where he toured, audiences demanded it—“The Prelude,” they shouted—“The Prelude,” they screamed from their red velvet chairs. Of course, Rachmaninoff was one of the few pianists who could flawlessly play this work—Rachmaninoff’s hand spanned almost two octaves. In disgust, Rachmaninoff twice left the stage after angry listeners heckled him for not playing it. Check out this pretty funny video of Igudesman and Joo playing the Prelude, which underscores why the big hands are important!

More seriously, in thinking about these two artists, I wonder just how much our expectations of an artist figure in our assessment of the work, how much does what came before influence our reception of what comes after? It is impossible to read new work by contemporary poets as diverse as Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Brigit Pegeen Kelly without referring to earlier books, the books that first garnered them attention. In all three cases, critics leveled the accusation that these poets are “writing the same poems over and over again.” We expect our artists to not only surpass earlier work but to grow, to change. But in my opinion it is almost impossible for readers familiar with their work to judge without the prejudice of what came first. My point is perhaps the later work IS better but we can’t judge it on its own merits.

One factor affecting our reception of an artist’s new work is the the widely propagated statement that artistic creativity tends to peak early. While we can always point to a Wallace Stevens, there are multiples more of cases like the ones noted above where a poet or writer or artist produces something extraordinary and then disappoints in some fashion over and over. But do poets really peter out after forty or fifty? Is creativity really the primary domain of the young? Sure, there are plenty of examples of young geniuses though when one cites Keats and Shelley, remember they died young. Perhaps Keats early work (completed before his death at age 25) was just a warm-up for what would have come later. I don’t think the situation is clear either way and there are enough examples to support both sides. We might complain that Galway Kinnell has not produced a second Book of Nightmares, but in my opinion, Anne Carson and CD Wright are only getting more courageous with age. I mean Philip Schultz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Failure, would be well served to let his first book go quietly out of print. By the way, I consider that last statement a compliment. If, in twenty years, someone writes that same sentence about me and my work, I will have written a good life.

Here’s a crazy thought—perhaps the rumor of young genius, older has-beens was started by old poets and wizened painters so that they no longer have to measure up. One must think that once an artist has created a body of much-lauded work, it would be terribly tiring to try and surpass it. Moreover, it might be debilitating, psychologically impossible to even contemplate the task. How can I? What if I can’t? Will they still love me? What will they say? I know. I know. We like to think that true artists are beyond caring how their work is received. But most do, if they are human, especially if the audience includes those they love or admire, those whose opinions matter. How can an artist transcend what is already transcendent? Which brings me back to my crazy though, why not go ahead and eliminate expectation?

If it’s not actually true that genius is the domain of the young, at least the idea that an artist has already shot his or her load to euphemistically put it by the time he or she reaches late middle age, reduces the pressure to perform. So one can get back to writing.

A Note on the Past

2011-01-07T00:53:00.000-08:00

If you live in a small intense country like Israel, over time you begin to recognize that there is a very big difference between what one might call ‘history’ and what one might call ‘the past.’ History is an official version of what happened, the one depicted in books and what is talked about on the news. The past is a place of shadows, whispers, failures, and defeats. The past is what you read in people’s faces after the bombings and what you hear underneath the mob’s cries. A mother hums it as she boils the pot of what she’ll serve for dinner, and the father reads it to his children at bedtime. The past exists in multiplicities as does each person’s idea of his or her future.

The past, like the idea of time, means something different every time it’s talked about and defies translation. History means one thing, or at least one thing at a time.

The two can never be reconciled.

Resolutions Kept and Ignored

2010-12-31T00:03:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned almost exactly a year ago in a similar post, 88% of New Year’s resolutions go unfulfilled. This means that almost all of us didn’t meet our goals for 2010, assuming we made any. We can all explain, justify, render irrelevant the gap, but the reality is that no matter how good our intentions, chances are this year’s resolutions will go similarly unresolved. One thing we can do to improve our chances, or at least according to Good Morning America, is to share our resolutions with the world. In fact, you are 10% more likely to follow through. Granted this stat comes from an unverified source and, if your goal is to slim down from a size 12 to a size 6, sharing that unrealistic target with the general public probably won’t increase the odds. But it does make sense to me. Other people’s opinions matter. Moreover, and perhaps as importantly, perhaps making one’s goals publicly traded forces one to set the bar at an achievable level.

So what about 2010? It was a really good year for me—I moved into a condo in New York, my book was published, I spent a month at the fabulous Vermont Studio Center, I am making good progress on a next manuscript. But none of these were explicit goals for the year. What DID I resolve last year? I vowed to read a couple of books I hated. First, at least one or two by German writers, a category of fiction that I tend to avoid (a long story but influenced by two years living in Munich). I also wanted to read Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aenied. So, I give myself a B. I read Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums and half of Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum. I skimmed The Aeneid, yes, searching for the juicy parts. It wasn’t lack of interest but I just had too many other books I really really wanted to read.

Yet, here’s something that surprised me—I wrote last year that I similarly disliked reading nonfiction memoir, historical accounts, biography, autobiography, the story of other people’s lives, true stories. I prefer fiction. Why? Generally I find that fictional stories tend to be better written and more engaging stories than their true to life counterparts. For some reason, when something extraordinary is recounted in a work of nonfiction (meaning it supposedly really happened), I find myself saying, “Really?” or “Well, that’s not so interesting.” What that says about my level of skepticism, I don’t know. Or perhaps what that says about my own perception of my level of skepticism, I don’t know.

Because…. in 2010, in addition to books of poetry, fiction, and nonfictional essays, I read at least 8 books of nonfictional history and biography. Included in the list: The Young Romantics, The Lemon Tree, American Priestess, The American Colony, Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City, The Courtier and the Heretic, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.

Surprising myself, I really enjoyed all of them. Granted, three of these were important to research I’m doing on Israel, but I enjoyed all of them, necessary or not. This is not to say that I’m going to start voraciously consuming the latest celebrity or political autobiography/biography on the Barnes and Noble shelves. But it won’t be because I might not find Sarah Palin’s ghost written narrative entertaining but that given the world of books to read, I’d prefer to spend my few dollars of consciousness reading something more edifying or at least books about better people. I suppose that admission marks me a bit of snob. Oh well.

So what about 2011? I am going to finish Fagles’ The Aeneid. Beyond that, I’m not going to commit. Not yet anyway.

Granta's New Issue--Nihilism in Spanish

2010-12-29T06:32:00.000-08:00

This from The Daily Beast about Granta's newest literary magazine release which highlights Spanish-speaking authors from around the globe, though Argentina and Spain log in with 14 of 22 spots.

It sounds amazing:

The new volume of Granta highlights bright new literary stars from across the Spanish-speaking world, says critic Oscar Villalon—and they wrestle with dark themes in a way few American writers dare to.

...It would seem, according to a new generation of Spanish-language novelists, we are living in an age where Big Ideas are dead, and this is far from a good thing, considering the Big Empty that's filled the vacuum.

...In one way or the other, these authors seem to be wrestling with an understanding of the post-Big Idea world that is perhaps best distilled in Urguayan author Andres Ressia Colino's piece, "Scenes From a Comfortable Life." Jimmy Tanaka, a working-class young man who happens to be Japanese, gets an education from his girlfriend's rich, Germanic father, who supplies him with this piece of sour wisdom:

"This system is a fucking circle of doom. Produce more and more cheaply, and make the consumer swallow faster and faster. […] None of the food or the clothes or the music or the books or the drugs that you kids consume are real. It seems like food, like clothes, like music, but it's all just something like those things, made to be devoured immediately. It's a perfect system. A magnificent, gigantic, super-efficient piece of machinery that produces nothing, totally and absolutely nothing."

I have to read the issue if only to find out if there's any sign of redemption, somewhere, anywhere in these stories.

Nick Flynn's Seven Testimonies and all the backup stuff

2010-12-12T06:43:00.000-08:00

I returned to Israel two days ago to rain and 120 kph winds. It was the first real rain of what is supposed to be Israel’s rainy season. After the wildfires that consumed much of the country’s Carmel Mountains a week ago, the rain is welcome. As the power flickered on and off with the flares of lightning, I opened the November/December issue of American Poetry Review to find a series of poems by a poet and author I much admire, Nick Flynn. The series titled “seven testimonies (redacted)” is, to quote the footnote at the bottom of the page, composed of redacted versions of the testimonies of seven Abu Ghraib detainees as transcribed by the artist Danile Heyman, in Amman and in Istanbul, from 2006 to 2008. Nick Flynn was present for those testimonies gathered in 2007 in Istanbul.

Each of Flynn’s seven poetic testimonies is short ranging from eight to thirteen lines. Each line is also short, two to eight words. The poems are in first person, but a first person that feels drugged, drained, yes, tortured. Flynn creates a nightmarish quality with the use of fragmentation, repetition, illogical combinations. Erratic use of punctuation and capitalization between the individual poems suggests that the seven testimonies are one, that one runs into another, that each punishment was done to one, to all, without relation to the individual suspect, to what he or perhaps she did or might have done, or didn’t do at all. Here is the last of the seven poems of the series in its entirety:

My eyesight in years
I see up yes did this

Yes you this I saw
A sister you see

In the showers you this
In this with yes I

I was naked you this
Yes to me & wanted

Moreover, the “I” in these poems shifts so that at points the tortured and torturer become one and same. The series is the crime of Abu Ghraib rendered lyric.

The entire series fits on less than one APR page, page 8. The rest of page 8 and all of page 9 are taken up by the actual seven testimonies or at least significant samplings from them. The testimonies make for hard reading. But then so do the poems.

Which raises a question—why do we need the actual testimonies? In my mind, it as though Flynn feels his poems aren’t enough to convey the urgency, the terror, the pain of what these men underwent. As though his poems aren’t authentic enough without the backup of the prose.

Flynn goes far to convince the reader of authenticity. The title contains the word “testimony,” implying the source. If he had added “Abu Ghraib," there would have been no doubt. He also adds “redacted,” in parentheses to the title. Redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined. Often the author/editor may make minor alteration to the texts (i.e., transform them into a single poetic work) so that they cohere. With all of this, Flynn leaves the reader little doubt that his poems emanate from actual testimony of Abu Ghraib detainees. This is of course reiterated in the footnote I quoted earlier.

All of this to make the point that I don’t think Flynn’s poems require the support of the actual testimonies. In fact, I think the prose testimonies undercut the emotional impact of the poems by their wordiness, their specificity, their almost clinical description. I wish Flynn had left them out.

