Lyre – Studies in Poetry and Lyric

“Whence cometh a poem’s divine presence?”: An Introduction to the Poetry of Sivan Har-Shefi

Tamar Wolf-Monzon — 2024-01-23

About Sivan Har-Shefi

"Acorns"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

The Class

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-06

"Thorns"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

In your world

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-06

"Peacock Feather"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

The Tree

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-06

"Seagulls"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

Hinds

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-06

"Deer"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

Echo

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-06

"Birds"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

From: Avishar Har-Shefi (Author), Sivan Har-Shefi (Author, Illustrator), "We who will soon become / Anaḥnu shebe-ḳarov nihyeh : shirim", Mashiv ha-ruaḥ, Jerusalem, 2019

The Motif of the Nevel (Harp/Lyre) in the Poetry of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) Period

Yehosheva Samet-Sheinberg — 2024-01-23

This article delineates the central place of the Hebrew musical instrument, the nevel (translated alternatively as harp/lyre), within the framework of the literary culture of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment; 18^th-19^th centuries). Adapting the “double impact” model of Hebrew Haskalah poetry, we examine the motif of the musical instrument in three channels: the instrument as it appears as a vignette or graphic attribute on the title pages of books; the inclusion of the word nevel in book titles; and the nevel as a literary figure in Hebrew maskilic poetry. This article points to the various textual aspects of the motif as depicted by the Haskalah poets, who betray both their obvious debt to the biblical tradition as well as the clear influence of the classic lyric tradition that was cultivated in contemporary European literature.

“This Poem is a Token of Love”: Expressions of Relationships in the Poetry of Rachel Morpurgo

Tova Cohen — 2024-01-23

When relating mockingly to the first modern Hebrew woman poet Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1870), Dan Miron describes her as a “respectable mother of a family.” He furthermore defines her poetry as superficial rhymes written for family and friends, in between a dense social calendar. Miron thus portrays a poet whose mediocre and superficial poetry (“rhymes”) was “only” occasional and worthless, serving purely social purposes. This paper will propose a different way to evaluate Morpurgo’s “rhymes written for family and friends.” Despite being a wife, a housewife, a mother of four children, and related to two of the most respectable families of Jewish Trieste (Luzzatto and Morpurgo), Rachel Morpurgo was a very lonely woman, as she hints in some of her poetry and letters. Her loneliness, I suggest, stemmed from two sources. First, from being estranged from her husband and her sons, who did not appreciate either her intellectual needs or her poetry. Second, from the problematic situation of a learned woman within a 19^th-century conservative Jewish society, she was estranged from both most other women (who did not have her education) as well as from most men who did not regard her as equal. One way to overcome this loneliness, I argue, was to express her emotions by writing poems addressed to specific individuals, usually to mark special occasions. These poems allowed her to articulate her love, friendship, or appreciation, as well as to converse with her addressee and create the valuable relationship she was missing. The main part of this article will demonstrate this function of her Poems for Special Occasions. The discussion will include three poems that reveal her love and friendship for three women (two cousins named Rachel, and an acquaintance, Flora Randenger), as well as for three men—her cousin Shmuel David Luzzatto, her husband (prior to their marriage), and her friend Yoseph Almanzi.

David Hofshteyn’s Poetry of Listening

Harriet Murav — 2024-02-05

This essay examines the multiple resonances of the Jewish term hefker (literally, “unclaimed, abandoned, or neglected property”) as a modernist, aesthetic, political, and ethical category in the early work of the Yiddish poet David Hofshteyn, including his 1919 debut volume Bay Vegn (“On the Road”), his pogrom lament 1922 Troyer (“Grief”), and the virtually unknown “Ba-yamim ha-hem” (“In those days”), a Hebrew prose poem from 1925. I attempt to shed light on aspects of his modernist poetic practice, not merely in terms of stylistics but, more broadly, in terms of his poetic orientation in the world. This includes the sensory experience of joy and pleasure, as well as his encounter with the violence of the Kyiv pogroms of 1919. I begin with a brief discussion of hefker in the literary milieu, then turn to Bay Vegn and Hofshteyn’s exploration of sensory listening. The second part of the essay turns to Troyer, tracing how the term ‘hefker’ adds an ethical dimension to the practice of listening. I conclude with the Hebrew prose poem, which, by reflecting the poet’s experience the Kyiv pogroms, shatters the possibility of listening.

Harold Schimmel’s Diasporic Poetry: Hebrew Literature as World Literature

Michael Gluzman — 2024-02-05

In 1983, Israeli American poet Harold Schimmel published a Hebrew long poem entitled: ’Afra de-Ar’a: Uri Nisan Gnesin be-Erets-Yisra’el (1907-1908). This narrative poem, which Schimmel never included in any of his collections, focuses on the famed Hebrew modernist Uri Nissan Gnessin’s short-lived stay in Palestine, after which he returned to Europe. Initially, Schimmel had planned to write a scholarly essay on Gnessin, but ultimately, he synthesized the variegated materials he had gathered into a long poem, which he described as “an essay in short lines.” Despite its status as an apocryphal text in Schimmel’s oeuvre, this article proposes to read ’Afra de-Ar’a as a hermeneutical key for understanding his diasporic poetics. Schimmel does not implicate himself in this narrative poem, written as a fabric of quotations from Gnessin’s oeuvre and from texts Gnessin must have read. Yet Gnessin enables Schimmel to think anew about his own relationship with the Hebrew language. While Schimmel never reveals his motivation for writing this poem, it is read as a self-reflection on his own immigration to Israel and on his choice of Hebrew over his mother tongue.

