jerusalism

[jerusalism]

Adeena Karasick interviewed by Joelle Milman

Stuck in quarantine, I make a video in which I get romantic with a spoon. I send it to my friends, one of whom tells me to check out the video poems of Adeena Karasick. Some online digging tells me Karasick is a Brooklyn-based poet, writer, performer, and thinker whose work tackles the fun and the real. She also happens to be on the line-up for Mekuvan, Jerusalism’s first online reading series. In a cool combo of fate and query, I interview her and ask more about what’s happening between the lines of her words.

When Adeena sends me an email, she calls me “sweets” and “babe.” Though we think about speaking on Zoom, our interview happens over email, which is to say—text. I don my best quasi-professional internet speak while Adeena skyrockets into my gmail, peppering her answers with emoticons and parentheticals, taking me inside and outside her answers in a slightly overlarge Arial font. Her I’s are lowercase, her proper nouns uppercase. Her signature is one lone, light gray “a.”

I go deep into Karasick’s online corpus. Soon I’m floating. Her virtual vocals hold words fused across mediums, embodying a world intimate with its own supposition of depth. Within this world is the explicit understanding that depth is about layers, and its meaning comes from the interaction of all things—poetry, politics, kabbala!—not nearly as disparate as we imagine. Her work reminds me of the internet itself: obsessed by its ever-updating form and devoted to the process of making image meet word.  

In our interview, Adeena tells me as much, making sure to blow my mind with the theoretical underpinnings of her playful, sexy, serious work. She signs off on our correspondence with ; ))))))) and !!!!!!! and xxxxxxx. Though we’ve finished speaking for now, I find myself again looking at her work, mesmerized. An in to the infinite. Here are some of her thoughts on the matter.

---

Joelle Milman: The infinite abounds in your work. What is your relationship to ein sof?

Adeena Karasick: I like thinking about ways in which ein sof is where all possibility erupts; everything that has been and will be created is housed in a kinda blueprint of potentiality. I think this sense of potent play is crucial, opening up dialogue for new possibilities of reference, connection, an “infinite” unfolding of semantic, syntactic (political) possibilities.

In the Zohar it says, “all binding and union and wholeness are secreted in the secrecy / that cannot be grasped and cannot be known, / that includes the desire of all desires. // Infinity does not abide being known, / does not produce end or beginning./  Primordial Nothingness brought forth Beginning and End? Who is Beginning?... It produces End... But there, no end.” ;)

I guess you could say this sense of questioning and a sense of endless opening really interests me. Take for example, how transliterated ein (nothing) is homophonically connected to ayin (eye) through which we can envision anything. Or if one shifts the letters to ani (i), then we are between being and nothingness, endlessly re-presencing. I’m interested in navigating this space between visibility and invisibility, what is revealed, concealed, veiled unveiled through the flux of form, emanation, re-formation. Recognizing, of course, that in order for anything to be manifested there has to be a limit, a concealment. I adore this ex-static play of expansion and contraction, where everything hums with a kinda vertiginous, vibratory edge.

JM: Who is your muse?

AK: Abraham Abulafia, 13th C. Kabbalistic mystic.

JM: Your ew hybrid poetic work, Salomé, takes a misunderstood character and gives her a new story. What was it like to work with such a specific character, attached to particular historical narratives?

AK: Well, it always bothered me that within Christian mythology and entrenched in history by writers like Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Mallarmé, artists such as Gustav Klimt, Gustave Moreau, and Aubrey Beardsley, Salomé was seen as yet another Jewish temptress/Christian killer (which is not so great for the Jews ;).

But, in fact, there isn’t any evidence to substantiate this claim. I did a whack of research and according to apocrypha and Josephus’s Antiquities, she came from Jewish royalty and there is no evidence she murdered John the Baptist or even danced for Herod. The only historical reference that [Herod’s wife] Herodias’s daughter’s name was Salomé is from Flavius Josephus, who makes no other claims about her—not that she danced for Herod, not that she demanded John’s head, but only that she went on to marry twice and live peacefully. The other apocryphal reference is that a daughter danced for Herod, which caused him to lose his mind and kill John the Baptist. Thus, the conflagrated Salomé that appears in the Wilde play, [Richard] Strauss opera and all subsequent productions, is an amalgamated construct. Along with Klezmer/jazz god Frank London, I embarked on a 7 year journey to set the record straight.

For the record, there are three women named Salomé in Jewish history: Salomé, daughter of Herodias and Herod II (circa 14-71 CE); Queen Salomé, her great-aunt (65 BCE-10 CE); and Salomé Alexandra (139-67 BCE). Her great-aunt, Salomé I, was the powerful sister and force behind Herod the Great, king of Judea and Second Temple rebuilder.  Salomé Alexandra (also known as Shelomtzion) was one of only two women who reigned over Judea. I wanted my Salomé, Salomé of Valor (pun intended), to carry the weight of both her genetic lineage and the cultural heredity of her name, embodying the legacy and power of the women that came before her.

JM: Your recent work, COVID/ KAVOD, pays attention to these particular times and the words we have created around it. Can you tell me more about the piece?

AK: You know, I was sheltering at home with my daughter Safia Fiera (Sefira) in NYC, and wrote a Facebook post thinking about the power of words and names. I was increasingly obsessed with how COVID transliterated in Hebrew as Kavod כבוד, which translates to glory, honor, and respect. When we congratulate someone we say כל הכבוד – ‘all the honor’ (Good job!)— or close a letter with the word בכבוד which means ‘with respect.’  Yet, ironically, it’s also related to kaved “heavy.” And throughout Exodus, the presence of God in the tabernacle is symbolized by the word ‘Kavod’ (which is also represented by a cloud!). Through a 13th Century Kabbalistic lens, Kavod כבוד refers to Shekhinah, the female revealed aspect of God, which is symbolized by the lips, the mouth, the wound, the word: gates of entry, gates of transmission. AND – according to the Zohar [3296b], the CORONA (crown) of the phallus. And most astoundingly, KAVOD as a technical term within the sefirotic system emphasizes the distinction between the 1st vessel of light and the other 9 – COVID19.

Superstar dub poet/producer Lillian Allen contacted me and asked me to record my thoughts. She had it set to music with a DJ and a cello; launched on Spotify and CD Baby...crazy! It was one of those things, where you never know where things might lead, the synecdoche of the ever-so prescient spread?! Really makes one think about the viral nature of everything, i.e. memes—units of cultural energy that virally replicate themselves; how à la Korzybski / Burroughs, “Language IS a virus…

JM: You work in performance, video, text—but everything seems grounded in words. How do words play differently in different forms?

AK: All my work is dedicated to highlighting ways in which language and being are so intricately entwined; how we are formed and reformed through the language we use; how language’s physicality / materiality / sonic qualities infinitely re-create meaning and being. Playing between and within language’s visual and acoustic space, underscoring how it’s all so viscerally alive.

I love the differences between them [mediums] and I love ways that they feed off and expand the experience of one another.

JM: What is your relationship to the individual letter?

AK: Kabbalistically speaking, if the world was created through letters, every time we read or write or speak, we are in essence re-creating the world.

I love thinking about the way each letter rubs up against another letter, how that modulates the overall feel of the way a line or a text plays itself like a score; how it asks us to renegotiate meaning and being. How every letter in a way contains every other letter and how they themselves hover, erupt as sparks of light.

My recent work Aerotomania, which investigates how the airplane is structured like a language, exposes how the shape of the airplane is reminiscent of the letter Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, symbol of infinite and contemporaneous beginnings.

It’s constructed from two Yods י, one above and one below, with a diagonal line, the Vav ו, between them, representing the higher world and the lower world, separating and connecting the two Yods. And through chambers of light rungs of life ærotically connecting higher and lower worlds, all brimming with interior struggle and yearning, hiddenness, and longing—

JM: Tell me more about what you find sexy. What is the erotic up to when it shows up in your work, and do you find it particularly intertwined with gender? If so, how and why?

AK: HA! What I find most sexy are witty mashups of entwined letters. Ways references wrap around each other, the ways letters brush up against and wind around each other—ways meaning erupts in unexpected ways.

To this end, my new work Aerotomania really focuses on the erotics of meaning production. According to Marshall McLuhan, “the airplane is an extension of the body.” So, with it I’m exploring not only how the airplane is structured like a language but an extension of the body, specifically metonymic of the female body; flying through clouds of data, through a sultry and amorous mapping of light, “shade,” shadow, highlighting the relationship of how language becomes a shape-shifting trickster; an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us to sometimes unknown destinations; flying through a variety of zones, registers, soaring to higher and higher levels, leading to radically transformative possibilities of passion, pleasure, power and promise, as we negotiate loss and light; opening up new ways of seeing and being. THIS is sexy ; )

JM: I love it. I haven't seen anything that approximates the video poetry you make and they’re awesome. When it comes to idea generation, do you start with the medium or the message?  What is your editing process like?

Well, in media ecological terms, the medium is always massaging the message. I’m always interested in the way information reads and is transformed through multiple platforms; whether on a page or a stage, a tablet, computer, or movie screen.

Videopoetry as a medium allows me exquisite axes of entry into a virtual arena. There, not only can the materiality of language be exposed, but through the conflagration of image, music, voice, text, sound and animation, a ‘textatic’ slipperiness of meaning appears. Each piece, operating with its own structure, codes, logic, idioms, reminds us how meaning-making is always a praxis of palimpsest and dissemination, generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.

But to answer your question—in almost every case, I start with a text that I want to multimodally play with. For example, right now I’m working on a videopoem for a Salomé track. I have my text, the recording of it, with the music (composed and performed by Klezmer / Jazz god, Frank London), and now have to assess what aesthetic feel is going to auratically transport it. So unlike writing the poetry, where I see and hear and feel the words all simultaneously, making videos is usually sequential.

Though I do all my own pechakuchas, it literally takes a village to make the videopoems! I write the text, communicate my vision, but I don’t have a lot of the technical expertise—so each one is a loving and painstaking process collaborating with musicians, animators, editors. Textual editing process parallels this in that I am a ferociously compulsive editor, renegotiating every syntactic reference, line break, lexical choice. And even though I have so much respect for Ginsberg’s “first thought best thought,” everything goes through a crazy amount of editing and re-editing until the last possible moment.

JM: So much of your work is mash-up, combining elements from other texts be they theoretical, visual, or otherwise. What is it like to combine existing content and bring it into new forms?

If everything is inherently intertextual and archival, my work celebrates a kind of parsed play of laced socio-political-lingual cultural shards and fractures, highlighting how all is pulsing with palimpsested resonance. This then inherently asks one to revisit and recontextualize, reframe information and thereby see it in new ways.