As an American living in Israel and writing about my experiences in Israel, authenticity is an idea I spend time thinking about. Moreover, as an American poet reading other the work of other American poets, who often, in my mind, have difficulty writing about conflict, about war, even about the state of the world, I find the issue of authenticity a part of the puzzle. I’m going to write more about this, but not today. Right now, there is an authentic storm raging outside my house, a river pours from every gutter drowning the grass, the twelve pine trees that line the perimeter bending back and forth forty five degrees. I’m curious what will be left standing.

Budrus: A Small Israeli Film with an Enormous Message

2010-12-02T05:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a Manhattan screening of an Israeli/Palestinian film called Budrus. I dragged my husband along with me even though he usually finds such ‘smoleneem’ films one-sided. But he is open-minded and, in the interest of placating his more left-wing wife, came with me. Budrus, produced and released by JustVision in 2010, has been celebrated internationally (Panorama Audience Award, Second Prize, at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2010, Special Jury Mention, Tribeca Film Festival, 2010, and others), but is only now reaching a few US screens. Go see it.

The film itself was remarkable for reasons I’ll talk about below, but the screening itself was also well done. Before and after, there were small receptions of wine and cheese, and two of the three producers, Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha, discussed the making of the film and took questions from the 100 or so spectators. In between, a three-person ensemble including a vocalist (Palestinian), keyboard player (Israeli), and trumpet player (American) serenaded the audience.

Budrus, to be brief, is a documentary film about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. Budrus, for those of you not familiar with Israeli geography, lies in the northern West Bank just east of the green line. Budrus’s 1500 villagers support themselves through agriculture, largely the cultivation of olive trees.

Israel’s separation fence has long been a point of controversy. I’ll go on record as saying I find its existence largely positive. Since its erection, suicide bombs in Israel have largely stopped (though there are dozens of attempts caught at the border every year). As a stepmother of four with lots of friends and family in Israel, I relish the protection. With that said, Israel has no business putting the fence one millimeter beyond the 1967 green line. Unfortunately, the fence often veers into what is by all international and moral reckoning Palestinian territory.

In the case of Budrus, the planned separation fence was going to uproot acres of Palestinian olive groves, divide the village cemetery, and would have passed meters from their only school. You understand the villagers’ anger and anxiety.

To protest the fence, Budrus’ residents, led by Morrar, unite in nonviolent protest. Over months of protest, residents together with international witnesses and participants put themselves between bulldozers, Israeli border police, and what they consider their blood, their olive trees. While the two sides exchanged tear gas, rubber bullets, a rain of rocks, remarkably no one was killed though apparently tens were seriously injured. In the end, and I am skipping past all that is interesting about the film, Israel relocated the fence closer to the green line and away from Budrus.

What was significant was the Budrus protests marked an embrace of nonviolence as a means to change facts on the ground. Of course, Palesinians consider the First Intifada nonviolent (highlighting the difficulty defining nonviolence), but why digress? Since Budrus, similar strategies are being employed in other West Bank villages.

Also significant was the importance of women to the Budrus campaign. The film spends a lot of time with Morrar’s daughter, who is now studying medicine in Bosnia, and she talks of how village women forced the men to allow them at the front of the protest marches. Not only did this hinder Israel’s ability to respond, but also, I hope, underscored the importance of female voices in the Arab world (a world that largely oppresses women). In addition, the Budrus protests required cooperation between Fatah and Hamas, the two ideologically opposed factions of Palestinian Arabs. Morrar, who is a member of Fatah and who spent intermittent years in Israeli jails (though the reason for his incarceration is never explained), stated that he disagreed philosophically with Hamas but pragmatism required cooperation. For this, the two sides came together. Moreover, both camps welcomed and embraced the Israeli activists who also joined their fight.

Which brings me to a third remarkable aspect of the film--the importance of the Israeli activist movement. Tens of Israeli activists spent months supporting and protesting alongside the Budrus residents, even when arrested and in the face of real violence by the Israeli border police. Many of the Budrus residents went on record stating their surprise and gratification that there were Israelis who not only rhetorically opposed the occupation but who were wiling to demonstrate their commitment with their presence. I can’t imagine a better means of building trust and belief between the two sides.

While the film downplayed the injuries some of the residents received and didn’t explore the background and mindset of the Palestinian leaders, it was an evenhanded, even uplifting film. Budrus demonstrated that nonviolence as a consistent means of protest can have effect.

I applaud JustVision for producing the film.

But there is more work to be done and the film raises another question. My husband, who is a native Israeli and who found the film overall positive put it best. His question at the end, “Yes, it’s hopeful to demonstrate that cooperation is possible and that not all Israelis are bad. But for peace, we also need Arab Israelis and Palestinians protesting and standing alongside Jews when Hamas, Fatah, when people representing them shoot rockets, suicide bomb Israeli civilians. When that happens, there might be a chance for real peace.”

2010-11-27T02:55:00.000-08:00

I don't know why this short piece hit me, perhaps because I'm struggling with a poem, struggling to learn Hebrew, tried and failed to learn piano, perhaps because I've tried to draw owls, but it seems apropos to my state of mind this morning. This from Ben Casnocha's interesting blog on current affairs and intellectual life:

I believe a key reason so many people on the road to mastery call it quits is not because drawing a beautiful owl in pencil is superhumanly hard. It's because they thought it would be easy

BookList Review for Bathsheba Transatlantic--Why it Matters (at least to me)

2010-11-25T04:18:00.000-08:00

My book, Bathsheba Transatlantic, was reviewed in Booklist this month. Alizah Salario, the reviewer, was very generous. First, here is the review:

In language evocative and vivid, Wetzel, selected winner of the Levine Prize in Poetry by judge Garrett Hongo, transports her readers to Israel in her first collection. As the title suggests, she dwells between continents and identities. Her snapshots of time and place coalesce into complex portraits, capturing the growth and discovery that occur in spaces between. Wetzel is in conversation with the past as she navigates present-day Israel, invoking Plato, Moses, and David to decipher modern-day dilemmas. Her keen insights are defined by her wide-eyed otherness, and she holds a microscope to the minutiae of everyday life in the way only an outsider can, whether in a close-up of a polygamist gardener or mulling her love-hate relationship with Tel Aviv. Wetzel’s work reveals itself slowly, even gracefully, and she effortlessly spins the particular into the universal. Some of her poems read like exhales—the release of tension through text—and give breath to a poet pondering her identity on the page.

— Alizah Salario, Booklist

Now I have a question: What good is a review anyway?

Perhaps a better way of pondering the same question is via its flip side—how much does a bad review matter?

For those of you who think there is another answer, let me tell you that on the personal level, it matters a lot. A reviewer approaches a book, obviously, from a much different perspective than a pure reader. A pure reader may or may not enjoy a book, but rarely makes the effort to articulate why she responded in a particular way. So a writer has little insight into why his or her book connected or failed to connect with the reader. This provides enormous psychological benefits for the writer. A writer can put a reader’s enjoyment or lack thereof down to subjectivity, to mood, can blame it on the weather or, even better, blame the reader. The reader just wasn’t educated enough or worldly enough or harbored hidden gender/racial/sexual biases. "It wasn’t my fault that the reader didn’t get me or my work."

On the other hand, a book reviewer has authority. The authority comes via three channels. First, the reviewer agrees to spend enough time with a particular work so that he or she can speak informatively about content, style, form, etc. Second, the reviewer presumably approaches the work with enough background in that particular genre to respond intelligently to the aforementioned criteria. Third, the forum publishing or presenting the review sanctions the opinion of the reviewer by propagating his or her words. This typically means a forum that is fairly well known or respected in its domain. Blogs and personal websites are also (increasingly so) becoming regarded forums for book and art reviews, but the market here is so fragmented, most haven’t obtained wide enough readership to move them significantly from the pure reader response category to the reviewer.

All of that to say, that a writer has a more difficult time blaming the reader for a lackluster opinion of her work. Gasp. It might be the work and not the reader.

So reviews matter. Of course they can help or damage sales, writer reputation, especially if the review comes via one of the major venues (e.g., NYTimes Book Review, New Yorker, etc.). But chances are if a book is being reviewed in these forums, the writer already has a large and loyal following. For less well known writers, it is the literary magazines, the online resources that come first.

Which is why I felt such release when my first review from someone who doesn’t know me was positive. This of course excludes the wonderful words penned by Garrett Hongo (who doesn’t know me personally) and who chose my book for publication. I know, I know. Much of what I’m saying here doesn’t need putting down and may in fact be obvious, but it helped me articulate for myself why I experienced the relief.

Anyway, as mentioned, the review was from Booklist, which for those of you don’t know (and why would you) is a book review from The American Library Association. I’m not sure it will generate sales but I do know, that if they had had nothing positive to say, I’d have been enormously down. And today is Thanksgiving! I’m hoping for other reviews and will steel myself for any and all critiques. But for those of you reviewing books, it matters, not just for readers, for those of us attempting to write.

Back to Booklist. Booklist is a subscription service and if you purchase books, a must-have resource. But they apparently don’t mind if I cite my small review (as long as I reference who wrote it.) P.S. I have a warm place in my heart for Alizah Salario, who reviewed my book.

The Opposite of Home

2010-11-23T04:27:00.000-08:00

I have lived in Israel now for over six years. Six years. I’ve never lived in one place for six years. I’ve never lived in any other place more than two. Granted, I spent one year of the six in New York. I spent another two years moving back and forth between Vermont and Israel, studying. When my mother was ill, I spent nine months back and forth between Atlanta and Israel. We moved twice within Israel. Last year, I bought the condo in New York and have been spending 50% of my time in the US. Still, I have called Israel home for six years. Home?

I am always dreaming of new places to live. I don’t mean JUST daydreaming about more square footage, a more extensive view, a different neighborhood, though like many people I often find myself imagining how it would be to live in a different house, a different city. I mean literally dreaming, at night, about the next place. Sometimes the dreams wake me up they are so dramatic and thrilling. They are often the ones I remember in the morning or when I wake up in the middle of the night. Of course this doesn’t mean they are my only dreams, but they are often the most vivid and I suppose the last ones I have before waking. Last night, there was a long rambling house on a hillside. From the window and through the trees, I could see the ocean throwing itself against a rocky shore. I knew, in the dream, I’d lived in the building before, in a smaller apartment, with a man I used to love. This time though I was looking at it for myself, only myself. The building was old and rooms had been added over time. Rooms opened to larger rooms, to balconies, to terraces. Some rooms had regular shapes, rectangular. Other rooms were round or had oddly shaped corners. There were places to hide. I knew there would always be a surprise in this house.

