Article
Welcome to PIW Israel - July 2009
June 06, 2009
The Hebrew word for ‘address’ is ketovet, which is also the name of the diverse band of poets who founded Poetry Place. Ketovet’s members, Shai Dotan, Gilad Meiri, Lyor Shternberg, Dorit Weisman and Ariel Zinder, who have many books to their credit and are the winners of numerous literary prizes, will now serve as a cooperative national editor for the Israeli pages of PIW. Poetry Place has not served as a private address, exclusive to these particular poets, but as an nurturer of Israeli poetry, and a conduit to world poetry; joining PIW is a natural step toward the Poetry Place's goal of “spearheading cultural and social change, which includes changing attitudes toward poetry and poets”.
A bit of history: beginning in 2002, the Poetry Place has offered low-cost poetry workshops in Jerusalem, as well as writing workshops for people with special needs, whether psychological or physical, which are now run countrywide, and workshops designed for at-risk youth through the local municipal juvenile affairs department.
Once a month Poetry Place holds a free, three-hour-long workshop for the general public, offering writing practice and poetry discussions. The workshops draw a wide variety of participants, reflecting the pluralism of the Poetry Place. They include residents of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods: religious and secular, young and elderly.
The Poetry Place is a venue for poetry readings by veteran and new Israeli poets and translators, for and discussions about poetry, most often punctuated by musical performances. And it has an international reach, in 2008 hosting Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, with musical interludes by Jerusalem native Jasmine Levy, a young singer of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) music – a surprising pairing that delighted both sides, as well as the overflowing audience – and on other occasions, New Zealand poet Tusiata Avia, and the Catalan poet Joan Margarit.
In 2008, the Poetry Place inaugurated its One Square Meter Jerusalem Poetry Festival. Now in its second year, it is to be held 30 June to 1 July 2009, just as the Israeli pages return to PIW, and looks forward to inviting overseas poets to Jerusalem in the future.
This issue, the Israeli pages feature three poets whose prizewinning first books have been the subject of serious critical review. To start with the youngest, Nano Shabtai has been described by two older Israeli women poets as someone whose work has a “kick” to it. In a brash confessional mode, she uses the facts of her life in her poetry, but artfully, exhibiting the control of material and the addition of imagination that art requires. According to Maya Bejerano, Shabtai has decided to “turn her life, her pain and her moments of happiness into a controlled linguistic narrative, in which invention is combined with facts”. One example of this achievement is the way she has packed deep feeling into the list of school subjects enumerated in her poem ‘“What Do Children Feel When Parents Divorce?”’ She is translated into English for the first time by Lisa Katz, and Bejerano’s review appears in excerpted form.
Next is Ariel Zinder, a poet and teacher who had the audacity at the age of twenty-seven to translate twenty-four of Shakespeare’s sonnets; they were published in a bilingual edition illustrated by a well-known cartoonist, Michel Kichka. Most of his poems in this issue, translated by Jennie Feldman, deal with family relations. Despite the child’s point of view that they sometimes share, they are very different from Nano Shabtai’s poems on the subject. Even when Zinder writes about fear, it is somehow shrouded in beauty. A poem about Job, ‘To the Weak, the Fearful and the Faint-hearted’, threaded with Jewish texts, manages to create a highly individual and opinionated speaker whose point of view is new. The poem is discussed at length in an article by poet and midrash scholar Inbar Raveh, who provides clear entry to Zinder’s use of religious sources.
Finally, Shai Dotan. This 40-year-old economist, the author of two poetry books, has had his work published in American literary journals, translated by Ohad Stadler, and in a recent protest poetry anthology, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back. Dotan has a wide reach; his topics include his army service, but also Wallace Stevens’ ‘Study of Two Pears’, Pablo Neruda and a pair of men’s red thong underwear (brought together in the same poem, ‘An Ode to Underpants’ in the translation of Harvey Bock). One almost overwhelming characteristic of his work is how precisely measured it is, with clipped, short lines stepping down the page, a quality enhanced when the poet reads aloud. Poet and critic Eli Hirsh, whose review is excerpted on the site, has ventured that Dotan’s work “recalls a poetic culture different from the current one – a calmer and slower culture”. LINKS
Poetry Place home web site
www.poetryplace.org
A newspaper report on the 2008 Poetry Place Jerusalem Poetry Festival
in English
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1000686.html
Video of the first One Square Meter Jerusalem Poetry Festival in 2008
with English subtitles
http://www.poetryplace.org/video-eng.html
Video of Israeli poets reading at the Poetry Place
in Hebrew
http://www.poetryplace.org/video-menu.html
The Israeli pages are back with three very different poets, two of whom are still in their thirties and one who has just hit the forty-year mark: a theatre artist with a “bad girl” image; a writer and translator engaged in dialogue with thousands of years of Jewish texts; and an economist known for poetic restraint.