For example, I’ve been working on an ongoing collaborative project with famed critic / weaver, Maria Damon, on a piece we call: “Intertextile: Text in Exile: Shmata Mash-Up A Jewette for Two Voices,” where we investigate the relationship between text and textile. The whole piece is marked by a kind of intertextatic syntacticism; as we weave meaning through found data, shattered matter, shredded fragments, through all that is proper, improper, impropriotous, riotous, simultaneously celebrating and questioning all that’s filthy and wrinkled and inside out, all that’s unfolded, soiled, sullied, un-rinsed and uncomfortable. And it’s this sense of exploration and reformation, through research, inquiry and play where one can explore the impossibility of the possible, the contingency of our finitude, our brokenness, excess and exuberance, within the fissures of being.  

What’s it like? In a word: textatic ; )  

JM: Your work has uncompromising trust in its own voice and self-representation. For us just getting started out here: do you have any advice on how to commit to and advocate for your work, particularly in a world not always eager to support emerging artists?

AK: Trends, aesthetics, modes, schools of thought come and go, in and out of vogue, and if I’ve learned anything over the years is that everything goes in cycles. Or to use McLuhan’s terminology, systems get enhanced, reversed, retrieved or obsolesced, and so it’s so important to just trust your own mind. Regardless of what seems to be the genre, the praxis, procedure, fashion of the moment, write what you want. Read, as much as you can, go to readings, start journals, perform at open mics, gather community and share ideas, share work. But it’s so important that you trust your own vision, and just sometimes shut it all out and just create your own unique powerful universe that you want to inhabit.    

--------

To join the Jerusalism Mekuvan Zoom session featuring Adeena, please see register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mekuvan-4-wadeena-karasick-tickets-107540472448

[jerusalism]

Emmy Raviv interviewed by Geula Geurts

Geula Geurts: Emmy, I’m honored to interview you, thank you for joining me! I’ve always wondered about singer/songwriters: when you’re creating a song, what comes first, the lyrics or the melody? 

Emmy Raviv: Thanks for having me! Well, for each song it’s different. I sing and hum to myself a lot, while doing the dishes or cooking. So sometimes a melody can come my way, without words. And sometimes a phrase comes without a melody, a first song snippet, that will lead me to the rest of the song. Sometimes songs are born spontaneously like that, and other times I’ll have a specific idea in my mind that I want to work into a song. Often, the songs that are more planned are born from a desire to tell a story that intrigues me, or has moved me emotionally. And often, these are narrative I pick up from the news. 

GG: So, you do research for these kinds of songs?

ER: Yes, for example the song “Supermoon,” which is about a pregnant prisoner who lost her baby. When I heard this story on the news, it really touched me, and it felt like a story I wanted to tell. So, I read more about it, and then started pasting together phrases.

My first born

He lived one day

Just another debt

To pay

Another example is the song “McDowell County,” the poorest county in West Virginia, where many voted for Trump. I started listening to interviews of these voters and became fascinated. I decided to write them a song, with the phrases from the interviews themselves, to which I added my own lyrics.

When I was young there were plenty of jobs

Timber, coal mines, filling stations, working on cars

Now the price of cans is 45 cents for a pound

I wouldn’t call it work but it’s the only job around

I know this guy he’s selling T-shirts on the road

He talks about his candidate and then he starts to glow

Says he’ll bring the coal mines back from the grave

Says he talks about McDowell in a special way

GG: Would you say you’re drawn to political songwriting?

ER: Yes, political songwriting is definitely an aspiration for me. On the one hand, emotions are absent from dry news reporting and politics, and on the other hand the news and politics can be so emotionally loaded and personal. In writing songs about political issues, I can make them personal, and in response the personal again becomes political.

GG: Who are songwriters you look up to for inspiration?

ER: I’d say folk singers like Phil Oches and Anais Mitchell. They both know how to create this magical place between making a political statement and touching upon deep emotion. That’s what great folk music aspires to do. As the genre itself implies, folk music is music for the people, music that incorporates folk tales, narrative, a form of generational storytelling. For me, this is the ultimate kind of songwriting and storytelling. The rhythm of the lyrics and melody band together to build one powerful musical whole.

GG: And talking about music, how would you describe your relationship to your guitar?

ER: Ha! The truth is, I try to keep my guitar away from new songs for as long as possible. Until I feel I have enough of the song written. Otherwise, the guitar will limit the process. I don’t feel like the guitar is my strongest asset, so I try not to let it limit the melody my voice and mind are working on. I often sing to myself, and then record myself and the new melody that is brewing. Then I go back and flesh out the lyrics. I only move over to the guitar to accompany myself when I’m comfortable with the melody and the lyrics. And then after it all sinks in, I’ll let myself be more playful with the actual instrument.

GG: You’ve mentioned that you’re often inspired by narrative in your songs. Is there a specific practice you engage in to motivate yourself at times when you’re not spontaneously inspired? 

ER: I write morning pages, which is really a practice to free myself from all the chatter in my mind. I wouldn’t say this writing is necessarily material for songs, or a part of the craft process, but it helps me to focus and connect to myself. I’m often dependent on my muse to show up at her leisure, which is an exercise in patience for me. The free morning writing helps me clear my mind. I’d like to have a better friendship with my muse wherein she comes by more often. When I was eighteen and starting my musical journey, my muse was on fire. I have no clue how I wrote the songs I wrote then. Now, I need to work hard and take my craft seriously. I’ve become a collector of images and stories. Actively searching for images, words and phrases around me in day-to-day life helps feed my muse. Sometimes, I’m not sure why I’m collecting certain images and obsessing about them, till another image comes along and it clicks, it falls into place, and I know I have a narrative thread to string together a new song.

GG: That sounds like a guiding muse to me!

ER: Ha, yes I guess. When I feel I’m on the imaginative yes-train when writing, I know I’m being guided. Everything needs to be yes, every word, yes, every rhyme, yes. When I’m in that yes-cocktail zone, I’m in the right state of mind, where nothing is forced, but the melody and lyrics just flow like a pair of good friends!

GG: Yes! I’m looking forward to seeing you perform on that yes-train this Tuesday!

ER: Yes! See you there.

-----------------

This interview was  conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Jerusalem Speaks, at the Besarabia Bar on October 16th, 2018.

[jerusalism]

Marcela Sulak interviewed by Geula Geurts

Geula Geurts: Thank you for agreeing to meet with me this early morning to discuss your poetry. 

Marcela Sulak: And thank you. 

GG: I’d like to start off with a question that intrigues me about poets in general, something I’m always curious about. How would you describe your mood when you write poetry?

MS: Well, there are different moods for different kinds of poems or genres of writing. The poems in my forthcoming collection City of Skypapers are a kind of morning ritual, or even a morning prayer. I tried to enter them with absolute openness, as if encountering a blank page. While writing them, it felt to me that the mood of each piece could be radically different. Some days I’d be obsessing about something specific, and other days I’d just be looking at the ducks in the Yarkon river, and some days I’d be wondering about the people I’m sitting next to on the bus. 

GG: That’s a lovely daily writing ritual. It feels very appropriate for us to talk about your poems in the morning, and in a sukkah, surrounded by a green garden.

Marcela Sulak: Yes, Sukkot is definitely a favorite holiday. I’m very much drawn to the yearly cycle and rhythm of the land, the harvest seasons and all they involve. 

GG: Your poems are indeed very much grounded in harvest imagery, vegetables, fruit, plants. They seem to naturally recur throughout your poems, often as organic background “props,” even when they aren’t the center of the poem. How do you explain this? 

MS: In my first book “Immigrant,” I was interested in how people are changed by the plants and nature around them, and vice versa. How the plants around them create sacred rituals or holidays. And in my second book, with laws and rules governing eating and social behavior.

I actually grew up on a rice farm, in a family that sustained itself. We had a garden, chickens, a cow; my mom sewed our clothes. We were commercially almost independent. So, I’m accustomed to apprehending the world that way. To ask myself, what’s growing on it, when is it in season? I grew up sensitive to sunrise, sunset, seasons. I learned to mark them by what was growing. I’ve also moved around a lot as an adult, and the natural world has always been the one stable thing in my life. I’ve frequently exchanged languages and countries, so I ordered myself through the natural world. Eating is actively consuming the natural world, it’s a constant everywhere, a communion with the world. Eating also brings people together, there is an intimacy. GG: I can sense this in your poem “Shekhinah, a prayer” where you write:

When I break the first egg, break the second, the chickens 

do not pause in their pecking, the insects in the grass 

continue to hide behind their blades. Companion 

is still one who shares my bread.

It feels like the imagery of the natural world imbues your poems with spirituality, sometimes even religion. 

MS: True. I think that the Jewish yearly cycle itself is grounded in the garden, is in constant conversation with the harvest. Look at Sukkot, Pesach, Shavuot; the rhythms of the land take on ritualistic and religious meaning.

GG: I’ve noticed that “place” is also an important factor in your poems. In “Skypapers” your home-setting of Tel Aviv is central. The mundane, everyday factors of city life: the market, the bus, the river, the garden, the kitchen. 

MS: In this book I didn’t have one general theme, but I wanted the collection to be a set of daily poems. My everyday life entails a morning run to the sea, or to my vegetable garden and orchard, a bus commute or bicycle ride to work, or cooking in my kitchen. And there is ritual there too. Much of Jewish custom is grounded in the fine details of the day to day, from kashrut to raising children. 

GG: The poem sequence which starts with the line “To get here today” seems to be grounded in poetic form, yet the language feels like a natural flow, a stream of consciousness. Can you explain what poetic choices you’ve made there?

MS: The idea of these daily meditation poems was also to mimic how the mind works. I mainly wrote on the bus or while walking in the city. I tried to remember my thinking process, from one thought to the next, to observe my mental process. I did this as a practice every day for six months. I wrote it all down in the form of a block. And only afterwards did I shape the poem into form, with either the ottava rima structure, or sonnet sequences. Cutting the block of free writing into form forced me to eliminate non-essential parts of the poem, the debris you delete when form asks for rhyme. Poetic form is like a hanger on which the dress of the poem takes shape. 

GG: What a wonderful answer on poetic craft! To conclude, would you say you’ve ended up writing a collection of love-poems to Tel Aviv?

MS: Ha! Let’s just say that Tel-Aviv and I are in a complicated relationship, an open relationship maybe. I never dreamed of living here, but I can say that I’m growing into the city. Since I started leasing the vegetable garden plot and orchard, and running by the river, I’ve found nature and peace within the city structures. I feel more expanded now. I don’t know if I’ll always live in Tel Aviv. Perhaps these are more poems that embody the act of falling in love with a city, learning the self within the city.

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Celebrate Olim reading organized at Beit Uri Zvi. Check out Jerusalism for the best literary and cultural events in the city.