Like most dream houses, I never move into this house, even in the dream.

But I recognize the impulse that Kay Ryan describes in the short poem below to be free of encumbrances, to never settle, to test what it is that is most necessary. I don’t think I’m alone.

That Will to Divest

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning: once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you've begun.

Six Days Left in Vermont

2010-11-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

Outside my studio window, one of the painters is working. I too sat on one of the benches beside the river and tried to write. But the sound of the water, the warmth of the sun were too large of distractions.

It is a gorgeous day—spring-like and almost warm enough to walk without a sweater. I’ve been told that November in this part of Vermont is typically grey and cold. It’s hard to believe given the 5-day expanses of blue skies we’ve experienced. I suppose the more seasonal weather will return. Ten days ago, it snowed! But those memories seem far away, those recognitions even more distant.

I’m going for a hike!

Three Weeks in Vermont

2010-11-12T16:12:00.000-08:00

Three weeks at Vermont Studio Center. I have loved being here. I have written. I have spent many hours in my studio staring at the river outside my window. I have hiked a bit. I have not slept enough.

I have dreamed.

Why do I keep writing about my dreams? My dreams are of use to nobody else.

Why do poets keep writing about their dreams? Their dreams are of use to nobody else.

Why do singers keep singing about their dreams? Their dreams are of use to nobody else.

Why do painters keep painting their dreams? Their dreams are of use to nobody else.

Freud said the universe of people possessed by one set of illusions or fantasies will be different than the universe of those possessed by another. He also said that every dream is either a wish or a counterwish.

Exactly.

It helps me sleep to know that other people dream. That their dreams are as strange, as grotesque, as burlesque, as mine.

It’s the same reason we can’t stop looking in each other's windows.

The Genuineness of Artifacts in Vermont

2010-11-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

I am a poet of place. The place I reside--the room, the color of the walls, the shape of the window, the smears of bug and human oil on the window pane, and what's outside the window--inflitrate my writing. How can it be otherwise unless you write with a blindfold?

The outside world can work its ways into the writing in insidious magical ways. I am working on a manuscript in which Israel figures prominently. Israel is the place I call home. I'm not sure all the poems I've begun here will survive but I've managed to begin many. What has been most surprising? The increased presence of water. There is a river outside my window and I find myself gazing at its watery progress many minutes of many hours. In some cases, the river becomes part of Israel, the Mediterranean, the Jordan River. In other cases, poems have emerged which seem completely disconnected from Israel.

I suppose none of this is revelatory but I wanted to put it down, so that I remember it. Here's a poem I wrote today in which Vermont, the river, one of the artists who I met here, and even an otter appear:

When I woke the world was the thin layer
between the chocolate cake and iced white
frosting. It was about to snow for the first time

that season and the earth was bunched up
into the cold. I knew it was going to be a good day
because I’d had a nightmare

about mushroom clouds and that the small otter
which I’m told lives in the river outside my door
had been found drowned. It’s true that the morning

after a bad dream, the structure of trees seems
more genuine. I know the first flakes don’t mean anything
but what I give to them. I know that even though

my mind conjures up a nuclear winter, still
the crocus will come, and that my knowing it
means nothing to you. I have a friend

who etches images of lost stone artifacts,
cornices, plaster friezes, columns and pilasters
into graphite pounded into a roughened white canvas.

They are ghosts, he says, of buildings vanished.
Though when they’re not quite right,
I’ve seen him take a hammer.

The Vag Club

2010-11-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

I'm still deep in the wilds of northern Vermont. If not wilds, definitely deep. The sun finally broke out this afternoon after what have seemed endless days of grey. I was a big chagrined to discover how tightly wound my psyche is with the weather.

Two nights ago, we did an informal reading here at the Studio Center. About 20 participated--either reading or just sitting back and listening. There was a lot of wine and chips consumed so the mood was pretty good. We read pieces of varying lengths. There were essays about torrid affairs with college professors, encounters between strippers and returning war veterans, stories of alzheimers and dying, and lots of poetry. I read two of mine, both of which I wrote here at VSC.

I've actually been extremely productive here--perhaps 20 poems so far, several much longer than I normally write. Not surprisingly quite a few are inhabited by a river and one by an otter. Outside my studio window are both.

Back to the reading. All of the readers were women. There are men here, but for some reason they are more reclusive. One of the gang called us a 'vag club.' Perhaps all the estrogen scared them away. Anyway, it was lovely and reminded me why I love my women friends.

In Country at VSC

2010-10-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

I’m spending this month at Vermont Studio Center, which is a retreat for artists and writers. It is in Johnson, Vermont, which is the smallest town I’ve ever spend time in with the exception of my mother’s hometown in south Georgia. There is a coffee shop here and a small college.

There are about thirty residents here and another ten or so who staff the facility. In the Burlington airport waiting for the van to pick me up, I met one of the residents. His name was Potchara and he was from Thailand. He spoke no English and communicated by looking up words in his English/Thai dictionary. It was his first time in a plane, the first time out of Thailand. I so wanted to know he found his way to VSC. This much I know. He missed his first connecting flight from Newark to Burlington and slept on the floor of the airport. He mimed that much to me.

As a gesture of friendship, he gave me a small vial of Thai herbs that smelled like menthol and oranges. It cleared my sinuses. In his backpack, he had tens of these vials. I still don’t know how he managed to get from Newark to Burlington. He is a sculpture. I don’t know how he’ll get his sculptures back to Thailand.

As I was writing this, I typed his name into Google. Images of some of his art is online and it is beautiful. Potchara may not speak English but his sculptures don’t need the language. Too many people speak English anyway.

I am going to learn at least a few words in Thai.

Bathsheba Transatlantic Enters the World!

2010-10-08T02:45:00.000-07:00

My book, Bathsheba Transatlantic, launched yesterday! It's hard to describe the thrill I felt when I opened the box containing the books and held one in my hand. I know, I know, a bit of narcissism. Of course the amount of time and stress and anxiety that the book represents, the amount of joy and thought it contains are enormous.

I am proud but also, of course, worried about how it will be received. This is a common feeling according to friends who write. Like watching your six year old enter the doors of school for the first time, someone said. You want him/her to be the most popular, the brightest, the teacher's pet but only in a way that doesn't cause others to shun her.

Anyway, it's out. It's in the world.

Back to work.

Barbarians and Writers

2010-09-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

Today, a ten-person boat attempted to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. On board, were Jews from Germany, the US, the UK, Israel who wanted to say, Israel’s policies are not ours. They carried books and school supplies for the Gazan children. Even though the Gazan leader would, if he could, murder every one of Israel’s fathers, every one of its mothers. Because of course the blockade does nothing but reinforce that hatred. Israel towed the small boat into Ashdod, one of its ports, without violence.

The barbarians are all of us.

I am reading Adina Hoffman’s biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali called “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.” Hoffman is a Jew living in Jerusalem. Taha Muhammad Ali still lives in Israel. The book is successful in that it recounts one particular man's experiences, his tragedies, and his victories. It speaks of the restorative power of words and of poetry. While I think Hoffman's retelling of the poet's life is seen through a particular lens, the book is beautifully and compassionately written and speaks also, I think, to the possibility of healing. Both of them wish each other well.

If the barbarians are us, so perhaps are the saviors.

Here is a lovely poem by Taha Muhammad Ali.

NEITHER MUSIC,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
on all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.

One Year of Sin

2010-09-18T00:36:00.000-07:00

Just a little meditation on Yom Kippur with line breaks...

At dusk, the streets go silent of cars and buses, television
programming blinks out, lawnmowers and leaf blowers
are stowed as the highways empty out, only to slowly fill
with children on bicycles, skaters and skateboarders, their dogs
running alongside, while the parents sit on benches
and chat about the last vacation to Puket or Berlin.
No one is supposed to die on Yom Kippur.

A day earlier, walking our small brown and white dog
through Park Se-adya Shoshani, my husband and I watched
a religious Jew dressed in his black coat and hat wave
what looked from a distance a feathered boa
over the head of a small boy who could not have been more

than three. Closer, I realized the scarf was in fact
a live white chicken. The chicken absorbs the past year’s
bad deeds, my husband said, looking a bit embarrassed. Even
that of a three year old child. The white chickens
are then slaughtered, so that the year’s evil dies with them.

This morning, I sent photos of Ayalon Highway empty
except for pedestrians and bicyclists to a friend, who
can’t believe that no one, I mean no one, drives
the whole day of Yom Kippur. For one day, in Israel,
there is nowhere to drive. In a few hours, the Israelis will
get back in their cars, but right now, I think I hear
the Mediterranean, the sins of the past year cast off.

Fiction vs Confirmation Bias

2010-09-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, how we humans cling to our narratives, refusing to acknowledge that our stories about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves, might be biased, even untrue. Psychologists call it confirmation bias. We ignore, deliberately and subconsciously, information that contradicts our hypotheses or preconceptions of the world.

Last night this was once again brought home to me in regards to the place I call home, Israel.

Where was I? An English language book club I belong too here in Tel Aviv comprised of women from the US, Canada, Australia, as well as native born Israelis and women from other countries who meet to read and discuss books in English. Last night we met to discuss Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani. In attendance were about 25 people, primarily women, all of them Jewish with the exception of myself, as well as the author himself.

Translated into English from Hebrew, The House of Rajani tells a late nineteenth century tale of the relationship between a Russian-Jewish immigrant to Israel and a mentally disturbed Arab boy. Hilu uses fictitious diary entries written by both as a means to describe their relationship and provide insight into the two characters. The book has been wildly controversial in Israel because the Jewish man (married) begins an affair with the boy’s lonely mother (also married), and, as irreverent as the affair in that day and age and between a Jew and an Arab, more so is his single minded obsession to purchase/steal the Arab family’s land through fair means or foul. Thus ensues the suspicious death of the boy’s father, the decline into madness of the mother, the assumption of the land by the Jew, his eviction of the land’s long-time Arab tenant farmers. Coloring the goings on are the boy’s prophetic visions, which describe a future war between Jews and Arabs, fiery modern warfare, death to thousands, and the loss of the land including his own to the colonizing Jews.

Interestingly, Hilu attempts to mimic the early Hebrew and Arabic of the time (he reportedly spent a year reading newspapers from the late 1800s), and the translation attempts to replicate the slightly archaic feel of the language. Conversational and contemporary the book is not. But Hilu does capture, at least in my opinion, the smell and color of that turbulent time, and his primary characters are fully fleshed even if there is little to admire in any of them.