First: we have a new address, as we are now sponsored by the Poetry Place in Jerusalem, a non-profit literary project working out of a municipal community center, located in the (poetic) narrow streets of the (poetic) labyrinthine neighborhood on the edge of Jerusalem’s (poetic) open-air market, Mahane Yehuda. The Hebrew word for ‘address’ is ketovet, which is also the name of the diverse band of poets who founded Poetry Place. Ketovet’s members, Shai Dotan, Gilad Meiri, Lyor Shternberg, Dorit Weisman and Ariel Zinder, who have many books to their credit and are the winners of numerous literary prizes, will now serve as a cooperative national editor for the Israeli pages of PIW. Poetry Place has not served as a private address, exclusive to these particular poets, but as an nurturer of Israeli poetry, and a conduit to world poetry; joining PIW is a natural step toward the Poetry Place's goal of “spearheading cultural and social change, which includes changing attitudes toward poetry and poets”.
A bit of history: beginning in 2002, the Poetry Place has offered low-cost poetry workshops in Jerusalem, as well as writing workshops for people with special needs, whether psychological or physical, which are now run countrywide, and workshops designed for at-risk youth through the local municipal juvenile affairs department.
Once a month Poetry Place holds a free, three-hour-long workshop for the general public, offering writing practice and poetry discussions. The workshops draw a wide variety of participants, reflecting the pluralism of the Poetry Place. They include residents of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods: religious and secular, young and elderly.
The Poetry Place is a venue for poetry readings by veteran and new Israeli poets and translators, for and discussions about poetry, most often punctuated by musical performances. And it has an international reach, in 2008 hosting Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, with musical interludes by Jerusalem native Jasmine Levy, a young singer of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) music – a surprising pairing that delighted both sides, as well as the overflowing audience – and on other occasions, New Zealand poet Tusiata Avia, and the Catalan poet Joan Margarit.
In 2008, the Poetry Place inaugurated its One Square Meter Jerusalem Poetry Festival. Now in its second year, it is to be held 30 June to 1 July 2009, just as the Israeli pages return to PIW, and looks forward to inviting overseas poets to Jerusalem in the future.
This issue, the Israeli pages feature three poets whose prizewinning first books have been the subject of serious critical review. To start with the youngest, Nano Shabtai has been described by two older Israeli women poets as someone whose work has a “kick” to it. In a brash confessional mode, she uses the facts of her life in her poetry, but artfully, exhibiting the control of material and the addition of imagination that art requires. According to Maya Bejerano, Shabtai has decided to “turn her life, her pain and her moments of happiness into a controlled linguistic narrative, in which invention is combined with facts”. One example of this achievement is the way she has packed deep feeling into the list of school subjects enumerated in her poem ‘“What Do Children Feel When Parents Divorce?”’ She is translated into English for the first time by Lisa Katz, and Bejerano’s review appears in excerpted form.
Next is Ariel Zinder, a poet and teacher who had the audacity at the age of twenty-seven to translate twenty-four of Shakespeare’s sonnets; they were published in a bilingual edition illustrated by a well-known cartoonist, Michel Kichka. Most of his poems in this issue, translated by Jennie Feldman, deal with family relations. Despite the child’s point of view that they sometimes share, they are very different from Nano Shabtai’s poems on the subject. Even when Zinder writes about fear, it is somehow shrouded in beauty. A poem about Job, ‘To the Weak, the Fearful and the Faint-hearted’, threaded with Jewish texts, manages to create a highly individual and opinionated speaker whose point of view is new. The poem is discussed at length in an article by poet and midrash scholar Inbar Raveh, who provides clear entry to Zinder’s use of religious sources.
Finally, Shai Dotan. This 40-year-old economist, the author of two poetry books, has had his work published in American literary journals, translated by Ohad Stadler, and in a recent protest poetry anthology, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back. Dotan has a wide reach; his topics include his army service, but also Wallace Stevens’ ‘Study of Two Pears’, Pablo Neruda and a pair of men’s red thong underwear (brought together in the same poem, ‘An Ode to Underpants’ in the translation of Harvey Bock). One almost overwhelming characteristic of his work is how precisely measured it is, with clipped, short lines stepping down the page, a quality enhanced when the poet reads aloud. Poet and critic Eli Hirsh, whose review is excerpted on the site, has ventured that Dotan’s work “recalls a poetic culture different from the current one – a calmer and slower culture”. LINKS
Poetry Place home web site
www.poetryplace.org
A newspaper report on the 2008 Poetry Place Jerusalem Poetry Festival
in English
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1000686.html
Video of the first One Square Meter Jerusalem Poetry Festival in 2008
with English subtitles
http://www.poetryplace.org/video-eng.html
Video of Israeli poets reading at the Poetry Place
in Hebrew
http://www.poetryplace.org/video-menu.html
© Lisa Katz, the Ketovet Group and Poetry Place
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