[jerusalism]

Delicate as a Photon Shower

Translator’s Note: The following is an addendum to the text accompanying “My Heart Isn’t Synchronized with Technology”, an exhibition in the Barbur Gallery featuring work by photographer Tamar Lewinsohn. Beyond the traditional work of the curator, Abraham Kritzman was inspired to compose and distribute the following words, which gallery visitors are welcome to read, to juxtapose with the exhibited works, and perhaps even to interpret. Focusing on the text itself, readers also have the opportunity to engage with an example of ekphrastic writing, which inspired the translator, Lonnie Monka, to make this text available to an English-speaking audience. Inspired by Lewinsohn’s visual art, Kritzman’s text asks us to engage with number of questions, including the relationship of language to visual experiences, and the possibility of evoking intimacy in and across media.

The Lock Hole

The door is open. It faces its thin side towards us, that plane designed to be swallowed into the wall. With a backwards step, the protruding key sparkles; becoming instilled with dimension and personality, the door is photographed.

In the past, locks had holes through which people could peak. Today, locks no longer bear these holes; yet, were they to, phone cameras would immediately penetrate them. Peeking through such a hole reveals a world beyond our physical space, disconnecting the body, and projecting its own signals for reading and imagining what is uniquely bound by a single channel. Just as with a camera, the world flattens into a plane in which we discover a place that is over there, on the other side.  

There, above the armchair, a flat cable lies tightly against the wall. Pulling it will open the shutter upwards. The tension of that faded-color cable stems from holding the weight of the shutter. The sudden noise of pulling would allure the elliptical apertures that spin on the wall facing the field that blinds my eye just before sunset.  

A Second First Gaze

As the shutter rises, the window is revealed; there I encounter the outside -- the world. Or so I tell myself. And since I encounter it from behind closed doors, I wonder about the attributes of this confined gaze.

I encounter the window’s opening inside the rip. Beginning to form general impressions of color, a few lines strum appearances on my imagination: it’s outside, a landscape, urban, inside a window, city residences in Israel. My eye runs and returns across the image in my imagination, yet differently -- according to a different hue, running between the eye and the imagination. This second hue rips my continuous familiarity between the two, it appears at the same time on the same plane.

Grip

I position myself before a picture whose contents I cannot successfully decipher. What has been photographed here? Positioned before a photographed object that seems so familiar to me, I am unable to name it. It’s as if I once stood in such close proximity, but perhaps not. Whatever it “is” slips away from me as it continually demands that I identify it, that I ask what it is or what it was.

When I think about photography (especially about analog photography) I don’t need to be reminded of its being derived from reality and from the past, I know and feel this fact: it photographs what lies before it and I am able to identify the world that was within it. When I don’t identify it, two possibilities stand before me: first, that the described world is not familiar to me, or second, that the photographic mechanism blurred the familiar.

In certain circumstances a new object is created -- something ambiguous. It exerts control over the place of this seam; this paper-thin space capable of containing hybrids, fragments of memory and feelings whose place and aim are difficult for us to determine, even though we feel their proximity and identify with them. For us, they are not created according to the workings of the imagination; they exist all of the time, on that rip between the familiar and the strange.

Concealment

I pass my hands across the wall so that my fingertips can feel the cracked open paint which, after winter, separated from the previous layer. I enjoy feeling it crumble and break, piling up on the floor, leaving behind an amorphous form. A few microns constitute this layer whose thickness is just that which is able to be felt. If I had not further crumbled the paint, I would not have created this form, and the peeling paint would still protrude as a fold on a wall, as curling fractures.

The printer passes indifferently over the things inserted into it -- concealing with ink. When the ripped, printed photographs are placed one over the other, they unify as a new object for us: a ripped photograph of an object, as well as a new object created by the printer and merged with photography. It’s continuity folds and moves along hidden planes. We assume that it continues duplicating layers and stratifying. However, we discover that the image is separated by a rip, and that there are areas where the imagination attempts to convince us that the thing below is also the thing above, and that what is above is also below.

Were I to use my hands to grab a booklet made of paper, on which was printed additional pages, I would learn, through their image, about the connection between them. These pages would unite as a kind of small pamphlet. I would hold in my hands all of the planes present in the work, able to play with them, to move them, and to place them so as to create a continuous image, or to expose the lack of unity by flipping or shifting.

The order of these works conceals seeds of trouble in me; my thoughts destroy the possibility of these images not being continuous, that the things I see and experience are products of my imaginations, and that they are not the very thing I imagine they are. I discover that I am not capable of determining or of consenting. Continuing to flip back and forth between them I wonder: are they connected to the reality that both was and is manifested by my perceiving it, or to a space that I fabricate, based in my memories, in my world alone?

Intimacy

Two strips of light pass over the tiles of the bathroom. They burn the image, corrupting a section of it; they are so bright that all that is left is the paper itself -- the substrate constitutes the image. In fact, this is the place in which there is no image, wherein reality was so violent to the medium that it rendered photography incapable of preserving the image as such. There we encounter a photographic wound. A proximity immense enough so as to burn the image.

We feel serene -- a bathroom, a quotidian moment. We identify a private space, one that often invites the body, the nude. This is the moment, this is exactly the moment that the sun can touch -- to meet a body inside a house, inside a bathroom, a place where people become most human. An encounter as delicate as a shower of photons. This feeling is that of intimacy. A feeling of uniqueness, characterized by its being pleasant. This intimacy, which I encounter inside the rips, invites me to transform my imagination and vision so as to become similarly distinct. I become a bare observer of a violence that is carried out with images that activate my senses and imagination. Facing this violence, I am continually summoned to gather just one more detail, with delicacy and tenderness to join yet another clue to my imagination -- to ascribe, to catalogue, to affix, to categorize, to situate as a narrative sequence. The works on these walls battle inside me, evoking a multifaceted mood as well as intimacy.

_________________________________________

Abraham Kritzman is an artist living and working in Tel Aviv. He currently lectures at Bezalel Academy, in Jerusalem, and serves as the Art Director of Barbur Gallery. Abraham has received numerous awards, including but not limited to the Herman Struk Prize for printmaking, the Aileen Cooper Prize, a Bezalel Scholarship for MA studies at the Royal College of Art London, and the Ministry of Culture Award for a Young Artist.

Abraham has exhibited his works in numerous solo shows in Israel and London.

[jerusalism]

David Caplan interviewed by Lonnie Monka

LM: Virginia Quarterly Review created a poetry poster with your poem "God Knows English". The poem seems to riff off of the way people relate to language as a means to connect to the divine. It seems to hint at the particular backdrop of Hebrew, as the holy language, against the English most American Jews communicate with daily, while also touching upon more general concerns about the way in which sounds are imbued with meaning. Can you share your thoughts about these subjects?

DC: “God Knows English” is part of a sequence of poems in my current manuscript, Into My Garden, which considers life inside and outside a Chassidic yeshiva. The poems follow a person who is both like and unlike me as he works to adapt to the demanding, rewarding schedule of study and prayer.  

One challenge he faces is linguistic. Like other Jewish-Americans who grow in traditional religious observance, he needs to develop his knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the prayers and sacred texts. The poem expresses the envy and longing he feels listening to the other students smoothly study the texts in the loud study hall. In a certain sense, he is working to move from the ordinary to the sacred. Of course once he learns more he will understand the need to see the sacredness of the ordinary. In a sense, by detailing the ordinariness of religious study, I am trying to honor that effort.

LM: The poem's student is a compelling image, especially in that it reflects what I imagine draws many people to poetry -- namely, the desire "to move from the ordinary to the sacred". It's easy to imagine that people's search for the sacred is a kind of universal longing, while that search leads to deeply particular experiences. Thinking of the relationship of universals and particulars, your poetry seems as steeped in the particulars of Jewish religious life as it is immersed in the American poetic tradition. When writing or publishing, do you have a particular audience in mind?

DC: The question of audience would influence how much information is given: whether, for instance, certain terms need to be translated into English, and whether the poem needs to explain the action it dramatizes. I suppose my answer has to be hedging, because I don’t have a definite rule to address this important concern. My tendency is translate terms (such Beit Midrash to study hall) and avoid technical terms of Torah study, when possible. At the same time, my tendency is also to explain less, to risk a lack of clarify for the sake of intimacy and intensity. I don’t write primarily for Jewish publications or audiences—although I am of course pleased when they connect with my work. In this respect, I guess the reader I have in mind is a secular version of me.

LM: As an American here in Israel for a fellowship at Haifa University, what are your thoughts about the relationship between American and Israeli poetry? Do you see much of an interchange? Or are their connections and interactions that you would like to see?

DC: During this year and on previous trips, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a number of Israeli poets and poetry scholars. The conference, Poetry Now, offered one occasion; it featured a very interesting group poetry reading, as well as a number of very strong presentations. I particularly enjoyed meeting Rachel Tzvia Back, Yosefa Raz (my colleague this year at Haifa), Marcela Sulak, and, previously Linda Zisquit. What strikes me is how Israeli poetry, both in Hebrew and English, can employ place names and language to evoke a long history and literature. For instance, a poem might convey Biblical echoes in a way that American poetry would strain to do. The author can assume a certain knowledge and, especially in Hebrew, a recognition of allusion and context. As for American poetry, the field is so vast and diverse that I’m not sure how complete any list could be. Some of my favorite poets writing now are Yehoshua November, Harryette Mullen, Albert Goldbarth, DA Powell, and Maggie Smith, and I admire James Longenbach and Stephanie Burt as both scholars and poets. I think more interactions in person—that is, through readings and meetings, both formal and informal—can only help the art.

LM:  Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the works of others. To conclude this interview, it would great to hear about your current projects, or anything else that we can expect from you in the future.

DC: Thank you for your thoughtful questions. As I mentioned, I am working on a poetry manuscript, Into My Garden.  I am also writing American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press, as part of its Very Short Introduction Series, and have started work on a new monograph, tentatively called The Art of Exclusion, which proposes a new theory of modern and contemporary poetry.

--------------------------------------

This interview was conducted in preparation for the following Jerusalism events that David Caplan will be participating: the 2+2 reading (on 13.3.18), and the Poetic Tuition workshop (on 3.4.18). 

[jerusalism]

Ross Weissman interviewed by Moshe Lapin

ML: Can you begin by telling me a little of your background? How did you develop an appreciation of poetry and start writing it yourself, and who (or what) are your artistic influence?

RW: As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been a creative writer, but it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I fell in love with poetry. I continued writing in college and found that whenever I wrote poems, as opposed to short-stories, the writing always became a pursuit of honesty. Its form invoked me to say something truer than I could, or would, in speech. Editing and revising poems became about making them more honest, more to the point and heart of things. Today, I still think any decent poem I write needs to be honest -- painfully, beautifully, or bitterly. Poems sound a gentle defiance against western culture, which is uninterested in honesty. Poetry saves me from it, but sometimes western culture dominates me too.