The House of Rajani is essentially telling one story of pre-Israel Palestine through the eyes of the ‘other.’ Hilu was vilified in one of Israel’s newspapers and stripped of a prize he had won (The Sapir Prize, which is one of Israel’s largest). Hilu believes the stripping of its prize, and its eventual return, was completely political. Hilu was called anti-Zionist, a self hating Jew, in the press and in the blogosphere. Several journalists, politicians, even academics criticized him publicly.

What is remarkable is not only the public drubbing an author received (in a democracy for God’s sake!) for writing a book of fiction, but the selective memory it represents on the part of Israel. There are innumerable books written, even by Israelis, documenting the thousands displaced by Israel’s War of Independence (the Palestinians call it Naqba, which means catastrophe in Arabic), that the displacement was at times voluntary, at others not, Israel’s destruction of Arab homes and confiscation of lands. There were atrocities, large and small, on both sides and Israel can certainly claim that they did not instigate the war. Moreover, as in all wars, to the victors go the spoils, but that Israel continues to deny its own participation seems, at least to me, at times ludicrous, at times immoral. Instead, the story of Israel, at least for the Jews, is that the Jews arrived to a land virtually empty and, in their hands, it flowered. Like many colonizers, the ‘natives’ were invisible, or rather they became invisible in history’s retelling.

I will say that the book club was civil if at times rancorous. Before Hilu arrived quite a few of the attendees admitted they were not political and in fact had little historical knowledge of what actually transpired. But even these women exhibited a willingness to listen to Hilu, even if they allowed it only as an imaginative work of fiction.

I suppose I draw more comfort that the book has sold 50K copies in Israel (amazing for a country of 7mm, not all of them reading Hebrew) and been translated into seven languages. People are reading it. In my opinion, acknowledging reality is the only way Israel can address the present. Perhaps literature will prove one way that the blindness associated with the country’s confirmation bias can be healed.

Reality in Fiction

2010-08-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

At this week's Edinburgh international book festival, author (most recently of The Children's Book) AS Byatt gave a fascinating interview. Byatt, an atheist, in talking about social realism in fiction said, “Most people who are talking about reality don’t understand how difficult it is to say what reality is.” She goes on to say that part of the issue is that “religion has gone away.” “A kind of map of the world that was provided by Christian belief or by other forms of religious belief, has for most ordinary people in the society I live in, disappeared. This means how you say who you are has become very difficult. There are novels to be written in the future about the very careful tactics with which we choose how to describe our sense of ourselves.”

I found Byatt’s thoughts evocative as I also believe that many people, especially secular people and including me, grapple with how to understand their own nature in the absence of God’s salvation. To some degree I think it is a debate between determinism and free will. How much do we believe that our life, our fate, hinges on our own choices and how much is determined by an environment beyond our control? There are various versions of this from Freud’s role of the unconscious, Jung’s archetypes, Skinner’s conditioning, evolutionary psychology, to Sartre’s atheistic existentialism. The truth lies perhaps in the synthesis of some of these opposing views.

I do think contemporary literature even now is at the forefront in regards to the dilemma of how we describe ourselves. Authors as diverse as Orhan Pamuk, Amos Oz, Don DeLillo, Arundhati Roy come to mind where it is often the confrontation between religion/culture and materialism that serves as backdrop for the definition of the individual self in their stories.

I do wholeheartedly agree that media, the Internet, social networks are adding new layers of complexity (and interest) to the debate. Moreover, new web technologies (and the ever-increasing availability of information) have made possible a new kind of writing. This prose uses fact and randomness rather than story and structure. David Shields and Anders Monson and Maggie Nelson are examples of authors integrating these factors into their literature. Though in the end, as AS Byatt says, in the absence of religion, all we are left with is ourselves. I’m hopeful though that this will be enough. Anyway, check out the interview. Byatt is not afraid to speak her mind and hers is definitely an interesting one.

Too Ignorant to Ignore!

2010-08-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

I rarely post regarding political issues, but this is just too crazy not to comment on. Poetically crazy perhaps.

Apparently nearly one in five people in the US, or 18 percent, believe Obama is Muslim. That was up from 11 percent who said so in March 2009. The survey also showed that just 34 percent said Obama is Christian, down from 48 percent who said so last year. The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don't know his religion.

I will try to believe those figures illustrate American gullibility to right wing propaganda, tendency toward confirmation bias (i.e., they always suspected it!), rather than complete and utter ignorance.

Of course, many Israelis I speak with (and most of them well educated) also believe Obama is Muslim. No stats here, but I actually believe the percentage might be higher. So ignorance extends beyond America's shores.

Many of these people dislike Obama for other reasons (political party, race, and even a few for his policies). On the Israeli side, the dislike is rooted in his refusal to provide blanket support for all Israeli policies. That they equate this dislike with being Muslim, I suspect, also reflects innate bigotry on their part regarding the Islamic faith. I.e., UnAmerican = Muslim or AntiIsraeli = Muslim.

Anyway, just for the record, Barack Obama is a Christian, and announced in June 2009 that his primary place of worship would be the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David. Merely attending school that is nominally Muslim in Indonesia does not make one Muslim. FYI, in Indonesia, Obama attended a Catholic school for two years (ages 6-8) and then a public school for two years (ages 8-10); in an interview, the head of the Indonesian public school said they are secular and have Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim students. To be considered a Muslim by the community, there must be an adult profession of faith, the recitation of the shahadah (declaration of faith) and that must be done with adult Muslims present. Barack Obama has not met these conditions, thus he is not a Muslim. Furthermore, he’s been baptized and regularly attended church his entire life, was married in a Christian ceremony, raises his kids as Christians, and he continues to confess his faith in Jesus Christ as his savior, which no Muslim will ever profess. And I certainly think the intensive news coverage would have picked up if Obama had performed any Muslim practices.

Ronny Someck and the Pleasure of Hebrew

2010-08-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of learning another language is being able to gather another layer of meaning to the poetry written in that language. A poet I am currently struggling with, both in translation and metaphorically, is Ronny Someck. Someck has published nine (or perhaps ten) books of poetry in Hebrew and hosted a popular radio program in Israel for years. Decades earlier, he was part of a circle called the “Tel Aviv Poets," which included Mier Wieseltier, Yona Wallach, and others, who often wrote about contemporary Israeli street life, incorporating slang, images from television and popular culture into their poems. Their poetry was often fleshy and sexy. Someck's poetry still often is.

Anyway, the reason I bring him up today is that I’m reading some of his work in Hebrew and struggling with the translation. BUT one interesting aspect of Hebrew is that much of the language is built around what they call “binyamin” or buildings so that word groups arise from the same root. For example, “dahm” means blood. From that, we get “Ah-dom” or red, and “Ah-damn” which means man, and from that we get “Ah-dah-ma” meaning earth. Red begets Blood begets Man begets Earth and vice versa.

Here is a poem by Someck titled “Red Catalogue of the Word Sunset:”

A French poet sees a red sunset
and squeezes burgundy from the cloud grapes.
An English poet likens the sunset to a rose
and a Hebrew, to blood.
Oh my country, a land fastening cannibal lips
to the setting sun’s virginal throat,
my arms are oars of fear
and I, in the ark of my life, row
like Noah to Ararat.

It is a unsettling poem comparing Israel to a cannibal that ‘eats its own,' different from more civilized lands where sunsets lead to wine and roses. But what is lost in the translation is the play of the language through the poem. The red of the sunset becomes blood becomes land becomes man. Underlining Someck’s unsaid importance of this resonance to the poem is that these relationships are "seen" by a “Hebrew” poet not an Israeli poet whose language might be Arabic, or given the waves of immigration, English, German, Russian, etc. The Hebrew language becomes part of what makes this land the cannibal that it is (in Someck’s poem). Or as Mier Wieseltier, another Jewish Israeli poet wrote in the poem “A March for Long Distance Poets,” “The believer in what words can do / believes in what they did to him.”

Her Circle Ezine - Kind Enough to Include Me!

2010-08-04T01:56:00.000-07:00

Her Circle Ezine is, in their words, an online portal of women's creative arts and activism from around the globe. By celebrating artists and writers whose work addresses the social issues of our time, we strive to bring these issues to the fore, whilst reaffirming connections between art, politics, and life. I've become an enormous fan for the poetry and prose, interviews, and essays, all created by an amazing array of talented writers.

They were lovely enough to ask me to submit a posting to their Writer's Life blog as a Guest Blogger! Take a look. Beyond my brief thoughts, there is a lot to draw you into their site.

Listening to Hebrew on the Anniversary of Gertrude Stein's Death

2010-07-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

"I am very busy finding out what people mean by what they say.”

—Gertrude Stein, who died on this day in 1946

Me too. Very busy.

A New Kafka Story Coming Soon!

2010-07-22T05:15:00.000-07:00

I know Franz Kafka, writer of "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis," wanted his papers destroyed after he died. He directed Max Brod (to whom Kafka left his papers) in his last will to do so, leave nothing intact. Brod, of course, ignored this plea. We can argue what was right or wrong, but if Kafka's will had been executed according to his instructions, his major novels - "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" - and most of his short stories would have been lost to the world. Brod, who died in 1968, left the remaining papers to Esther Hoffe, his close friend, assistant, and perhaps lover, with the direction to deposit them in an appropriate archive so that they could be saved for posterity and available for study. Well, Esther didn't follow instructions well either, but hid them away. Her daughter similarly kept them hidden although reportedly did sell a few in secret auctions.

Anyway, you can read a bit more on this on a previous blog.

There is, however, some good news. After years of wrangling, courts finally managed to get the boxes opened and contents reviewed. There was a gag order regarding what was inside, but a Tel Aviv judge rejected the order. The Haaretz newspaper reported that a huge amount of documents found in the safe deposit boxes are letters and manuscripts belonging to Kafka and Brod. Also in the box is a HANDWRITTEN SHORT STORY (!) by Kafka that has never before been seen. Perhaps Kafka would still want whatever remains destroyed rather published. I suppose his wishes are important, but at this point, after so much has already been published, I think it would be a greater loss to destroy them.

Of course, the lesson for great writers (or writers who believe they might be great) is to destroy what you want destroyed before you die. If you leave to someone else, a friend, even a close friend, chances are you'll be reading your unpublished letters and documents from the other side (assuming any of us get there!). If Kafka's case isn't enough, just remember Dmitri Nabokov and Elizabeth Bishop.

