“Once I said, Death is God and change is His prophet. / Now I have calmed down, and I say: / Change is God and death is His prophet.”

“Time is a coffin, while nakedness is the daily news.”

Contemporary political discourse about the Middle East often underscores the divide between Israelis and Palestinians. But in reading and re-reading the poems of Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, and Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the foremost Palestinian poets of his generation, what strike me are the similarities.

Obviously, the physical landscape they describe is the same–but beyond this, their inner landscape of grief and hope, forged in the intensity of a war-torn homeland, steeped in ancient traditions, yields poems at once timeless and immediate, universal almost to the point of allegory, yet also deeply and achingly personal.

What interests me most is how each poet finds hope in the midst of the violence and uncertainty of such long-standing conflict. In Nasrallah’s poem “Beginnings,” the speaker describes to his lover a passionate vision of a hopeful future:

…
when I am able to freely place a gentle kiss
on your cheek in public,
when I am able to return with you after midnight
without a police patrol desecrating our bodies
in search of a confession,
when we can run in the streets
without anyone pronouncing us crazy,
when I am able to sing
and share a stranger’s umbrella
and when she in turn may share my loaf of bread,
when you are able to say I love you
without fear of death or imprisonment
and I can open a window in the morning
without being silenced by a bullet
…

Even as Nasrallah holds out this vision, he does so in contrast to great difficulties–some ostensibly real, such as curfews and dangerous, bullet-ridden streets; others more extreme–such as fearing death or imprisonment for saying “I love you,” or being killed simply for opening a window. Yet the juxtaposition of the real difficulties against the more strange, or at least strangely-described ones, only serves to underscore the absurdity of the real oppression, and thereby heighten the deliciousness of freedom.

Amichai, by contrast, seems to find a kind of hope, and an affirmation of his humanity, in his willingness to keep asking the difficult questions, and in a “we shall see” attitude toward life. Consider this excerpt from the third section of “Once I wrote ‘Now and in Other Days’:”

…
… When we sang, “This is the last battle,” I believed,
and when they told me “This is the last supper” I believed. Since then
my life has been filled with last battles and last suppers, like the last wish
of a death-row inmate. …
…
… And the measure of justice and the measure of mercy were like
getting measured for shoes–to this day I buy shoes a size too big,
so they won’t pinch my feet. …
…
They told me “I’ll be back” and I am still
waiting, and they told me “I’ll never come back”
and I am still waiting. And when they told me “Don’t ask,”
I began to ask, and I have not stopped asking since.

Again, like Nasrallah, Amichai intersperses his poem with a poetically described hardship–constant uncertainty–but he does so, not with visions of actual freedom, but with whimsy (the shoes) and chutzpah (“I have not stopped asking since.”) These qualities would seem to be a survival skill for the constantly-disappointed speaker as he endures dangerous times.

Each poet presents an incredible vision of what it means to nurture and reinvent one’s humanity in the midst of a bitter, age-old conflict. And strangely, in this way, they would seem to be more united–in the realm of poetry–than divided. That is, each has found solace in poetic terms where no resolution has, as yet, been reached politically.

Perhaps Plato got it wrong. Rather than banishing poets from a healthy republic, they should be called upon to remind us–in ways that philosophers and even theologians often cannot–of our fundamental humanity, and how, even in the midst of long and seemingly endless conflict, we can and must make meaning–and find hope.

Recommended Reading:

Open Closed Open: Poems

by

Yehuda Amichai

January: The Third Year

Each January brings an opportunity for my wife and I to reflect on the birth and death of our son, and on just how far we have come in learning to re-embrace hope.

February: Poem in The Long-Islander

February was a dark month, as the economy began to take its toll. A glimmer of light came with the news that this poem had been published, on the other side of the country, beneath Walt Whitman’s gaze.

March: Mark Doty: Phoenix Aflame

I discovered solace in the remarkable work of the poet Mark Doty, whose collection Fire to Fire continues to inspire and astonish me.

April: Defining Great Poetry

A young marketing executive from Singapore wrote to me to ask what makes great poetry great.

May: On Ashbery and Surprise

One of the surprises of completing my MFA was discovering an appreciation for the poems of John Ashbery.

June: Pacific University MFA Commencement Student Speech

I was selected by the faculty, on the basis of my “contribution to the program” to give the student speech at my MFA commencement. It was a glorious day.

July: Interview with Scottish Poet Andrew Philip

I had the great pleasure of meeting Andrew Philip through the blogosphere, and interviewing him about his outstanding debut collection of poems as part of Salt Publishing’s innovative Cyclone Book Tour.

August: Generativity and Letting Go

We marked another milestone in recovering from grief when we finally gave away the baby items originally intended for our son.

September: The Blessings of Complicated Grief

The anniversary of the birth and death of a poet-friend’s son prompted this meditation on the blessings that can come from the deep self-examination profound grief can instigate.