ML: ​What was it that contributed to your "fall"? Were there particular authors or poems that were inspiring or love-inducing, or was it rather the potential for a creative outlet?

RW: Love begat love, and new begat new. My fall, as you put it, accompanied falling romantically in love for the first time. I was reading poetic texts from a range of religious and philosophical traditions for the first time too. I was captured by Lao-Tzu’s Te-Tao Ching and the poetry of Rumi, all of which provided form for my newfound cosmic wonder. Within Jewish poetry, I was drawn to love-poetry-liturgy, especially L’cha dodi, and its invitation for a communal expression of love, for God, every Friday night.

ML: What do you mean by a "defiance of western culture"? It is very striking how little the value of honesty is used as a criteria for judgement -- aesthetic or otherwise -- or in general discourse at all. There seems to be a package of values that have been taken to be right or best or true, rather than honest.ֿ Do you see your writing as an intentional intervention?

RW: It's been rare for me to find people in the west who attend graciously to their honest inner lives and who prioritize that same attendance in others. Such regard for honesty isn't well-nurtured, and many people are lonely because of it. I do think that’s where honesty is most valued though: in relationship, even if its not realized.

Are my poems successful interventions in honesty? Probably more successful for me than for others; I assume few people are reading my writing, and even fewer are enjoying it. My girlfriend likes many of my poems, she tells me when she doesn’t. I believe it has an effect on my personal and interpersonal reality though, and I hope that it does or will for a broader communal and cosmic one too.

ML: Some of your poetry that I've read delves into the everyday life, and is influenced by the Bible and Talmud, can you talk to both this juxtaposition and influence?

RW: Since poetry is a project of honesty, I include references to Torah, Talmud and other classical sources because they are reflective of my world; religious texts tend to point to the heights of honesty, its depths, so I return regularly to classical sources and I invite others to do that with me.

ML: Can you expand a bit on what you think the relation is between ​writing poetry or poetry in general, and textual interpretation? Learning, and particularly exegesis of primary texts, has always been at the center of Jewish education, perhaps poetry as a genre has something to add to this, perhaps that's a role it once filled an no longer does for some reason, do you think of this effort and these texts as poetic, if so what does that mean to you? Maybe that's a means to understanding Midrash or Aggadah or Kabbalah.

RW: I do understand poetry to be an alternative form for commentary on classical sources; nurturing its study and writing can generate and even validate other commentaries that are less central to the canon too. Whoever said that all commentaries have been and need to be ancient, relegated to essays or preserved in Rashi script?

Many classical sources are certainly poetic. Hasidic drashot, in particular, come to mind. Many were recited on Shabbat in Yiddish and then written down the following day by a student in Hebrew. Their oral nature and then later recording, their translation, and how they are often contained within the narrowly structured columns of a sefer are all very poetic. Many possess subtle, but powerful insights within their hiddushim that regularly remind me of poetry too. Is a Hasidic drash a poem? I'm not willing to say that, but I'd like to think more about its possible meaning.

ML: What do you think of poetry as Jewish form of expression, if you do?

RW: I long romantically for the medieval poetry circles of Andalusia, when more Jewish scholars held up Jewish poetics as a religious form to learn, share and practice. I believe in the poem’s powerful appeal to our physical and cosmic senses, so the poem certainly appeals to me as a vehicle for religious expression. I want poetry to be more a part of contemporary religious study, teaching and creating today; when done right, it can be much more approachable than other forms of religious writing.

ML: ​I think this is a beautiful sentiment. Poetry as a way of thinking (and practice) does have an untapped potential. ​​Why do you think it is derided? Do you think there is a remedy?  ​

RW: I think poetry is perceived as an impractical economic investment, which I actually don’t agree with, and it is also perceived as not containing explicit connection to the legal underpinnings foundational to much of classical Jewish text study. A remedy to the former point needs to be societal and probably economic, but to the latter point, I would say: if aggadah can be regarded as more important, and if individual voices beside Torah can be too, and if there is permission to synthesize old and new, then more poetry can be learned, taught and written within the context of Torah learning.

ML: Do you have any reflections on reading your work in Israel? Does the different context change the meaning of what you'll be reading or add something to it?

RW: Poetry as both a literary and religious form is more widely embraced in Israel than in the United States. The love of language, literature, and poetry are more in the fabric of the day-to-day than anywhere else I’ve been. Many of my close friends who are writers live here, so I feel this very personally.

The first time I read poetry to a gathering of listeners was in Jerusalem; the majority of poems I’ve ever read in public gatherings have been in Jerusalem. I don’t know if reading my poems will change the meaning for me here. Maybe more of my Jewish poems will sound more cliché or resonate more with folks because of the predominantly Jewish audience, it’s hard for me to tell. Before selecting poems to read though, I’ll take some time to consider whether I’ll read the ones I wrote in Israel or in chul.

[jerusalism]

Caroline Kessler interviewed by Josh Friedlander

JF: Were you always interested in writing poetry, or in creative writing in general?

CK: I became very interested in poetry during my sophomore year of high school, when my English teacher introduced us to Billy Collins' project Poetry 180 (a poem a day for each day of the school year). I was also making a lot of visual art, mixed media, and photography, and was working on integrating text into the work. These factors propelled me to deepen into poetry. In the past two years or so, I've started writing a lot of nonfiction, mostly lyric/braided essays.

JF: What -- if you'll excuse the term -- is your “poetic project”? What are you trying to express in your writing? Or is it not reducible to themes?

CK: A lot of what I write about deals with place, the body, and moving through space as well as time. As is often the case with writing, what is important or repeated doesn't emerge until much later in the process. I've also been interested in ritual (both secular and religious) for some time, and how we use/don't use ritual to guide how we spend our time. My time in the San Francisco Bay Area, in both the Jewish community and more "New Age" communities, shows up a lot in my work, often in the form of a cultural critique (but not always). ​

JF:  A few of the poems that you'll be reading are about, or from the perspective of, 'Chava'. Is this the Biblical character?

CK: Yes -- I was in a dance workshop a few years ago in southern California, exploring Jewish text in relation to dance/movement. Out of a dance embodying a text about Chava and Adam in Gan Eden, I began writing a poem. In the dance, I felt as though I "went to a place" and I wanted to capture that in the poem. The best way to capture that seemed to embody Chava herself, although through a third person point of view. I continued to write through and toward Chava, sometimes in the first person. She allows me to talk about femininity, the (male) gaze, relationship dynamics, and archetypes in a way that's really exciting to me.

JF: What is your Dorot Fellowship focus -- is it related to your writing?

CK: I'm focused on a few different things as part of Dorot. One is contact improvisation and other embodied forms of movement...and the writing that emerges from/in relation to this movement. I'm continuing to work on a chapbook of poems about Chava, and as well as a series of lyric essays tentatively titled The Geography Problem. These essays deal with emplacement/displacement, places I've lived, and what it means to move a body from one place to another.

[jerusalism]

Batnadiv Weinberg interviewed by Etti Calderon

EC: Where and when did you go for art school?

BW: I went to a school here in Jerusalem called the Jerusalem Studio School, which is a very traditional type school, and then from there, a few years later, I went to the New York Studio School and studied with an abstract painter. I wanted to get the missing side.

EC: How do you feel that your art and your writing connect? I see that they are sometimes combined.

BW: That is actually something that I’ve been working on for a long time, because the Jerusalem Studio School was all observational painting…for me it was a long process of trying to connect the two sides. I would be writing in one place and painting in another and I didn’t see any connection, and then when I was studying, I think in my Masters, I was starting Gerard Manley Hopkins  and I started writing his poems, writing them with ink, with a paintbrush, and that was the beginning of starting to see the graphic element of writing, and working off of that, and that became my main project when I did my MFA, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins and then building up paintings through texts, which is what you see happening here [at her exhibit “Duo - שתיים” currently showing at Studio of Her Own]. And now I would say there are several levels of interconnection. One thing that happened is that my writing got shorter and shorter, and more visual, so I went from novels and short stories to flash fiction and poetry, which really are more connected because they are both very visual, there is just a shine of a moment, so I felt that the two connected there. And with my paining: I stopped working only from observation. I started working with these text paintings, and that is a whole series that is ongoing, and then I began a series called Bibliodraw, which is really all about connecting my writing and painting. It is studying Tanach, a chapter a day, so it begins from a text, so that is the first level of interrelationship with text, and I read it the way I would when I did comparative literature, but then the idea is then, how do you bring that in to an image? It is moving away from textual analysis, which I see as breaking things up, and bringing it together to a holistic image. And I think that is what painting is, everything in one glance. That became my project, to see what happens when you study visually. And then it got more complicated, because I would start the drawing by writing down a few words, and then what I found is that while I was drawing I often would get new words, so then once the drawing was done, halfway through the project it began turning into these poems that had to do with the chapters. That’s what I’m doing now.

EC: I like that, I feel like that’s how we experience the world, it’s not just text and not just images, it’s a combination.

BW: I got into it partially because I was teaching at an art school. The students there tend to be such visual thinkers, and yet they are still being forced to think very textually, and I thought, “what if I engaged them on their own level, what if I just tried to get to them through the right brain, through the visual brain, would it change things?” So I started teaching this project, Torah Art Integration, we study, but then they give their analysis not through a written statement but through some piece of art. Bibliodraw started first and then when I saw that it was working for me I started teaching all these workshops based on it, for visual thinkers.

EC: When you choose to write something, or to paint something, do you feel that the inspiration comes from the same place?

BW: Not always. The truth is probably yes but not in a different way. I’m very, very visual so sometimes when I’m painting, if I’m stuck, I’ll just paint what’s in front of me. But the truth is when I’m stuck with writing, I have this daily writing exercise that I got from the poet Gabrille Calvocorresi where she has you start every day with five things I noticed that nobody else noticed. I found that when I get stuck with my writing, it’s basically what I do with painting, it’s ok, what’s here, what do I see? The difference is that the painting is more immediate, and stuck to the moment. If I’m painting from observation, I’m completely there, it’s like a meditation. I don’t feel that my writing is like that in the same way. That’s more with the free-writes, but that’s a different kind of thing where that is going

EC: Where do you think that comes from?

BW: That is why I write really, really big, and it’s using a paintbrush, and the idea is that you write with your whole body and see where it takes you. Usually it will take me somewhere I will never get if I was writing with pen and paper. I didn’t start it just because I like the look of text, there was actually a new way of exploring writing and a new way of exploring painting at the same time. I’m still working on it.