Truthiness in History and Fiction

2010-07-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking a bit about historical truth lately primarily because a part of my current project involves historical events that took place in Israel during the late 1800s and early 1900s when a group of evangelical settlers moved from Chicago to Jerusalem in anticipation, they believed, of Christ’s reappearance on earth. Of course, some of the events and most notably the motivations and beliefs of the primary actors differ based on whose recounting one reads.

Assuming there is some basis for different accounts, which version do I believe? What is historical ‘Truth’ anyway? I suppose if the state of current affairs is any guide, both in literature and history, it depends on what interpretation I want to make.

I was listening to Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, who gave a lecture last year at The Key West Literary Seminar (by the way, there are some fabulous readings and lectures available for download at the KWLS site). Dr. Foner says in the lecture, “The line between historical scholarship and historical fiction is not as hard and fast as we sometimes might think. ... Every novel is an expression of the sensibility of the novelist; and, as E.H. Carr wrote, 'to study history, study the historian.' The reason historical interpretations change is that historians change, as does the world around them.” In other words, history depends on who is telling it.

Historical truth is always contested and ever changing. All history is to some degree contemporary history as it depends on who writes the history books. In Turkey, the Armenian massacre was written out of textbooks. In Japan, their pre-WWII rule over parts of Asia as considered ‘humane.’ In Russia, Stalin is being rehabilitated, while in the US, the abomination of slavery continues to be watered down (see how they’re handling it in Texas). Here in Israel, different versions of Israel’s War of Independence (called The Naqba or The Catastrophe by Palestinians) exist side by side.

So what does that mean for my poetry and for fiction in general? On therumpus.net, Travis Kuowski relatedly asks, “Are there rules that govern the representation of the “real world” in fiction? How much should fiction writers be allowed to misrepresent history before being called out for it?”

He writes later in the same essay, “History and fiction have long been a team. The fictional transformation of historical fact has been going on since literature’s beginnings—I am thinking particularly of Gilgamesh and The Iliad, both about historical kings their authors never met, battles they never witnessed. And historical accuracy has always been a bit, well, uneven—short story pioneer Washington Irving never visited the Catskill mountains until after he wrote about them in “Rip Van Winkle”; and Homer didn’t fact-check the Trojan War before composing a 16,000-line poem about it. Luke Slattery argues in The Australian, “To the extent that Homer’s Troy exists at all, it exists in the imagination.”

When asked if his stories were true, David Sedaris once answered that they were “true enough.” Much like character, setting, and symbolism, history is simply an element of the writing, and the only verification the writer must make for any element is if it “rings true” within the realm of the story, not that of reality.

At the same time, I’d like to think that when I read historical fiction or poetry, that there is an element of truth to it, at least as far as the writer is able to ascertain. Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, Ted Genoways are examples of writers whose work often springs from the past. While I’d bet that much of what these amazing poets created was from imagination, at the core, I also believe, are real, and true, stories.

Ted Kurowski goes on, “Fiction most often—perhaps always—exists in that middle ground between the real and the imaginary.” Perhaps, but at the root, if one is referencing past events and history, I think, there still needs to be the seed of truth, otherwise it is not historical fiction, but pure fiction.

As for me, I’m going to research the events I’m referencing as much as possible, visit the places the immigrants settled in Jerusalem, read as many accounts as I can. I recognize however that in the end, what I believe about the past will be my choice.

David Grossman Awarded German Peace Prize

2010-06-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Today, the Israeli novelist was announced winner of 2010 Book Trade Peace Prize by Germany’s book publishers association for his efforts in ending conflict between Israel, Palestinians. Tragically and some might say ironically, Grossman's youngest son Uri was killed during the Second Lebanon War when a Hezbollah missile his tank. Grossman at first supported that war, but later, and even before his son was killed, protested it.

Anyway, here's a short poem that incorporates elements (or doesn't) from that terrible event as well as Grossman's most-recent novel "To the End of the Land", which was takes on the story of a woman travelling through Israel, and was influenced by the death of his son.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT DAVID GROSSMAN

The famous author writes a story
about a woman whose son fights
at the front. The woman, who’s begun dreaming
of deserts, leaves her husband

and a small cerulean pool
in the garden. She starts walking, believing
if she’s not home to answer
the door, her son remains untouched.

Awakened in the middle of night
by military officers, the famous author
learns his youngest child, a tank
commander, disappeared

during a fierce battle that same
afternoon. A woman sits
at an empty bus stop between
nondescript towns. She’s waiting

but not for a bus; the bus company
quit the unprofitable route
years earlier. There are no cars, no signs
of anyone. When asked how death

affects his writing, the famous author
said, I do not speak of that. In her
dream, the desert is flat and dry. She lights
everything on fire.

The Killjoy of Contemporary Poetry

2010-06-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

In case you wanted another take on the state of contemporary poetry, its current killjoy, William Logan, reviews the current works of six poets (C.K. Williams, Tony Hoagland, Don Paterson, Keith Douglas, Derek Walcott, and Anne Carson) in June’s New Criterion. Perhaps there is a part of me that takes delight in William Logan’s nonstop bashing and snide contempt for much of contemporary poetry. God knows, I would not want to have his jaded eye trained on my work (Oh Oh Oh, if only my work would warrant such a look!) Mostly though, I find Logan’s tireless criticism wearisome. Perhaps it’s just me, but I prefer to have a critic point out what works in a poem than what falls flat.

In Logan’s world, almost all of contemporary poetry is just not quite right. Williams is too moralizing: “What but poetic deafness could make so many passages read like sociology texts.” On the other hands, Hoagland is too concerned with consumerism: “Hoagland is the Updike of American trash, forgetting nothing—but he hasn’t figured out how to recycle rubbish into art.” Likewise, Patterson is too sentimental: “The book ought to come with linen handkerchiefs from the broken mills of Glasgow or Aberdeen.” The dead war-poet Douglas can’t write a good line: “You need to go a long way to find the good lines in these poems, and when you do they’re surrounded by bad ones.” Meanwhile, Walcott can’t stop writing the same line, “I wish that in almost every book the flash of the sea weren’t compared to coins or the surface to a sheet of tin or the flight of birds to arrows.”

The only poet he saves praise for is Anne Carson, whose latest poetic effort Nox literally weighs in at two pounds and thirty dollars. I very much admire Anne Carson’s work though haven’t read Nox (I’m waiting for the ‘paperback’ edition). I found Plainwater and Eros, The Bittersweet, excruciatingly beautiful and over the top smart. Nox, which was written in large part as elegy to Carson’s disappeared brother, is also a meditation on Catullus 101, likewise a lament for a lost brother though written by the 1st Century BC poet Catullus. Does it seem surprising that Logan saves his praise for the one poet whose work hearkens back two thousand years? But I’ll reserve my take on Carson’s work until I’ve read it, which I admit, I’m looking forward to,

Granted, Logan has an unerring ability to hone in on a poet’s weakest lines and faults. Moreover, Logan’s critical prose is beautifully written if not uplifting. Finally, I suppose poetry needs at least one curmudgeon if only to balance the praise most poet/critics tend to heap on one another’s work. But his criticism won’t stop my reading of any of the poets whose work he derides, and, of course, I won’t stop reading his criticism. Sigh.

The Vanity of Buying a Book

2010-06-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

In Israel, book sales are up, though not all book sellers see it as a reflection of increased reading:

The CEO of Sifri bookstores, Aryeh Almog, said rising literacy led to increased reading, but stressed that "buying books today is a symptom of the newly rich, who buy books so they will not be suspected of a lack of comprehension." Or as Ziva Alfasi, one of the owners of the Lyric bookstores, said: "Books are a kind of fad. A few years ago, people would bring a vase or a useful kitchen accessory as a gift; today, when you go to a birthday party, dinner or even a wedding, people bring a book."

Ah, vanity. But if more books are in people's houses, for whatever reason, perhaps a few more will be read.

Amos Oz Says, "Against Ideas, Israel's Force is Impotent"

2010-06-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

Since Monday when Israel boarded the Gaza-bound aid flotilla and the resulting terrible tragedy of nine lost lives, I’ve been ill. Yes, the mission was not without venal objectives. As The Gaza Freedom March stated efore Monday’s confrontation: “A violent response form Israel will breathe new Life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.” But Israel couldn’t have handed them a more desired response. Throughout the Arab world, the nine killed are called “martyrs.”

Here is an op-ed written by Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most revered writers and a peace activist, which appeared The New York Times and UK’s Guardian, among other places I've reprinted it in full below. I haven't been able to write about it yet, and Oz's words are clear enough.

Against ideas, Israel's force is impotent

Since the six-day war Israel has been fixated on military force. But Hamas is an idea, and no idea has been defeated by force

For 2,000 years the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to their own backs. For several decades now we have been able to wield force ourselves. Yet this power has, again and again, intoxicated us. Again and again we imagine that we can solve every problem we encounter with force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.

In the period before the state was founded a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine did not understand the limits of force and thought that it could be used achieve any goal. Luckily, during Israel's early years leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful not to go beyond those boundaries. But since the six-day war in 1967 Israel has been fixated on military force. The mantra is: what can't be done by force can be done with even greater force.

Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip is one of the rank products of this view. It originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas can be defeated by force of arms; or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.

But Hamas is not just a terror organisation. Hamas is an idea. A desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force – not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads, and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one. The only way for Israel to edge out Hamas is for it to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

Israel has to sign a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas and his government and thus reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict can be resolved, in the end, only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Abbas's Fatah movement with Hamas. Even if Israel seizes a hundred more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip a hundred more times, no matter how many times Israel deploys its military, police, and covert forces, it cannot solve the problem.

The problem is that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until we, Israelis and Palestinians, recognise the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege – Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.

I do not discount the importance of force. Military force is vital to Israel. Without it we would not be able to survive a single day. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative – to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventative, not in self-defence, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters – just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, on the high seas, opposite Gaza's shores.

A Book for the Beach: American Priestess

2010-05-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted anything for a few weeks. Blame it on travel. Blame it on Spring. Blame it on ennui.

I've been hanging out in Manhattan these past three weeks and, a brief respite from Israel, loving it. Of course, what do I read in this downtime? American Priestess, the fabulous nonfiction account of a messianic Christian group that landed in Jerusalem in the late 1800s and, in due course, founded one of the city's most famous hotels, The American Colony. It is a highly recommended read for the beach. Here's a brief synopsis of why I couldn't put it down.