October: The Bear

A remarkable visitor came, all too briefly, into our neighborhood, and met a tragic end. I wrote a poem about the experience, and our next-door neighbor placed an enduring metal sculpture in the tree the bear occupied right across our street.

November: The Death of Loftiness in Poetry

I conducted a quick, fun poll about poetry book titles, and came to some surprising conclusions about what people from different backgrounds think poetry “ought” to be.

December: Enlightened America

I had the pleasure of flying to Boston with Val to see two dear friends get married, and to meet their new baby daughter–the first baby I held in my arms since our son passed away.

It has been an incredible year–full of poetry, hardship, and the renewal of hope. I wish you and yours peace and prosperity in the year to come.

Visual Cortex diagram courtesy Wikipedia

I have been questioning my preference for reading poetry on paper versus digital text for some time now, wondering what might underpin these instincts. It recently occurred to me that the difference in mental state I experience when reading a book versus surfing the web may actually have a basis in science. The advent of digital text has made a staggering amount of information available to us, and thereby altered forever how we learn. The further proliferation of digital text through the internet, and especially now with blogging and social networking, has made our ability to filter through words a survival skill. We must read faster than ever in the information age, skimming for nuggets of meaning or amusement.

Just how have we learned to read faster in the information age? Short of a research grant, an EEG machine, and plenty of literate volunteers, I have only a sample size of one, and my subjective methods of self-observation to guide me. But my theory is that we bias the visual processing centers of our brain, instead of the auditory centers, when surfing the web. This theory is supported by speed-reading courses that attempt to eliminate sub-vocalization and auditory processing to teach people to read faster. And yet, poetry has been an aural medium for centuries.

What are the implications for our poetics when readers stop listening to poetry in their head? Could this have a relationship to the advent of visual poetry, and language poetry, and to the false-starts of neo-formalism? Might the rise of free verse even go hand-in-hand with this explosion of the accessibility of written material? Surely, other factors, like the effects of the Second World War on postmodernism, play greatly into contemporary poetics. Yet this simple theory, with its potentially biological basis–that in an age glutted with words, we have stopped listening to their music–may have as much to say about contemporary poetry, and its decline from popular favor, as rock-n-roll has to say about the decline of classical music.

Furthermore, the volume of writing shows no signs of letting up. As Thomas Swick puts it in his essay, “Have Book, Will Travel”:

Tell a writer you write and depression sets in; tell a writer you read and gratitude blooms. Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or that hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead.

Indeed, it seems to be an art that is increasingly fading in our cultural memory–the art of listening–to ourselves, each other, the music of our language, and the wisdom of the dead. Perhaps my relationship to books is not anachronistic, or fetishistic; perhaps it is not the smell of the binder’s glue, the feel of the page, the pleasures of a good font in dark ink, or anything else about the book itself that I love so much as that poems served up in this format literally change my head space, making me quiet, attentive, and able to hear–really hear–what the poem is saying to me.

“…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.”

I am somewhere over the Midwest as I type this, returning to the West Coast from a weekend in Boston. Val and I made the trip to attend a very special wedding. Seeing two dear friends–both kind, courageous men–exchange vows with each other, and blessings with all in attendance, renewed my understanding of what marriage is all about.

We stayed in the Omni Parker House Hotel, home to Emerson and Longfellow’s Saturday Club, and spent what little time we had on this trip getting acquainted with American history up close. We visited beautiful old churches, and made the trip up to Harvard–a school founded by Puritans to unite scholarship with spiritual pursuit.

Though most of us made the trip from California, Massachusetts turned out to be the perfect place for this kind of wedding. It was the first state to abolish slavery, a haven for religious diversity, salvation to the starving Irish, a haunt of Franklin, and later, the Transcendentalists–peopled with the inheritors of great wisdom and fierce compassion; steeped, on every Boston street corner, in our nation’s founding ideals.

We also made this journey to meet a very special wedding guest–the two grooms’ newly-adopted daughter. At lunch today, I got to hold her. She is the first baby I have held in my arms since our son, James, died four years ago. And yet the experience was pure joy. When she opened her eyes, and looked in my face, she started smiling, and laughing, and delight seemed to bounce between us, gathering up our faces in grins and giggles.

I picked up a hard-to-find book of poems by Marvin Bell at Grolier’s just outside Harvard, and have been reading it on the plane. A poem that begins, “The dead man encounters horrific conditions infused with beauty,” also contains the phrase: “…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.” I read it, and thought of this lucky little girl, who will come to embrace love’s many facets as naturally as she forms her radiant smile.  And arcing now across a small, dark section of globe, fresh hope lights up inside of me–for myself, for my country, and this beautiful, incomprehensible world.