-

EC: Do you think there are a lot of spaces like that [Studio of Her Own] for religious women in art?

BW: No, not at all, that’s why this was made. I would say that up to five years ago there were barely any spaces for religious artists to show at all.

EC: Is this particularly women, or in general?

BW: There is a double problem. There is always a problem of women in the arts. If you look at the Guerilla Girls and all those problems, women are underrepresented, they win a lot of awards in school and once they get out of school, there’s less gallery representation, less curators, less everything. It’s all over the world, it’s not unique to Israel, it’s a general problem. The bigger problem for religious women is that they are immediately identifiable if they cover their hair or wear skirts or anything like that, and then they are immediately judged. I had that experience when I got back from New York. In New York I was going around to openings, and people would talk to me, and I went to Tel Aviv and it was like I was invisible. And even people I had studied with in Jerusalem, it was like I was the religious person, and obviously I wasn’t artsy and I had nothing to say, and then once you have a kid, forget it. If you have a child, you’re not noticed.

EC: Do you feel that your being religious affects your subject matter, in your art and your writing?

BW: I guess so in that it’s “write what you know”, so a lot my writing has to do, well my thesis had to do with my grandparents, who were both very religious… and Bibliodraw came from the fact that I was raised on those stories, they were my bedtime stories, so there is something very intimate about it. Does that mean I don’t paint anything? Of course I do, things you can’t usually show in a religious art gallery. I went to a “regular” art school. Who you are always affects what you do and what you write and what you paint   I don’t think anybody who sees my writing would immediately know, but if they saw enough of my writing, sooner or later it comes up.  And it is also your mental world. What are the archetypes you think with, what metaphors you’re going to draw on.

-

EC: Which artists and writers inspire you?

BW: That's a hard one. There are so many, and it changes daily. I'm very much an artistic omnivore. Visually, I've been looking at Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Kyle Staver, Catherine Kehoe and John Dubrow lately. I'm inspired by Rachel Zucker's work, the mix of everything in her writing. Also have a fascination with Anne Carson, and the way she plays with the physical presence of the text.

EC: What challenges do you face when writing and creating other art? How do these challenges differ?

BW: The challenges in common for all my artistic creativity is finding the time and the focus - creating that internal and external space. With painting, the external space is more challenging, add I need to have proper materials, and a place where I can work. The way I paint is very messy, and I use many different mediums, so I really need a studio space.

EC: You mentioned that you’ve been living in the Katamonim neighborhood of Jerusalem. How has living there influenced your art and perspective? How has this differed in other places you’ve lived?

BW: That’s a hard one. I'm very influenced by places, but it's usually a very pervasive and subtle influence that I only notice after the fact. One thing I love about this area is the mix of populations-- in age, background, and socio-economics. Three of my neighbors are women in their mid-to-late 80s, one from Bahrain, one from Iraq, and one from Morocco. The playground where I take my daughter always presents juxtapositions. (I've actually started a series of drawings of the playground). Another thing that draws me to the area is the do-it-yourself aesthetic. The place is a hodgepodge of different styles and materials. The gate to our garden is built out of a repurposed bed frame. Maybe it's not a coincidence that I created my first piece made entirely out of found material --the viewers, which was on exhibit in the Bible Lands Museum --after moving here.

__________________________________ This interview was conducted by Etti Calderon in preparation for the Jerusalism event, Back to Back at Studio of Her Own Gallery, Jerusalem (February 15th, 2018).

[jerusalism]

Elazar Larry Freifeld interviewed by Lonnie Monka

LM: Larry, you seem to have led a rich life filled with creative activity and family, while also having crossed paths with many of the top literary figures of the Beats and early New York School poets. What has been the biggest impact on your creative activities and literary associations since deciding to emigrate to Israel? Have you felt more or less inspired and/or productive post-aliyah?

ELF: Not really, the basics remain the same wherever you are. Language is a repository of culture and since I was culturally Jewish in America I am even more so here in Israel. The transition of my ethos as a poet from the US to Israel was made easier by the fact that there was already a well established community of expatriate English language writers and poets from throughout the world in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.

First off, there’s no ‘biggest impact’ on my work beyond what inspires me in the moment; something I hear or touch or read. In this I am a romantic and write in series, until another experience triggers my imagination to embark on another poem. ‘Passion rules the universe’ says Isaac Babel,  and the true traveler ‘goes only to get away’ [Charles Baudelaire]. Poems are like little boats in passing….

LM: Part of being a poet is consistently pondering and sometimes even answering questions about the meaning of poetry. Do you have any advice you would give to a young aspiring poet?

ELF: Writing a poem is both process and end-product. “If one could just sit down and write what is in his heart it would be a great book” said Edgar Allen Poe. Don’t ‘think’ poem before you write it. It may or may not originate in thought but rather in feeling or overhearing or seeing or any of the five senses or combination of perception(s). It may even be extra-terrestrial! It is in part an act of discovery and like a mistake, it can never be entirely calculated. Keep an open heart and listening ear, all great art is ‘appropriation’ of what is already there. ‘We are transmitters’, (D.H. Lawrence) conveyances of popular wisdom and prophets of the absurd. Study the classics if you will, follow the rules of the game like chess, then break them but with intelligence and meaning, when you find it.

LM: In your interview with Allen Ginsberg, he mentioned that your poetry reminds him of Charles Resnikov’s work. Do you imagine yourself as writing in his, or anyone else's lineage? Moreover, who are your biggest influences, and have you ever had a poetic mentor?

ELF: To be honest with you, I can’t imagine why Ginsberg compared me to Resnikov as I was never a great reader or admirer of his work; except that we both wrote in the vernacular. So did Carl Sandburg.

No, I never had mentors because I ran away from school when I was 11 years old and didn’t graduate high school until I was 35. There were however many poets both classical and modern who influenced my writing. Too numerous here to mention… lately I have been enamored by Apollinaire and Voznesenski. Found some good things to steal!

I was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before it became the East Village and my first readings at St. Marks Church, ca 1965 (run by Joel Oppenheimer and Paul Blackburn) hosted many great poets from both the California Renaissance of beat poets headed by Jack Spicer, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg, and the NY School headed by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and David Shapiro. If I were to proscribe a circle of poets with whom I most congregated, it must include Jackson MacLow, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Ted Berrigan, Armand Shwerner, Vito Acconci, Dick Higgins, and especially Tuli Kupferberg.  I will never forget a reading I attended of John Berryman reading his sonnets.

As the 60’s progressed into the 70’s I grew more aligned with Dick Higgins at Something Else Press who represented the international concrete poetry movement headed by Emmett Williams and a list of other European and South American poets. Moving to Israel was simply a fulfilment of being a poet and also being a Jew, culturally. I’m not sure I could ever have attained that in America being ‘a Jew writing Hebrew in the ghetto’ as a friend once described my work. Here in Israel I have achieved this balance along with many other expatriated Jewish poets from English speaking countries from throughout the world.

LM: How often do you write these days? And how would you describe your current work? In other words, please tell us a bit about your muse as well as what we can expect to read from you in the future.

ELF: I write less nowadays since I recently discovered that ‘I am myself the poem’. They are mostly seasonal and largely appropriated. I devote a lot of time these days like Ezra Pound collecting and editing poems and stories already written.

__________________________________

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Back to Back, at Studio of Her Own Gallery, in Jerusalem (February 15th, 2018).

[jerusalism]

Allen Ginsberg interviewed by [Elazar] Larry Freifeld

LF: Welcome to Israel, Allen. You come at a very troublesome time [civil war in Lebanon].

AG: Ah, it’s the same all over the world. Everyone has their own tsurus [trouble in Yiddish]. In Nicaragua, the CIA is fomenting trouble, in Columbia there are the drug dealers; think of Iran and the Iraqis. What could be worse?

LF: I know. Hundreds of thousands killed. What happened in Jerusalem? I heard you got mugged.

AG: Oh, it was nothing. I got knocked down by a drunk, a guy who was drunk.

LF: That’s unusual in Israel. Made me paranoid when I first heard about it. I thought it might have been a deliberate provocation.

AG: No, no. It was just a drunk. But my bag got knocked down the street or something. He knocked me on the ground. The police came. And then the mayor Teddy Kollek came:  ‘Oh, oh, this is terrible. I am sorry. Who’s responsible for this?’ He was so upset... Did you bring a tape recorder?

LF: No. But first let me tell you I’ve dissociated myself from the Jerusalem Post, they censored the last piece I wrote about you. I will interview you as poet to poet.

AG: O.K., but you must be careful not to misquote me. I have a biographer – really, he gets upset. [laughs]

LF: In your interview on TV this week with Ram Evron, you seemed a bit aggressive.

AG: No, not at all.

LF: I thought your taking a picture of him was quite provocative, I mean disconcerting.

AG: No, it wasn’t meant to be. He knew I was going to take his picture – it was prearranged. However, we were told at first, we would have 20 minutes. Then when we got to the studio, they said we would only have 12 minutes. We had to get a lot more in, in less time. We had some Arabic newspapers that had been banned, and we wanted to show them but they wouldn’t let us.

LF: You know, I asked other Israelis what they thought about you. One said: ‘A flower child…’ Another said that you ‘never grew up’ and that you are ‘still a child.’

AG: Hmm, yes that’s true. I am still a child.

LF: On TV you said, quoting a Lama you had met in India, ‘If you see something horrible, don’t cling to it. If you see something beautiful, don’t cling to it.’ You know, for an Israeli, for a Jew, this is an especially hard concept to swallow. Particularly on the heels, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Allen, we are talking about people, children, families, the land, a place to live.

AG: Jews certainly need a place to live – stupid for me to say how people should live. But Hitler and Stalin also refused to give up, refused to let go.

LF: I don’t think that’s a fair analogy, Allen. What do you think about giving up the West Bank?

AG: Certainly many people think so. I don’t know. Many people have many conceptions. Some people conceive of winning at any cost. Listen, the Arabs are just as bad. I have some cousins in Gush Etzion. I hope I have time to visit them.

LF: Both Jews and Arabs are victims. I can cite a long list of slaughtered Jews.

AG: The thing is to start talking. Think for your enemy. Most Israeli politicians are shouting, bullying all the time. Have you noticed? It’s in the voice. The only resolution is gentleness…measure politics by the quality of feeling and voice…awareness of other people’s and your own pain. We see through our own pain, it’s universal. Everyone is in pain.

LF: Allen, you know, I came here today with a lot of questions but your answers are much better. I too have a few ‘conceptual knots’ like those you described on TV. Anyway, to continue, when you were last in Israel 27 years ago and visited Gershom Shalom, I read somewhere that when he asked you why you didn’t come to live in Israel, you said that since you were a boy, you have been running away from the Bronx.