Jerusalem is a city of extremes—extreme religion, history, and emotion. Jerusalem can drive people insane, literally. There is a rare psychosis associated with the city known as Jerusalem Syndrome involving the presence of religiously themed obsessive ideas or delusions that are triggered by Jerusalem or compel its victims to go to the city. Every year tens of visitors are affected. The afflicted have been found wandering in the Judean desert wrapped in hotel bed sheets or crouched at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, waiting to birth the infant Jesus. The syndrome can affect seemingly normal people as well as those already suffering from mental illness. In extreme cases, the affected Pilgrims who, in some cases, belong to bizarre fringe groups rather than regular churches, believe they must do specific things to bring about major events like the coming of the Messiah, the war of Armageddon, or the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Which brings me to the fabulous book I just mentioned—American Priestess by Jane Fletcher Geniesse. American Priestess follows the remarkable true story of Anna Spafford from her arrival in Chicago from Norway at the age of four in 1846 to her early years and marriage at age eighteen to Horatio Spafford, the loss of four of her children at sea, to her and her husband’s eventual emigration to Jerusalem in 1881. It also follows her transformation from a seemingly ordinary housewife into the leader of a messianic Christian quasi-cult known as the American Colony. In the course of her story, Anna not only lost four of her daughters to shipwreck and a son to fever, but also she and her followers endured plagues, war, and starvation, living through some of Jerusalem’s most turbulent periods as it changed hands from Ottoman to British to Jewish.

Anna Spafford (born Anne Tobine ALarsdatter Oglende in Norway), interestingly, was not always religious. Like all her peers of that period, she regularly attended church and was nominally Presbyterian. It was at bible study when she was just fifteen that she first met Horatio, who was leading the study and would later become her husband when she reached eighteen. Their life together seemed charmed. They had four girls in rapid succession, Horatio’s law practice gave him good income and prestige in the community. But after a tragic fire destroyed much of Chicago in 1871 and nationwide financial collapse several land deals in which Horatio invested, the Spaffords were left destitute. Horatio had long been evangelical and, like many of his time, believed the Second Coming eminent. It was during this period that he and Anna began their own sect called the Saints (or the Overcomers) and founded a church beside their home.

At the same time, Horatio was stealing money he was entrusted with investing and was one step ahead of bill collectors. It was in front of this additional calamity that he sent his wife and four children to France via ship. He was to join them later. Tragedy struck again when another ship ran into theirs on the way, and all four of the Spafford daughters were lost.

After all these traumas, Horatio ‘received’ communication from God that he and his followers must emigrate to Jerusalem to await the Second Coming. A band of eighteen, including two Spafford daughters born in the interim, arrived in Jerusalem in 1881 where they rented and later purchased a large house, later hotel, on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem. Others from Chicago and from Sweden and Norway followed. Horatio initially was the leader, however, when he died in 1888, Anna took the reins. By definition, the American Colony of Geniesse’s book was a cult. Members received unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader, in this case, from Anna Spafford, assuming they obeyed her commands; members received new names and often new professions; members were isolated from friends, relatives, and mainstream culture; and access to information was severely controlled. American Colony members ceded not only all financial resources to the group, but also their husbands and wives, children, autonomy. Marriages were dissolved, celibacy instituted, parents and children separated. Later, marriage was re-instituted though Anna (aka the Priestess) decided who married whom. Only Anna’s two surviving daughters, Bertha and Grace, received full education.

Certainly the beliefs or practices of the American Colony members were considered strange by outsiders and several American consuls complained to their American counterparts in the US about the group. While they considered themselves Christian, they considered most mainstream Christian churches tepid and disowned them. The group arrived in Jerusalem anticipating the eminent second arrival of the Messiah. Anna, aka The Priestess, was apparently in direct communication with God about this and her band, according to her messages, had been chosen to receive him. Like some other messianic Christian groups, the American Colony believed the Jews return to the Holy Land presaged the Second Coming and, unlike Arab residents of the city, welcomed the Jewish immigrations of the early 1900s. At the same time, the Overcomers fed the city’s poor, treated the sick even when exposure risked their own health, and, during the many periods of war, maintained hospitals and treated soldiers from all sides of the fighting.

Peppering the book with quotes from the descendents of the American Colony as well as from letters, books, documents from the period, Genniese recreates in real time the period between 1880 when the American Colony was founded and 1950 when the Colony disbanded. There is an immediacy to American Priestess which is due not only to Geniesse’s extensive research (the book apparently took seven years to research and write) but also because the Jerusalem of the late 19th century feels current. The political and religious frictions about which Geniesse writes and through which the American Colony lived continue, between Arab and Jew, between easterner and westerner. Jerusalem exists, as it has for millenniums, at a contentious crossroad and its sites are symbols of the religious and cultural aspirations of many peoples.

Beyond the historical context, American Priestess reads like a good novel. The characters in the story—Anna, Horatio, their daughters Bertha and Grace, are fleshed-out, three-dimensional. Though I admit I found little attractive about the main characters, their flaws made them real and intriguing. I also found the periods through which the American Colony lived fascinating. They survived two World Wars, multiple skirmishes, battling against and sometimes aligning with the various powers controlling Jerusalem’s gates. I admit also some personal connection with the story given that I live in Israel and am an immigrant from the US. While I feel little in the way of alignment with Anna Spafford’s motivations, I sometimes felt I understood her and her family. Whether one calls it Jerusalem Syndrome or spiritual conviction, the power of Jerusalem as symbol and destination remains. The American Colony still exists, literally as a five-star hotel just outside the Old City borders and symbolically in the mind of those searching for their particular brand of salvation.

By the way, if you want to see how the current management of The American Colony Hotel spins this story, check out their website.

One War Ended

2010-04-30T03:30:00.000-07:00

The Vietnam War ended on this day thirty-five years ago, the date marked by the fall of Saigon. Below, the first stanza of “April 30, 1975,” by the American poet and English professor John Balaban, who served in Vietnam as a conscientious objector doing alternative duties:

The evening Nixon called his last troops off,
the church bells tolled across our states.
We leaned on farmhouse porch pilings, our eyes
wandering the lightning bug meadow thick with mist,
and counted tinny peals clanking out
through oaks around the church belltower.
You asked, “Is it peace, or only a bell ringing?”

Perhaps only a bell ringing, the signal for a temporary hiatus in war’s blind march through history. Below a lush poem called "Curfew" written by Brian Turner, which also speaks to that small space of quiet. Brian served seven years in the US Army, most recently in Iraq. He has two books of poems—Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. Both are must-reads.

                                   The wrong is not in the religion;
                                   The wrong is in us.
                                              --Saier T.

At dusk, bats fly out by the hundreds.
Water snakes glide in the ponding basins
behind the rubbled palaces. The mosques
call their faithful in, welcoming
the moonlight as prayer.

Today, policemen sunbathed on traffic islands
and children helped their mothers
string clothes to the line, a slight breeze
filling them with heat.

There were no bombs, no panic in the streets.
Sgt. Gutierrez didn't comfort an injured man
who cupped pieces of his friend's brain
in his hands; instead, today,
white birds rose from the Tigris.

Another Independence Day

2010-04-20T04:45:00.000-07:00

Today marks Israel's 62nd year as an independent country. There has never been peace. There will likely never be peace. At least not in any timeframe that feels worth talking about.

Of course, last night Israel celebrated the anniversary with ceremony, speeches, fireworks. In Israel, there are more festivities the night between Memorial Day and Independence Day than on both New Year's Eves combined (the Jewish and the calendar). Our neighborhood erected a stage in its center surrounded by rides for the children, acrobats, booths selling every kind of cake, cookie, drink, candy imaginable. For two hours, officials including Tel Aviv's mayor (who lives in our neighborhood) delivered speeches extolling their as much as Israel's accomplishments, followed by dance and singing performances put on by local children's groups includng the Scouts (Tsofeem), dance groups, school groups. Behind them all, video and pictures of army personnel, local heroes, interspersed with images from the dancing and crowds played on two giant screens. Fifteen minutes of fireworks followed. And all this just for our neighborhood! Afterward, my husband and I went to a nearby party for drinks, more food, dancing that went on well into the early hours of morning.

I love the entire two days for its earnestness. There is no irony in all this exhibition. I also am sad, because nothing changes. After sixty two years, nothing has changed, it seems to me. Israel exists but always on a precipice.

I included a brief poem written by poet Aryeh Sivan. Sivan has written 14 (14!) books of poetry and a novel. Today he was awarded Israel's highest literary honor, The Israel Prize. Very few of his poems have been translated into English. Sivan wrote the poem below more than 25 years ago. It could have been written today.

TO LIVE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL
To the memory of Zvi Hurvitz:
Pioneer, commander, and bereaved father.

To be cocked like a rifle, the hand
clutching a pistol, to walk
in a closed, harsh line, even after
the cheeks are filled with dust,
and the seared flesh is fallen away, and the eyes can no longer
focus on a target.

There is a saying: a loaded gun is bound to fire.
Not true.
In the Land of Israel, anything can happen:
a broken pin, a spring rusted through,

or, the sudden cancellation of your orders, without explanation,
as it once happened to Abraham on Mount Moriah.

Translation by M. Salomon

Slouching Toward Bedlam

2010-04-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

This week, Israel passed out new gas masks to all citizens, urged them to restock their bomb shelters, albeit through humorous commercials and flyers printed on ice cream shades of paper (wouldn't want to scare the kids!) Yesterday, at the height of rush hour, their was a nationwide terror alert that simulated emergency scenarios, including simultaneous terror attacks at multiple locations. All arms of the security establishment took part including the Israel Police, the Israel Defense Forces, firefighters and Magen David Adom emergency service. I was stuck in traffic at 5PM and, given the road rage I encountered, I'm sure Magen David had to evacuate a few irate car drivers to local emergency rooms.

The rumors are rife of course, especially after Israel told all its citizens to evacuate Egypt's Sinai peninsula because of information that suggested terrorists would (or might already have) kidnapped Israeli citizens. Today the rumor is that Israel will bomb Iran's nuclear sites and expects retaliation, or was it that Hezbollah plans to test its newly received Scud missiles (probably also a gift from Iran) in Israeli territory?

What came to mind? Besides disbelief mixed with a bit of fear, and after I'd checked all the expiration dates on the food and water in our shelter, I couldn't help thinking of W.B. Yeats poem "The Second Coming:"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

That it was also Poetry Daily's Poet's Pick today seemed a strange omen.