Meta-Representation: World-Making Thematized in the Ekphrastic Poetry of Dan Pagis

Tamar Yacobi — 2024-02-05

Meta-representation in discourse refers to the discourser’s explicit or implicit thematizing of representation. Such thematizing may bear on a variety of poetic features and operations. For instance: What objects does one choose to represent or foreground or marginalize or omit altogether? Moving from selection to evaluation, how (un)suitable is a medium or a genre to the challenge of representing the object? And to what extent does that object itself suit the communicative purposes and effects sought? Such questions always arise throughout the author’s genetic process, but they sometimes appear in the finished text itself, whether on the surface or in some oblique or dramatized form.

The elegant poetry of the modernist Hebrew poet Dan Pagis (1930-1986) presents an assortment of such meta-representations. His ekphrastic poetry has a special claim to an interest in this regard. Ekphrasis, as defined by Yacobi based on Sternberg's theory of quotation, is an intermedial quotation that transfers a visual image (a painting, a sculpture, a photograph) to language. Since one discourse here re-presents what has already been directly represented in another discourse, ekphrasis is an exemplar of meta-representation. This intermedial transfer and doubling throws yet more light on the issue of world-making, far more than does any reference to the world in either of the media, the verbal or the visual, on its own.

In turn, Pagis offers an instructive case in point. His ekphrastic poems mix the dramatization of representational problems with open commentary. Furthermore, they often do so from unusual, estranging viewpoints that compound and thematize the meta-representational issues. My article will focus on the question of (un)success in world-making and will explore it through a set of poems that play variations on the theme.

The Poem and the Place: How Poetry in the Alien Language of English Exists in Israel

Karen Alkalay-Gut — 2024-02-05

Literature written in the Hebrew language possessed enormous significance for the establishment of Israeli identity. Yet, in the 1970s, people started questioning the linguistic exclusivity of the Hebrew Association of Writers. In part to counter this criticism, and perhaps also to preserve the purity and the development of the Hebrew language, members of the Hebrew Association of Writers helped to form a Federation of Writers’ Organizations—among others, the Israel Association of Writers in English. This article explores the development of “Anglo-Saxon” poets in Israel and examines their relationship to the local literary and cultural identity. For the first generation of these natives, English poetry was insular, written for the local population or anonymously for a foreign audience. Thus, questions of politics were not often raised, and poets did not have to feel like they were explaining their lives in Israel to others. The opening of the skies and the invention of email and the internet gradually created a generation that could be based in any country and publish elsewhere. As possibilities for publishing from multiple residences became viable, so the occurrence of political and cultural controversies became more frequent, as some of the writing changed its subject and purpose. By comparing some of the poems from the 1970s with poems written today and published everywhere on the internet, the startling distinction of subject matter becomes clear. While some poets write exclusively for their country of origin, others depend on local readership and their subjects vary accordingly.

“I Can Write in the Dark:” Radical Intertextuality in the Poetry of Adi Keissar

Chana Kronfeld — 2024-02-06

Adi Keissar, the founder and convener of ’Ars Poetica, the new radical wave of Mizrahi writers, has helped bring poetry – as literary practice, performance, and polemics – back into the center of Israeli cultural life since she established the circle in 2013, in the wake of the 2011 social protest movement. In this article, I take seriously the group’s name as a cross-linguistic pun on the prestigious meta-poetic Latin term, linking it outrageously with the Arabic ‘ars, “pimp,” which is used in Hebrew slang as a degrading epithet for Mizrahi men. I show how this sarcastic re-appropriation of ‘ars nevertheless retains the Latin sense, namely Keissar’s – and the circle’s – serious concerns with poetics and with the intersections of lyric poetry and society, in particular. Contra the masculine stereotype of the ‘ars, Keissar has, in fact, insisted – not without a struggle – on an explicitly feminist, inclusive credo and set of practices for the group and its highly popular events, which she also produces. I discuss the ways the metaphors of “pimp” and “whore,” commonly used to denigrate Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs, are systematically reclaimed in the work of ‘Ars Poetica poets (in addition to Keissar, also Mati Shemoelof and Tehila Hakimi, among others). I demonstrate how Keissar, and the poets in the group and around it, use biblical intertextual resonances of the metaphorical “whore of Zion” in the Prophets and the history of its (ab)uses in colonial discourse as a powerful site for constructing a poetics of intersectional solidarity between women, Mizraḥim, Palestinians, foreign workers, and the poor. I read the poem “The Dominion of Night” (Memshelet Layla) as a pastiche of East-West citations and a meta-poetic rewriting of Genesis 1:16, the creation of the moon and the stars that have dominion over the night. I describe how Keissar’s use of queer ungrammaticality radically inscribes women’s poetic creativity in the foundational myth of creation (as the work of “elohit”). At the same time, she settles accounts with the Israeli government – the common, modern sense of memshala – and calls on dark-skinned women to “take back the night,” in all senses of that expression. In the process, I argue that Keissar’s project compels a rethinking of Western conceptions of the lyric as an essentially apolitical solipsistic soliloquy.

Foreword

Chanita Goodblatt — 2024-02-06

A Minor Lament

Neta Stahl — 2024-02-05

"And His Name Shall Be Called in Israel"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

Behold, You Are Consecrated unto Me

Tamar Wolf-Monzon — 2024-02-05

"Entanglement"

Sivan Har-Shefi — 2024-02-05

7 October 2023

Chanita Goodblatt — 2024-02-05