AG: No, I don’t remember... Wait, yes I recall; I said many people in Israel remind me of my relatives in the Bronx. I like my relatives in the Bronx. But let’s talk about something else, let’s talk about literary things.

LF: Good idea. I meant to ask you, are you still involved in the Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado?

AG: Yes, well, I was co-director of the Institute from 1974 to 1983. I will be teaching there this summer, but I am no longer a co-director.

LF: Can you tell us more about it, and the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics?

AG: Yes. Naropa is based on Buddhist meditation – a contemplative college. The background emphasis is non-theistic, Buddhist style.

LF: Are you still involved with Rinpoche?

AG: Rinpoche? You mean Chogyam Trungpa. Yes, he…you know, died this year. Chogyam Trungpa was my teacher in meditation; he believed in aesthetic appreciation of the world as it is, united through Heaven and Earth.

LF: You know, when you spoke of ‘clinging’ to things, I couldn’t help thinking of those marvelous lines of Blake: ‘He who binds himself to a joy, doth the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies…’

AG: ‘…lives in eternity’s sunrise’. Yes, that’s an excellent description of Buddhist meditation method.

LF: How has your own poetry changed in the last 15 years?

AG: Not much change in my poetry really, only more meditation – greater realization of my own worthlessness – low self esteem.

LF: Really! That’s funny. One would think you had accomplished a great deal, your work, your fame as a poet. Why do you feel like that?

AG: I don’t know – that’s why I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist the past two years. You know the feeling – not up to what was expected of me. Haven’t you ever felt that way?

LF: Yes, I know what you mean…Anyway, I’ve been away from the States for five years, what’s happening now on the literary/poetry scene. Whatever happened to Gregory Corso?

AG: Corso…Oh, he’s the most brilliant of them all. He’s been living in Italy, the past few years. He has a new book out with New Directions – Herald of Autoc-Thonic Spirit – a great book! Who else from the 50s generation? Gary Snyder is still very active. Phillip Whalen…also Creely.

LF: I’ve always liked Whalen.

AG: Whalen is now a full Zen master. Really, he’s the only one of us who’s really become a Zen master; you know, gone through the whole training.

LF: And Bremser? Ray Bremser, he was great! I always remember him - he was so funny – taking out his false teeth at poetry readings.

AG: Bremser? He’s still around. He taught a class of mine about a month ago. Bobby Dylan also likes him. He says he has the best ear of all the poets. He has a new book out called: Blowing Mouth.

LF: Incidentally, when Dylan was here recently he acted very strangely…sort of weird.

AG: He just didn’t want to hack all the bullshit!

LF: He never did like concert tours.

AG: That’s not true. Friends of mine who saw him here said he really sang his heart out.

LF: Any other poets in the States you think we should know about?

AG: Well, there’s Ed Sanders, a great poet; and Anne Waldman, they’re both stars. Another poet, Antler (single name) is excellent. He has a book out called Factory/last words. There’s also Andy Clausen, and another new young poet, David Cope. And John Weiners, you remember John Weiners?

LF: Yes, the Hotel Wentley poems.

AG: Black Sparrow has just come out with his collected works. Charles Resnikov’s collected works is also out with Black Sparrow. He also wrote in the vernacular; he was an imagist. You should see it – your work reminds me of him a little. He and William Carlos Williams were both my teachers. Williams taught: ‘there are no ideas except in things.’

LF: Jonathan Swift said that everything is a noun.

AG: Williams taught me to write poetry as ‘reconstruction of vernacular,’ and not to focus on ‘imitation of the literary’.

LF: You mean like Kingsley Amis?

AG: Amis never recognized the revolution in the line…Williams taught me: ‘first thought, best thought.’ And Whitman influenced me so very much in referring directly to things, but Whitman was of course biblical. Kerouac, who was a very great influence on me, never wanted a single word changed, but to have it just as it came immediately out of the mind.

LF: Well you know, a lot of what these guys were saying can also be found earlier in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.  Also in F.J. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

AG: Yes… yes, that’s true, in the Ballads.

LF: Anyway, my own best work is in flashes and series.

AG: Yes, that’s it. That’s the best. What Charles Resnikov did with images, Ezra Pound did with verbs. For him, everything was moving, changing all the time.

LF: On TV you said: Speech is sacred. Can you explain what you mean? Sometimes it seems to me that speech is more often profane, judging from the way people talk to one another.

AG: Well, I mean it this way. There is the mind from which come thoughts and words, which is heaven. From the body and earth comes breath. And speech is sacred because it synchronizes heaven and earth…when it synchronizes and harmonizes and harmonizes the heaven of the mind, with the body and breath of the earth. Speech unites, as long as you speak with your own voice.

LF: Sometimes I wonder, Allen, at the violence in some of my own work.

AG: As long as you speak with your own voice, it’s O.K. Everything is O.K. in the poem. [whispers] Most poets never do find their own voice. Just be honest without fear. I wonder though, if the Israeli writers are working enough in the idiom… the vernacular?

LF: I don’t know. But there are a lot of excellent writers here. Now, returning to your poetry, what role do you see yourself playing as poet?

AG: Not a role, no role. I just express my own pain.

LF: Or pleasure? Once you spoke of your poems as celebrations of life.

AG: Yes, pleasure too, and celebration of life – existence.

LF: (pause) I understand you were in China. You mentioned it during your reading.

AG: Yes, I was for ten weeks traveling in China. I wrote a lot of poems. Imitations of Po-Chu-I, or Bai-Ju-Yi – in my White Shroud book. Lately, I have been writing narrative poems from dreams: First thought, best thought.

LF: Allen, I must tell you some of your ideas are like pollen, they propagate and inspire. I love what you said in one of your poems you read at Tzavta club: what was it? ‘I am looking for someone who is wrong’ and ‘if only everyone around me wasn’t so great.’ I wrote a poem about it.

AG: No, the correct verse was… no, let me see… oh yes: “A world of conscious mercy / a world we could create, /  if we all sat down / and decided not to be great.” And the other line was: “if only I could find someone / who has the courage to be wrong.” Sounds like good advice for Shamir, Peres and the Palestinians. Especially at this time….

LF: Allen, can you think of anything else you want to say?

AG: No, I’ve told you everything I know.

_______________________________________

This interview was conducted at Tel Aviv University in 1988, and published in The Tel Aviv Review (1989) and in Moznaim (Hebrew translation in 1988). This interview is republished with Jerusalism in celebration of Larry Freifeld’s work and in anticipation of his participation in the Back to Back reading, at Studio of Her Own Gallery, in Jerusalem (February 15th, 2018).

[jerusalism]

Amital Stern interviewed by Geula Geurts

GG: In your lyric essay FOREIGN BODY EAR you write: “My presence as an actual foreign body in the city, not born or raised here, nor having ever managed to put down any roots.”

Being bilingual, do you sometimes feel not only foreign to Jerusalem, but foreign to yourself? How does this present itself in your writing? Do you express yourself better in English or in Hebrew creatively?

AS: When I moved to Israel at age seventeen, it was clear to me I wouldn’t be able to write creatively in Hebrew. But writing in English felt out of place too. It felt irrelevant, so I didn’t write at all. You can say this alienated me from my creative self for a while. Then later, after I took an acting class and wrote a monologue in Hebrew, I realized that was something I can do.

GG: Because your Hebrew speech was becoming controlled.

AS: Yes. Hebrew dialog became safer for me, so theatrical writing, and later screenwriting in Hebrew became safe and even natural at a certain point. I realized this is a form I can use in Hebrew. It allowed me to play with spoken Hebrew on paper.

GG: But your prose, your lyric nonfiction is written in English.

AS: I’m not sure if to call English my mother tongue, but it still is the strongest and most creative vehicle of my prosaic expression.

GG: Does your background in screenwriting influence your lyric nonfiction, your prose?

AS: At a certain point I felt that the strict set of rules of screenwriting was stifling my creative voice. Writing for film is something I will return to, but I did feel a deep need to break free from the rules of that form. I’m not sure what to call the genre of my prose, but it’s definitely hybrid animal. It combines many aspects: cultures, language, myth, academic nonfiction, memoir, fiction and even theater. I felt a strong desire to combine all these aspects of my life into my writing life.  Actually, my “Mifletzet” series of lyric essays is driven by the idea to create a play about the female monster that is Jerusalem. I’m writing the essays to figure out what such a play will look like, whether it’s a play I could write and perform. This is one of the things driving me in the series.

GG: That’s exactly what you do in the end of the piece “I feel like vomiting the mother.” You force the reader to imagine this play with you. So perhaps it’s a new genre all together. We can call it meta-theatrical lyric essay!

AS: Ha! I guess it really is hard to define.

GG: Who are your mentors in these forms? Which writers inspire your own writing?

AS: When I started to combine different aspects into prosaic writing, I became interested in reading more hybrid forms. One writer I’m influenced by is Dodie Bellamy, a New Narrative writer from San Francisco. Also, experimental theater I was exposed to is very hybrid. I was always a child who read a lot, so when I was young, Modernists like James Joyce, T.S Eliot and Virginia Woolf spoke to me. Their writing is essentially hybrid, that’s what they’re doing. Lidia Yuknavitch, who created the space for the Mifletzet column, is a giant of the hybrid form, in her own writing and as a facilitator who helps writers allow themselves to experiment. I also grew up very religious, so I was often exposed to biblical literature, midrash, rabbinical commentary. There are so many levels of storytelling when it comes to Jewish literature. There is a lot of intertextuality, so  through absorbing this at a young age, I learned to combine different forms of texts.

GG: That’s fascinating. I guess the Bible really is hybrid. There are parts of mythology, and sections with lists of laws.

AS: Yes, and even songs, and poetry. It’s wild.

GG: It’s an understatement to say that you are heavily obsessed with the notion of Jerusalem as a female character, a female monster. Do you think good writing needs to be driven by obsession? Is obsession itself monstrous? Is writing monstrous? In what way are you monstrous?

AS: Well, yes, in a sense I do feel like a monster. So often women are described as objects of both desire and disgust. These two opposing aspects are what make us monstrous. I want to know if this marriage between desire and disgust is possible to live with. As a woman, I’m trying to get to my own understanding of this. Of course I’m driven by obsession. I want to know everything about it, so my writing is drawing from research, personal experience, myth and imagination. It’s turning into a monster itself.

GG: You write about Jerusalem appearing in biblical mythology as a wife, virgin, widow and whore. You question whether the actual women living in Jerusalem become objects of these mythic projections. Do you write and research to find a certain answer, or are you driven by something beyond?

AS: I’m definitely driven by something more than a search for an academic answer. Perhaps I’m looking to purge myself from these myths through my writing. The myths themselves are monsters that claim the individual woman. I feel a deep need to write my own myth, to set myself, as a woman, free from the existing myths and see what else exists.

GG: You write: “MY LIFE HAD STOOD – A LOADED GUN: wrote Emily Dickinson. Maybe life holds so much possibility, still. Maybe my warm gun is this pen.” So, would you call yourself a literary activist?

AS: I think my writing started as subconscious “feminism.” I didn’t realize that what I was doing was feminist. It came about naturally. Lately, I try to push myself to be clearer about what I’m trying to say and express, instead of keeping my intentions vague. In my nature, I don’t like demonstrations, but there are a lot of issues that bother me. My writing is a way for me to discuss these issues with myself, and with the reader.

GG: I’ve noticed you have a small online presence. You don’t have a Facebook account. Could you say “hiding” is a part of your writing self, too?

AS: Not being on Facebook is a very conscious decision. I deleted my account two years ago. This is very much connected to my writing life, to create a vacuum for myself to write. I also started feeling physically ill about social media. It’s like an alternative world. I remembered my life before, and it was fine. I decided to leave the alternative world online, also as an experiment. I wondered if people would still know me, whether I’d still exist for them if I exited that realm. I know there’s a price that I pay, when it comes to keeping up with contacts and professional presence online. But I do think my writing, and my face to face relationships, are enriched by this choice.

GG: You’re working on your first novel now.

AS: Yes. I’d say it’s also a hybrid monster, but it has a dramatic structure, a narrative arc. There are a lot of different voices: supernatural, mystical. It’s an exciting and scary endeavor, and I feel strongly about writing it.

GG: I look forward to reading it! And of course hearing you read your work on February sixth.

AS: Thank you. So do I!

-----------------------------------

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event, Selfless Promotion, hosted at the Art Cube’s Artists’ Studios, on February 6th.

[jerusalism]

Holes Best Left Unfilled: A Review of Necessary Stories

Haim Watzman’s Necessary Stories is a collection taken from his The Jerusalem Report series of the same title. The stories take place in various historical settings that span centuries, engaging both Zionist dreams and conflicts, and are interspersed with the magical realism of myth and memory. In his introduction, Watzman writes as if to an old friend or protege, both vulnerable and instructive and without pretension, a tone that continues throughout the collection. Remarkably, Watzman’s personal history is tangled with the larger history of Israel, small-scale struggles that represent the universal experience of tragedy, sacrifice, and an optimism born from the realization that nothing has ever or will ever be whole. Many of the stories could accurately be described as ghost stories, negotiations between historical figures like Theodore Herzl and the Russian minister of interior Vyacheslev von Plehve; a conversation between a fictional Watzman and Abba bar Zabda, a talmudic scholar, about grief at Watzman’s son’s grave; and a pianist that appears in order to play her own piano in a home that had once been taken from her family.

Many of the stories are marked by a tinge of skepticism and refer to the payments of personal dignity made in exchange for Israel and for survival. Such sacrifice often leaves lingering feelings of guilt, doubt, and regret. Other stories embody a Kafkaesque satire that describes a cruel yet self-aware bureaucracy and the apparent senselessness of real losses in war. Watzman points out flaws and conflicts in both Jewish and Israeli society, and gives a voice to those people ignored in the historical record. For example, in “Rescue”, a woman in 1929 Mea Shearim saves an Arab man running from a Jewish mob. She hides him in her closet, where he disguises himself as a Jewish woman and can thereby finally escape. In this manner, Watzman’s stories are a poignant mix of tragedy, suspense, and humor. They often take turns to the supernatural or surreal, and the readers must suspend their disbelief until reaching the conclusion of each story, when suddenly, with a gasp, they realize that they’ve suspended breathing as well.

The experience and delight of reading this collection is best articulated by Watzman himself: “I found myself following the example of the writers I like best, those who challenge their audiences by leaving holes in their stories for readers to fill in.” Jerusalism will present a live performance of Necessary Stories by Haim Waztman together with Annabelle Landgarten and Jane Golbert at the Barbur Gallery in Nachlaot on January 24. I am looking forward to seeing how these holes will remain open when the stories are performed and in what new ways the audience will be challenged.

----------------------------------------------------

Etti Calderon Jerusalem, Israel

[jerusalism]

Haim Watzman interviewed by Josh Friedlander

JF: You're a quintessentially Israeli writer. You've lived here for decades.

HW: Almost 40 years.

JF: Your books are set here, and it's been said that your dialogue sounds like Hebrew speech. Yet you have always written in English. (Am I right?) Are you able to straddle that divide? Do Israelis read your writing?

HW: I actually tried writing in Hebrew and set that as a goal, but the market forces, and the whole issue of literary language made it too hard. I'm a freelance writer and I need to make a living, so financially it was too hard.

JF: Do you write privately in Hebrew?

HW: I do expository writing sometimes. There was a period some thirty years ago when I made an effort to become a Hebrew writer, but again, it required more time and effort than I had, at a time when larger markets were presenting themselves.

JF: You translated Yuval Noah Harari. Did you do his latest book?

HW: He actually translated it himself -- his English is very good -- but he asked me to edit it.

JF: And David Grossman.

HW: Some years ago I translated his two non-fiction books. I haven't worked with him for a while.

JF: So, slightly related to David Grossman, I want to talk about politics a bit...In addition to your writing, you keep up a blog with Gershom Gorenberg on "Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature", and you've worked as a journalist. How important are political issues in your writing? Are they relevant?

HW: Of course. We started it as a real blog, writing every day. We hoped to find some sort of angel who'd provide the money to enable to keep updating it every day. That didn't work out, and both of us are freelancers, so it's just become a hobby.

JF: I don't think anyone makes money off blogging these days!

HW: Or if they do, they write faster than us...But yeah, the fiction often touches on social and political issues. I don't think fiction needs to be polemical, but it can often point out a paradox, or show that something, which maybe seems like a clear value, is more complicated, or show the many-sidedness of a situation. Often when I sit down to write my monthly story I look into my gut and see what's bothering me. Sometimes it's personal but sometimes it's a public issue.

JF: Often you can hide the political ramifications in the subtext; on the surface, it's totally personal...

HW: Yeah. For example in the book, there's a story called ‘Sin Offering’ which is about soldiers apprehending refugees on the Egyptian border, which is one of the issues that still bothers me very greatly. It's personal because my daughter served there with Caracal, and she told me some stories. And that came together with a sugya from the Talmud that I was studying at the same time, which became a template for the story, and used the content of what my daughter told me. It made for this really surreal atmosphere.

JF: So does your observance, your Torah study, often figure in your creative process?

HW: I'll often use a template from the Bible or the Talmud. It throws out a story or a set of characters, or a paradox I want to explore. But not always. I'm not being polemical. Often those things come together in an intuitive way.

JF: Finally -- and this is a little loaded, you don't have to answer if you don't like -- do you think Israel is becoming a less hospitable place to artists and writers who question its consensus, its sacred cows? It seems like there's some hostility towards that on the part of the government, and a lot of the people.

HW: I think there's an effort, but we have a very vibrant literary community and political discourse, so I don't think that right now it's an issue. Lots of writers, our best writers, are always questioning assumptions and opposing government actions. Grossman is obviously one example. Most of the country's major writers are actually doing that, so I don't see that as a problem for writers now. But we do worry about the government's efforts to restrict discussion and take control of the media, things that right now are threats, not things that have actually happened.

JF: So back to our event...you're currently promoting your collection 'Necessary Stories', and you'll be reading from it on Wednesday.

HW: It'll actually be a performance. I started out my writing career as a playwright, in college, so when I began writing prose, I still tend to always see my characters on stage. Then a friend of mine, a high quality amateur actress, came up to me early last year and said with regard to one of my stories, this really needs to be performed as a piece of theatre. I said that's really interesting because that's how I thought of it when I wrote it. So with her encouragement we brought in another actress and we put together a show last year with some of the stories, and it was very successful. Now this is an entirely new edition called Through Woman's Eyes which is a new set of stories, three stories that are told through female narrators. It's a lot of fun to see the stories on stage.

JF: Looking forward to seeing it

HW: Thanks!

—————————————————

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event, Necessary Stories: a performance, hosted at the Barbur Gallery, on Wednesday January 24th.

[jerusalism]

Karen Alkalay-Gut interviewed by Josh Friedlander

JF: You were born in the UK, educated in the US, and have spent much of your professional life in Israel. Where do you feel most at home? Do you see yourself as an Israeli poet?

KA: Definitely -- but my most recent project, that will be coming out at the end of the month, is in Yiddish.

One of the ways I see my role as a writer is to act as a bridge between Israel and the world. A tiny bridge, but still a bridge.

JF: Your doctoral thesis was on Theodore Roethke, and you've written on the Victorian poet Adelaide Crapsey (not a familiar name to me -- was this a Rochester connection?) Have these writers influenced your work? Are there any other major influences, in English or Hebrew?

KA: Because I taught English poetry for over 50 years most of my influences are American and English. Roethke and Crapsey still sing to me. I got to Crapsey because she was a Rochester poet and when I read them, in Israel, I was overwhelmed -- she was a good poet but almost unknown. I spent a few months back in Rochester when my father was ill and got to know the family and became intrigued with how someone so lyrical could be unknown. I am still intrigued by her poetry, but more by artists and poets who disappear from our radar or are never discovered, and a few of the doctorates I still supervise deal with poets like this. I’ve also been devoting a lot of time to an actor and director named Kurt Gerron who was killed in Auschwitz and most of his 95 films have disappeared.

JF: The way that you have worked in so many media, particularly with musicians, is reminiscent of earlier poetic traditions of bards or troubadours, when you could easily have stayed within the academy as a writer, teacher, critic. How did you break into this artistic mode?

KA: It comes naturally. I love working with musicians, dancers, painters, etc. It inspires me.

And I love reading poetry out loud -- any poetry, all poetry.

JF: What led you to start writing in Hebrew? Does your Hebrew writing express something different to the English?

KA: Every language brings out something to me. I’m not very original in Hebrew as yet, but in Yiddish -- which I tried only a few years ago -- I discovered a great deal of my past. Still, my real poetic language remains English.

JF: Finally -- as founder of the Israeli Association for Writers in English -- is there space for an Anglophone Israeli poetics? How vibrant is the community?

KA: There SHOULD be room.

First of all, when I founded the IAWE it was because I had been asked by the government to create an English writers association, and for a few years they supported us financially, paying for publication of our journals, according us halls in the writers’ house in Tel Aviv for public readings and meetings, and making paperwork easy for us. That disappeared in the ‘90’s. I always think that was a mistake because we could be wonderful good will ambassadors.