Another Reason for Translation

2010-04-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

A interesting review of Edith Grossman's new book "Why Translation Matters" in The New York Times.

Here's the summation: In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.

Grossman is a fabulous translator and I'm looking forward to reading her take on why her work matters.

I Want to Talk About the Sea

2010-04-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Just Today....
I want to talk to you about the sea.
No one here mentions her
except as a destination
during Sukout and Shavuot
when the Israeli children released
from school run her edges wild.
I want to talk about HaBoneem Beach
just an hour drive from Tel Aviv
where the city Jews sunbathe
and barbeque, setting up haphazard huddles
of two- and three-person tents
along its undeveloped stretch
about how the tents aren’t long enough
so the pale soles
of their children’s feet splay
from the zippered mouths.
We should tell their mothers
that their soles, city soft,
will burn but I can’t recall the words
in Hebrew (kafregel, kveeyat
shemish). Anyway, it’s nice watching
their small heels burrow
skinny trenches in the wet sand
so that when they fall asleep
their feet remain standing.
I want to talk to you about the sea.
From shore
the place where the shallow surf
drops to dangerous depths
is a shade of blue you’ve never seen.
That blue spot doesn’t shift
even as the tide turns
and despite the signs that warn
of undertow
the parents and their children
won’t stop wading out.

Where Dadaism Settled in Israel

2010-04-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spent the day in Ein Hod, a small Israeli village about an hour north of Tel Aviv. What makes Ein Hod so interesting is that supposedly all of its inhabitants are artists. Granted there are less than 600 of them, but it still makes for dense creativity. Ein Hod became an artists' colony in 1953. The driving spirit behind the project was Marcel Janco, who convinced the Israeli government to let him build the colony rather than destroy the village. Until few years before his arrival, the village had been home to 500-700 Arabs, who fled or escaped or were pushed out (depending on who you ask) after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Janco and its later residents renovated many of the pre-War buildings including the local mosque, which became of all things a bar.

Anyway, the place is rife with artist studios, many of them open and selling to the public. There is also a museum, which features the work of Janco and tells his and Ein Hod’s story. Janco was actually a fascinating character. He was a Romanian Jew, who spent much time in Zurich and Paris, and was one of the key characters in the Dadaist movement of the early 1900s. Janco’s paintings and illustrations from that period often depict the café and city life enjoyed by him and his compatriots. In addition, Janco illustrated poetic works by the likes of Tristan Tzava and Andre Breton, two leading Dada lights.

When Janco immigrated to Palestine in 1941, Dada didn’t come with him. Janco’s work took on a more figurative and narrative feel though later work tended toward the abstract. His subjects also tended to be of the local—immigrant camps, Arab and Jewish scenes, abstract Israeli landscapes.

As a historical note, most of the 700-900 Arab villagers of Ein Hod resettled in the West Bank. A group of 35 original inhabitants took shelter in a nearby wadi forming a new village called Ein Houd. It wasn’t until 2005 that Israel recognized the village and connected it to its electric grid. As in so many places in Israel, the conflict between the possibility of what is versus the loss of what was remains a constant presence.

If you do visit Ein Hod, there is a fabulous bookstore hidden down one of its small streets. The store is assembled of what looks like sheet metal, stone and wood remnants from demolished buildings, and a few nails. The floor is nothing but dirt and rock. The proprietor, who surrounds himself with at least four dogs and makes and sells some really terrible pottery, plays old Israeli and American LPs and might, if you look longingly enough at his coffee pot, offer you a cup. I found an out of print collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin as well as an ancient (and a bit water marked) edition of Octavio Paz.

Why Write or Read Poetry Reviews?

2010-03-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

Craig Teicher posted an interesting article “What Poetry Reviews Are For (and Up Against)” on Publisher’s Weekly a couple of days ago. As he points out (as have others before him) most poetry reviews are done by poets to be read by other poets. And almost all are positive. Spotting the Snow Leopard in Central Park Zoo is statistically more likely than finding a negative review of a poetry book. So then, as Teicher goes on:

In almost any conversation on the topic of poetry reviews, one question comes up: what’s the point? This question isn’t always asked with the flippant air that actually means “who cares?” Often, people really want to know: what is accomplished by poetry reviews? Do they help sell books? Do they keep the art form in line? Do they spur writers into creating better poetry or kick bad writers out of the halls of Parnassus? Do poetry reviews help readers?

Teicher’s article includes input of three other poet/reviewers—Kevin Prufer, Matthew Zapruder, and Nikole Brown. Prufer says, “The purpose of poetry reviewing is to keep the art of poetry alive.” Zapruder adds, “The most valuable thing about a review of a book of poetry is its potential to deepen the reader’s experience of the work under consideration.” Brown goes on, “The sale of a book, while the obvious goal, isn’t the ultimate aim” of a poetry review, she says, “It’s healthier for a title when that review stimulates public conversation.”

I agree that poetry reviews are part of the conversation about poetry. For many readers, they may be the ONLY part of that conversation and their only exposure to a particular book. I do a few reviews and I read a lot of poetry reviews. Why? For me, reviews help me not only understand what a particular poet is doing, but what poetry is. This is true when I’m reading a review, and even more so when I’m trying to do one.

Another similarly interesting panel/discussion took place in 2000 and was published in Jacket Magazine. Participating this time were critics Stephen Burt, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Scharf and Helen Vendler. I posted a few of their comments below but the discussion in its entirety is worth a read.

Stephen Burt: Poetry criticism might be defined as all the kinds of writing whose immediate effect is to help people read poems—poems that help us, as Samuel Johnson put it, "better to enjoy life or else better to endure it." Though the poems become part of life, as well—"part of the res itself and not about it" (Stevens). Valid tasks for criticism can include line-by-line exegeses; general introductions to formal and intellectual tools; explanations of how poems interact with other parts of culture; refutations of common fallacies or bad arguments; and even jokes. As Randall Jarrell had it, "The best critic who ever lived could not prove that the Iliad is better than 'Trees': the critic can only state his belief persuasively, and hope that the reader of the poem will agree—but persuasively covers everything from a sneer to statistics."

Helen Vendler: I think there's room for many kinds of criticism. There's room for criticism engaged in my circuit with the author, and there's room for criticism that says what the role of poetry is in the larger culture. "The most marvelous bishops of heaven," says Stevens, "are those that made it seem like heaven." And the most marvelous bishops of poetry are those that made it seem so. It's rare to find that volatility and power on the page, as we all know, and we're all looking for it all the time. The fact that there are people who are recognizing poetry, whether east-coast, west-coast, south, or north, seems to me a wonderful thing. It's very nice to be handing over one's own function as a talent scout to the next generation.

Marjorie Perloff: And now I think we've become much too polite in a certain way, and so I'll go back to what Steve said and start a little argument (we might as well, right?). Steve said in his talk, "I like Rae Armantrout, I like Frank Bidart, I like so-and-so." I find myself asking, "Why?" I don't know what that means to like some of those people you listed. I think it's too tolerant. Great art and great criticism have never been tolerant. Was Milton tolerant? Was Goethe tolerant? It's not up to artists and in that case their critics to say "Gee, everything, is great. I like this, and I also like that. And how wonderful that is."

Helen Vendler: I'm often asked why I don't often do negative reviews. Sometimes I've promised to write something and it turns out to be a negative review, but basically I don't want to write about that which doesn't attract me on the page—it's very much like being asked to talk about an incompetent singer. All you can say is the voice has no carrying power, there's no interpretative ability, there's no resonance or timbre, no dramatic excitement. All you can say is things that you miss; that doesn't seem to me an interesting kind of writing to do, I mean life is too short. It's like doing a multiple choice test: timbre, NO; carrying power, NO; interpretative talent, NO; this is just a boring kind of writing to do, whereas when something seems to be succeeding on the page, it's thrilling—and especially when it's something new and you don't know how the poet is making it happen.

A Passover Poem for Jerusalem

2010-03-26T21:24:00.000-07:00

We enter Passover week here in Israel. I’ll spend Passover Eve, Monday night, at my in-laws in Jerusalem where Shmuel, my father-in-law, will recite the entire “Agada” in Hebrew. Meanwhile, I’ll be feeding my gefilte fish to the dog. The reading of the Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) story, which recites how Moses led the Jews out of Egyptian slavery and to freedom, is a beautiful ritual, one I look forward to even though I am not Jewish. Of course, Moses’ story is also a Christian story, but I enjoy the ritual more for its continuity than for its content, the sense that we are saying the same words said thousands of times before. It makes me feel more human, not Jewish.

Jerusalem is in my mind a great deal, primarily because of the continuing controversy over the building of new Jewish apartments in the predominantly Arab eastern portion of Jerusalem. As most people know, this part of Jerusalem lies inside what the Palestinians hope will be the future capital of a Palestinian country. Most secular Israelis who I know also believe in a shared Jerusalem. But in order to appease right-wing and primarily ultra-orthodox coalition members, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government continues to approve new construction. It is appalling. I am happy that the US government appears to also find it appalling and is vocally letting the Israeli know its displeasure. Despite Netanyahu’s words, Jerusalem is not Tel Aviv.

I don’t want to turn this into a political piece. Here is a short lovely poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai called “Passover,” which at the end sums up what I think the Israeli government must take as its commandment: “Thou must surely change.”

My father was a god and did not know it. He gave me
The Ten Commandments neither in thunder nor in furry; neither in fire nor in cloud
But rather in gentleness and love. And he added caresses and kind words
and he added “I beg You,” and “please.”
And he sang “keep” and “remember” the Shabbat
In a single melody and he pleaded and
cried quietly between one utterance and the next ,
“Do not take the name of God in vain,” do not take it, not in vain,
I beg you, “do not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
And he hugged me tightly and whispered in my ear
“Do not steal. Do not commit adultery. Do not murder.”
And he put the palms of his open hands
On my head wit the Yom Kippur blessing.
“Honor, love, in order that your days might be long
On the earth.” And my father’s voice was white like the hair on his head.
Later on he turned his face to me one last time
Like on the day when he died in my arms and said
I want to add Two to the Ten Commandments:
The eleventh commandment – “Thou shall not change.”
And the twelfth commandment – “Thou must surely change.”
So said my father and then he turned from me and walked off
Disappearing into his strange distances.