In his retirement, my dad has been setting down these and many other stories for young people. And most recently, he has begun sharing some of this work in text and audio snippets on his new website. Be sure check it out, and leave an encouraging comment for the man who first introduced me to the pure delight of letting one’s imagination catch fire.

Obviously, people got questions wrong, individually and collectively. In fact, the collective wisdom didn’t end up being that much more reliable than a coin toss. But far more interesting, and unexpected, was the difference between the answers that poets and non-poets gave about which titles they thought were poetry, and which were prose.

According to comments I received from non-poets, they tended to follow the norm, whereas poets reported a tendency to want to “poeticize” every title in the poll–imagining how every entry in the poll might make a great tile for a fascinating book of poems. What intrigues me about this is the implied contrast between the reference point poets and non-poets hold for poetry.

Looking over the answers, I notice that often when a prose title was mistaken for poetry, the title had lofty words in it. My theory is that ideas like “Beauty” (Fast Beauty) and “Death” (People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead) tricked non-poets into believing these could be titles of poetry books. You see, most non-poets stop reading poetry after they leave school. So, their reference point tends to be poems from before the post-modern era, when poetry was encouraged and even expected to touch upon lofty ideas with lofty language. For the same reasons, the most un-lofty title in this poll, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, got voted prose, and so did The Anger Scale.

Contemporary poets, on the other hand, have heard it all–the most disarming, banal, and surreal titles deployed in efforts to shock, or shake up, our notion of language art. In an era deeply mistrustful of lofty ideas plainly expressed, poets have danced around deeper human concerns to an extent that must seem as absurd to the outside observer as trying to conceive of some of these titles as the titles of books full of eighteenth-century Romantic verse. More than pushing the envelope of our perceptions, it confounds us altogether.

And so, the paradox of contemporary poetry is that we crave the deeper human concerns, yet deeply mistrust lofty language. Those of us reading and writing contemporary poetry struggle to reconcile these strange parameters with an endless array of tactics, many of them borrowed from prose. But the result, to most educated non-poets, must seem utterly baffling when held up against the standards of centuries past.

I believe that the radical shift in our culture that came at the end of the Second World War, when post-modernism rose to power, can be seen in the responses to this simple poll. Imagine reading some of these titles to Whitman, Keats, or Blake, and explaining that these are the titles of books of poems. The sound of their bemused, bewildered, and ultimately uncomfortable laughter is a sound that haunts our age.

Care to help me out? You don’t have to know a thing about poetry to participate. For each title in bold, simply click “poetry” if you think it sounds like the title of a poetry book, or “prose” if you think it sounds like a prose book’s title.

Ready? Here we go.

Are the following book titles prose or poetry?

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The results you see after clicking an answer, above, are the tally of votes. Here are the answers as to which book is which:

Poetry

Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films by Wayne Koestenbaum
Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird edited by Anna Skucińska
The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder

Prose

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka
Fast Beauty by Rona Berg
How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson
People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead by Gary Leon Hill
Pocket Guide to Emergency Bicycle Repair by Ron Cordes
The Essential Beginner’s Guide To Raising Swans by Andrew Gray (e-book)

How did you do? Any surprises about which books were which? Any surprises about the poll results, above?

“How open to suggestion / they have always been, carrying nothing // with them of the past, content to leave almost / everything behind…”

-Christopher Buckley, “New Clouds”

I received a complimentary copy of the premiere issue of Cloudbank today. The journal is co-edited by Peter Sears, core faculty in the Pacific Unviersity MFA program, and the index reads like a roll-call of some of that program’s most talented writers: Arthur Ginsberg helps us see behind sight, Ron Bloodworth takes us into meditative country, Marianne Klekacz makes a Christmas-morning discovery of flight, Jennifer Whetham extols the sensuous mushroom, Beth Russell defends the curious appetites of the female praying mantis, and Abby Murray brings a glimmer of hard-earned compassion to a dog-eat-dog world. More than this, new poems by Christopher Buckley, Carolyn Miller, Margaret McGovern, and a host of other wonderful poets–some from the Pacific Northwest, others not–round out this impressive debut. A publication of Cloudbank Books in Corvalis, Oregon, Cloudbank the journal is accepting submissions for its second issue, including offering a $200 prize for one outstanding poem. Details for submitting poems, and ordering a copy of their excellent first issue, are available on the Cloudbank website.

“It is a great privilege … to celebrate through poetry what is sacred between species…”

-Sandra Alcosser

Here is the voice of my friend and mentor, Sandra Alcosser, reading her own wonderful poem about a bear:

You can read more about the good work she is doing, combining poetry and conservation, in this article in the current issue of SDSU’s 360 Magazine.

1. The secret to success is longevity
2. The secret to longevity is consistency
3. The secret to consistency is discipline
4. The secret to discipline is love

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