Second, there are so many English speakers here and someone should be speaking for them. Most English speakers like to remain tied to their origins, and if they read at all, prefer to read from the popular culture, but they need to have their lives mirrored back to them. It would be good for them, but there are few venues -- no papers who publish poetry as well, no publishers for local work in English, no journals. That’s what we all need to work on.

—————————————————

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Every Calm a Storm: arc25 Launch Party, hosted at HaMiffal on January 15th, 2017.

[jerusalism]

Mark L. Levinson interviewed by Noam Freshman

NF: Please tell us a little about yourself. What inspired you to move to Israel?

ML: The Lone Ranger made me a Zionist. I spent my childhood watching TV heroes whose behavior implied that a responsible adult gives precedence to any call for help, from any decent person, over the personal business of the day. Sky King, the Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett, Roy Rogers. So when I finished college and had nothing else to do, the question was whom to help. But I should say more about having nothing else to do. In 1970, the US economy offered no jobs for new liberal-arts graduates, President Nixon was spreading bitterness, bumper stickers were saying “America: Love It or Leave It,” and the shock of Nazism that delegitimized the anti-Semites was showing the first signs of fading. It was hard to maintain the belief that America’s real soul was represented not by the redneck right but by me and my socialist-leaning incense-burning intellectual friends. Some disenchanted Americans were leaving for Sweden, Canada, or Australia. I didn’t belong to a Zionist youth movement, I’d never visited Israel, and I didn’t know a soul there. When the Six Day War was in the papers, I didn’t even understand that it was a big thing. But I realized that in my case there was a country that would be not merely tolerant but welcoming, a country that needed and appreciated help, and it happened to be the land of my ancestors. So whereas Davy Crockett went to Texas, I went to Israel and had better luck.

NF: You're a poet! What inspires or sparks your imagination? What is your writing process? What’s the most difficult part of this process?

ML: As Leonard Cohen said, “If I knew where the poems come from, I’d go there more often.” Generally I start with a phrase, and if it dictates a meter (which isn’t always) I develop the poem in that meter. When I look back, I find that my poems often include a newspaper, a bus, or a dog. I don’t like dogs.

NF: In reading and writing poetry, how important to you is it that a poem be accessible in terms of being “solved.”

ML: Just as eventually you’ll find water if you dig deep enough anywhere on earth, eventually any poem is mysterious if you consider it deeply enough.  All our writing is made out of mysterious materials. But it’s up to the poet to keep the intentional mystery at a tolerable level, which unfortunately may vary from reader to reader, and make sure not to be unintentionally baffling.  

NF: What writers (or books) did you at first dislike but grew into?

ML: I can’t remember going back to a writer or book that I disliked. There are so many other options.

NF: Jerusalem has had pilgrims visiting it for thousands of years. What literary pilgrimages have you been on?

ML: An odd thing happened to me some decades ago, pre-Internet. A little sci-fi magazine in the USA asked if I’d like to write some literary criticism. I said sorry, but I’m in Israel and I can’t put my hands on every book I’d need for research. I can’t, for example, just take the subway to the library and borrow everything Henry Kuttner ever wrote. I’d picked an author at random, but they wrote back saying “But we really would like an article from you for our special Henry Kuttner issue.” I figured it was a sign from on high, so I hit every used book store I knew (and there were a lot back then) and that was my pilgrimage. I didn’t find everything, but the search was a good workout for my primitive huntsman instinct and I did get the article written.

NF: When did you first learn that language had power?

ML: That language itself has power, above and beyond the logic that the language contains, I suppose I realized instinctively but I was additionally enlightened by a book that explored the concept of truth in various cultures. It said that in the Arab culture the rhyming or assonance of words can carry a lot of weight in giving an idea legitimacy. I realized that the same thing is true in our own culture, to an extent, as for example when O.J. Simpson’s lawyer told the jury in connection with the glove produced as evidence: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

NF: Much of your career has been involved in translating. What are some of the interests, oddities, and challenges of translating Hebrew?

ML: I write a monthly column about the challenges of translating various specific Hebrew words and phrases, and I thank you for the chance to plug it: http://www.elephant.org.il/translate/. I’d be happy to see the comment section at the end of the column used more often than it is. Aside from such specific translation issues, there’s a general issue that challenges translators of fiction: Hebrew doesn’t really have past and present tenses, it has perfect and imperfect, and a writer can freely slip between them when describing the past. I had one writer insist on keeping a mixture of past and present in the translation, and although I don’t think the result was successful (and someone’s subsequent editing, after my translation, made the text even worse here and there), I can understand why he insisted. Often something is lost in translating the imperfect tense, which can be used for telling “how it was,” into the past tense, which tells “what happened.”

NF: You edited this edition of arc which is based around the theme of A Calm Inside a Storm. What inspired this theme and how did the theme guide and shape the development of the issue?

ML: As co-editors, Shlomo Yashar and I wanted a theme that would provide for a sympathetic portrait of the Israeli condition without ruling out a broad range of other topics and approaches. In our call for entries, we included some suggestions that pointed in the direction of war and peace, and a lot of our contributors took that direction.

NF: What did you find challenging about editing, as opposed to writing?

ML: There aren’t enough outlets for English-language writing in Israel, so the fate of a submission to any project like ours takes on more significance for the writer than ideally it should. It can be a troubling responsibility, and that’s one reason that arc normally switches editors from issue to issue. The contributors and would-be contributors shouldn’t depend on the taste of one or two people, however competent, for years upon years.

—————————————————

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Every Calm a Storm: arc25 Launch Party, hosted at HaMiffal on January 15th, 2017.

[jerusalism]

Lois Michal Unger interviewed by Etti  Calderon

EC: What have been the effects of writing about your personal experiences and your family? Do you feel that your writing helps you to better connect with and understand your life and relationships?

LMU: Much of my poetry is about personal relationships, conversations, confrontations between people. Often the truth is camouflaged. My writing isn't cathartic. It just is.

EC: How do you find balance between seeing the world as a writer and experiencing your life in the moment?

LMU: My writing isn't planned. I don't see a situation and decide to write about it. Sometimes poems are born in my head and I'm just the conduit for writing them down.

EC: Were you pulled toward writing prose or poetry first?  

LMU: Poetry. When I was 11 I won a prize from Junior Scholastic Magazine.

EC: When you write poetry, do you imagine reading the poems aloud? Do you connect with them differently when they are read in front of an audience as opposed to when you read them to yourself?

LMU: I was an actress. I try to use acting techniques to focus. Yeah, it's different reading in front of an audience.

—————————————————

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Every Calm a Storm: arc25 Launch Party, hosted at HaMiffal on January 15th, 2017.

[jerusalism]

Shlomo Sher interviewed by Josh Friedlander

JF: How did you get to being a poet?

SS: I was growing up in '68, there were all kinds of protests going on -- a bit like what we have nowadays, people unhappy with their government. I went to City College, New York.

JF: - a hotbed of radicalism -

SS: Yes, since much earlier.

JF: So you were protesting Vietnam and all that?

SS: Yes, I imagine so. There was a lot of that stuff going on. Later I became more interested in Zionism and my Jewish background. Then, and today, Jews didn't know a lot about their background. For young Jews today -- Judaism is a foreign culture to them. They're lost.

And then my Zionism fed into my writing, and later my politics. That's what the theme is for the new issue [of the Israel Association of Writers in English journal] -- the way that we are attacked here, the way people deal with the vicissitudes of life, the terror attacks and rockets...  

JF: Do you find inspiration in Jewish texts?

SS: I do. I think you're always inspired by your surroundings. When I lived in Oregon, I was inspired by the nature, the remoteness. It works its way into your poetry. When I lived in New York, I wrote about the Hasidic world. Now the political world gets into my poetry. I feel sorry for people who live in static worlds.

JF: You've been mentored by great poets -- John Ashberry, for one. How did you meet him? Has your work been influenced by his style at all?

SS: My first great mentor was Menke Katz. He was a Yiddish poet who later wrote in English, he used to stand on the corner with these books yelling "poetry, poetry!" People thought he as talking about chickens! [poultry...] He pulled me into that world, I guess. I was a pre-engineering student, and later I'd done graduate courses in journalism. It was around 1972/73 that I first started seeing myself as a poet. Another important mentor was Larry Levis, who was also a major poet in his own right.

I studied creative writing in Iowa and met John [Ashberry] when I was back teaching in NY. I was just starting to teach classes and he was patient and helpful, and taught me a lot. He was the true image of a poet, and a mensch. He just died a few months ago.

JF: Yes. His poetry is difficult to parse at a line level, but there's a beauty in the language.

SS: Right, it's difficult to read literally, but it's like a collage.

JF: When did you first meet William Stafford?

SS: That was when I was teaching in Oregon. He was a very serious, intense man. His family were Quakers, and he went to jail during WWII [as a pacifist]. We once spent a cross-country flight together, from New York to the Northwest. When I was publishing a book I sent it to him to review and he gave me a nice quote for it.

JF: There are a couple of names from that period I'd like to throw at you, that I figured you might have encountered, or read.

SS: Sure.

JF: David Shapiro.

SS: Yes, I met him. He had a photographic memory, he could read a poem and then recite it off by heart. He would have been considered an iluy in the religious world.

JF: He was part of that New York world -- there's a famous picture of him sitting at the desk of the dean of Columbia in 68.

SS: Yes. I met him through John.

JF: Another name -- a bit older. Louis Zukofsky?

SS: I never met him, but I've read his writing. Another writer who dealt with Jewish themes, something which is rarer nowadays.

JF: Also someone, like Katz, who came from the world of Yiddish poetry and was able to transfer it to English poetry, and in a very experimental, avant-garde way.

SS: I'm full of admiration for people who can write in another language. Now, when I imagine writing in ivrit -- there are so many nuances. Lines, breaks, cadences, meter, internal rhymes. I'm getting better at Hebrew. Hats off to Joseph Brodsky, who could not only learn to write in a second language, but could be even better at that than in his first.

It takes immersion -- maybe if I were thirty years younger...now I'm in my late sixties. I need to expand my immersion.

JF: Who are you reading these days? Either contemporary or not.

SS: I'm not really keeping up with who gets published in which magazine, who reviews what. I used to. There's someone called Yehoshua November who writes about some Jewish themes. And Linda Zisquit...

JF: Have you got anything in the pipeline?

SS: Rachel Heimowitz got in touch with me a while ago, and we were talking about publishing some of my new writing. She said to me you check all the boxes: you're white, male, right-wing, not PC, now it's very important.

JF: What Harold Bloom calls "the school of resentment". But you're still writing.

SS: I'm not complaining, I'm very fortunate. I have a new book out last year, and a new manuscript that's a bit more political.

---------------------------------------------------

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event Every Calm a Storm: arc25 Launch Party, hosted at HaMiffal on January 15th, 2017.