Precious Translation from The Poetry Translation Centre

2010-03-19T05:29:00.000-07:00

Last month, Poetry Magazine published a lengthy discussion on translation. Two poets and people I admire—Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch—took somewhat opposing sides in the debate. Kirsch took the more pessimistic stance, claiming the now standard impossibility of translation and that “when you translate the “accidents of life” into the rather featureless dialect of international poetry” there is a risk “of losing the very truth the poem wants to tell us.” Kaminsky, who just co-edited (with Susan Harris) a book of translated poetry from around the world called The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, took the side of translation. While his arguments were more nuanced, he suggested that while there may be good and bad translations of specific poems, translation can yield something akin to the poetic ‘truth’ and sometimes yield a better poem. Most of us who read poetry in translation partake of both points of view (as do probably these two poets, but what a boring conversation that would make!).

In my case, I can only read Rilke, Zagajewski, Milosz, Akhmatova, Cavafy in translation. Even the Hebrew poets I love including Natan Zach, Yehuda Amichai, Dahlia Ravikovitch come to me only, really, in their English translations. But in all cases, I recognize the trade-off. The original music and meter, form and even content, is often sacrificed. Translators must make choices. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, an Israeli poet, and her English language translator decided to avoid translating any of Bar-Yosef’s more difficult poems (i.e., ones that had difficult form or abstract metaphor) because they felt it would be impossible to do adequate translations. You have only to compare different translations of the same poems to see how it can sometimes work and sometimes not. Hopefully though what is retained (and dare I say added by the translator) replicates, even enhances, what the originating poem intended.

I’m reiterating some of this debate because I came across a very interesting translation project called the “Poetry Translation Centre.” It is a small UK-based outfit that translated only living African, Asian or Latin American poets who have already established a reputation in their own languages and only through collaboration with the poet. Their process is in three steps:

1. They look at the original poem: even if most of us can’t understand a word, it’s always important to hear its music, and to look at how the poet has placed it on the page.
2. The language expert produces a literal translation that’s as close to the original as possible.
3. There’s the long and detailed negotiation that ends with the translated poem.

It is a lengthy process and obviously requires lots of resources though the Centre seems open to the idea of exchanging poems via mail and e-mail. So far, they’ve translated poets from Sudan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Somalia, Kurdistan, India, Argentina, Afghanistan, Turkey, Oman, and many others, including poets from Palestine and one from Israel. On their website, there are podcasts that include readings in both the original language and the translated, and one can purchase chapbooks of the translations.

I am doing a bit of informal translating myself from Hebrew to English of work by Israeli poets Tal Nitzan-Keren and Khaviva Padia. These translations are extremely time consuming and, so far, terrible. They illustrate how far I still have to go in learning this difficult language, and, how difficult the translation project is.

Check out The Poetry Translation Centre website and some of the poets. You can see the poems in their original languages, the literal translations, as well as the finished translated poems. Here is one of the finished poems by Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi translated from Arabic:

Dream

Poetry - may you be a green body.
May you be a language
in which I wander
with my wings and my self.
Be the inspiration of my tongue,
so that I may pasture
the tribes of my voice - though they are silent.

Sleepless
and alone, I see
you will not be
a green body.
You were neither
a good master, to be bought,
nor the muse.
My longed for delirium, my memory.

Reading Muller's The Land of Green Plums

2010-03-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading The Land of Green Plums the novel written by 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller. Muller is Romanian-German and there were several reasons I put the book on my reading list. I’d never read any Muller, or to be honest, heard of her before the Nobel bestowed its prize. I also have a slight aversion to German fiction after living in Munich for a few years and felt it time to move beyond my own pathology (don't ask but it was one of my 2010 New Year’s resolutions). More importantly, my in-laws, now living in Jerusalem, fled pre-Ceauşescu Romania in the early 1960s. Their exit may have been part of what is known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between Romania and Israel under which Israel paid Romania hard currency or provided economic assistance for every Jew “allowed” to emigrate. Even for Jews, such a decision must have been difficult as those that applied to leave were labeled enemies of the Communist system, of the country. This resulted in immediate humiliating dismissal from the place of employment and social stigmatisation. My in-laws left businesses, friends, family and came to Israel where a few years later, my husband and his sister were born. Muller herself may have been part of this same program as in the 1960s Ceausescu decided to "sell" not only Jews, but also Romanians of German origin who wanted to return to live in Germany -- The "selling" of people was a unique occurrence in modern history. He considered "Jews, Germans, and oil" the most important export commodities in Romania. For all those reasons, Muller seemed an important writer.

The novel takes place in an unspecified location and time, though it is a large city and sometime during Romanian dictator Ceausescu’s reign 24-year reign. I imagined Bucharest, Romania’s capital, in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The novel is told through the eyes of an unnamed young woman who leaves her small village for college and work. The narrator is of German origin, and may be modeled on Muller herself. We do learn names of several of her friends—Lola, Tereza, Edgar, Kurt, and Georg. Lola, one of the narrator’s roommates, kills herself early in the book. By the end, Tereza, who may or may not be an informant, succumbs to some unnamed disease perhaps cancer, Kurt and Georg are dead, after fleeing Romania, while the narrator and Edgar, who also manage to escape, are living in a state of still-constant fear in Germany.

The language in the book is simple and usually told via the interior monologue of the main character. Thus we often lose track of who is speaking, the action. Muller also uses created metaphors such as ‘heartbeast,’ ‘the eating of green plums’ by police officers, a ‘singing’ grandmother to indicate emotional states. The metaphors are strange, but are very expressive. They make you feel the oppressive atmosphere in a totalitarian regime, one starts to feel persecuted by "harmless men with dogs" walking behind you, one can relate perfectly well to how the characters grow more and more hopeless.

The Land of Green Plums brings to mind absurdist literature in the vein of Camus and Kafka. The novel lacks a traditional plot structure, the characters are ambiguous in nature, and it is basically a study of human behavior under circumstances that are highly unusual. But this is a perfectly valid way of expressing such life in art. To deal with the experience of totalitarianism would appear to demand either a talent for such poetic near-evasion or for absurdist, almost surreal comedy. In Muller’s case, it is the former rather than the latter. Humor, at least here, is not one of her tools. But given the suffering and deprivation Romanians suffered under Ceausescu, including her own, perhaps Muller felt any lightening of the novel’s atmosphere would have been further absurdity.

I admit I have typically turned to the poetic works by Czeslaw Milosz, Durs Grunbein, Adam Zagajewski, Anna Achmatova, Osip Mandelstam as lenses into this type of experience. Muller’s work though cannot be ignored. It isn’t necessarily fun reading, but it is I suppose necessary.

International Women's Day--Today!

2010-03-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Probably most of you don't know this but today is International Women's Day! I admit I didn't until I tuned in the Bitch Magazine website, where besides having a great name, the site provides interesting essays, commentary on media, politics, the arts as viewed through a women's lens. It also provides useful updates including regarding the aforementioned date. Did you also know that this has been a UN recognized day since 1911? Me either.

Anyway, to mark the day here is very brief excerpt from Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of Women's Rights" written in 1792. And still true, still true...

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave luster...? How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty!

How to Make a Bestseller: Poetry as Self Help

2010-03-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, Michael Berger wrote in the almost always excellent online magazine The Rumpus that if only poets and publishers could leverage the poetic obsession with ‘death’ and ‘loss,’ bookstores would be selling a lot more poetry books. Here’s an excerpt:

Yet if we consider poetry as less a morbid exploration of these bleak realities and more of a redemptive confrontation with them, then poetry will start selling like The Power Of Now or The Secret. Poems, instead of all those smug, unrealistic books on self-deification, will be the signposts directing us down navigable routes through thickets of pain and wastelands of loss.

Good grief, poetry as grief counseling. What’s next, Rita Dove writes “Goodbye Grief,” Tony Hoagland writes “Twelve Steps Backward,” Charles Simic’s “Elegy for the Last Cigarette,” or Marie Howe’s “The Diet Sonnets?” Granted, poetry is often a way in, a way through some of the most complex of human issues. It can certainly console, but it can also uplift, sing, amuse, and dance. Death is certainly one of poetry’s preoccupation, where isn’t it, but there’s also lots of sex, love, infidelity, money won and lost, murder, and lots and lots of mayhem. For me, poetry is compensation for only having one life.

The fiction bestseller lists are dominated by James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, Dan Brown, Harlen Coben, and Nora Roberts. I admit I’ve dived in to a few books by the aforementioned group and, yes, enjoyed them. There is a reason these books are called page-turners. But it is a rare case when anything we might call ‘literary fiction’ finds itself teetering at the top of one of The New York Times bestseller lists. Granted, a number of authors I consider articulate, complex, funny, and capable of writing a sentence with more than one subordinate clause like Jonathon Lethem, Jonathon Franzen, Alice Munro, Joyce Carroll Oates, etc, do sell. They even sometimes make it to the bestseller lists. But the number of books sold by these authors falls far far short of those sold by the highbrow romance publisher Harlequin. I mean how else does a young girl learn about sex?

Most people I know who avoid poetry do so for a whole slew of different reasons including but certainly not limited to lack of familiarity, perceived difficulty, desire for story, escape and entertainment, and, for sure, confusion in the face of the sheer number of poetry books. These are some of the same reasons these same people avoid literary fiction. Moreover, there is probably a reason Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are two of the bestselling poetry writers—they are often amusing, well at least Collins, straightforward and their poems illuminate feelings, and not just grief.

Reading poetry takes practice. I suppose if children were given more books of poetry and less Harry Potter, we’d have more adults reading poetry. That’s not to say that poetry doesn’t provide a beautiful and often helpful lens of loss and suffering. Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” Kimiko Hahn’s “Unbearable Heart,” Mary Jo Bang’s “Elegy,” tell what it is to lose a brother, a mother, a child. When I lost my mother, it was to this ‘help’ I turned.

D.H. Lawrence and His "Ship of Death"

2010-03-02T03:04:00.000-08:00

I suppose depression would be difficult enough, but at least most of us are saved from persecution complexes like that suffered by the writer D.H. Lawrence! Though I suppose given his most-famous book Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned and many people considered his work, if not him, pornographic, he wasn't entirely paranoid. Anyway, today is the 80-year anniversary of his death.

On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France, of tuberculosis. Lawrence was so scoffing of medical (or any other) science that he refused to name or accept his condition, or to submit to any of the "magic mountain" treatments recommended to him. This fatalism was combined with a belief that he was in the grip of an evil spirit, visited upon him by a lifetime of vilification from misguided critics and an outraged public -- most recently for the banned Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and for an exhibition of paintings condemned as "filth" by the press and confiscated by the police. "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another."

But I'd rather remember him for his amazing writing. Here is a fabulous reading of his poem "The Ship of Death," written just months before his own: