Why don’t we hear more about Aryeh Sivan?

May 19, 2011 A specifically Israeli landscape does feature prominently in the work of the “native” poets, rather than nature or village-scapes in general, but their work also includes the urban scene, such as the particular neighbourhood in which each poet grew up. At the same time, the poetics they employ are for the most part utterly modernist, sometimes just as experimental and innovative as those of their more cosmopolitan colleagues. One should remember that Sivan, Dor and Zach shared a common starting point in the 1950s in the “Towards” (Likrat) group which is attributed with the breakthrough of the second modernist wave (actually the third) in Hebrew poetry. In 1953 the three poets published a collection together, titled One Two Three (Be’shelosha).

In an article published in Ahshav 62 (1995), following the publication of Sivan’s Boundaries of Sand, Rafi Weichart noted five main themes in Sivan’s poetry, particularly in his later work: poems of a Tel Aviv childhood and Tel Aviv poems in general; political or social poems; love poems; poems referring to the Holocaust and poems about old age and the ravages of time. His categorisation suits this collection too since some of the poems are actually variations on poems previously published in earlier collections. In this book as in his previous collections, Sivan comes across as a very skilful poet, in full control of the task of writing. His language is rich but not fanciful, is wonderfully precise and reflects a deep knowledge of ancient Hebrew texts as well as sensitive attention to everyday spoken Hebrew. The world of images and the lyrical language are based both on everyday reality and various modern discoveries – since nowadays “Poets also / Stick close to what they know / In their immediate surroundings, like organs, accessories,” (from ‘The Sling’) – as well as on immediate and distant memories of culture, all part of the poet’s eclectic erudition.

It is also clear that Sivan is always in tune with rhythm and register. The reader, accustomed to a conversational register, with its generally poor level of expression, is liable to miss the musical precision so typical of the poems, whose substance is functional rather than decorative. It is sufficient to read the poems aloud, to appreciate their musical quality.

Sivan has never confined himself to personal lyric. All his poetry collections, including Recurrences, include public poetry alongside poetry of the individual, work produced in response to political and social reality, at times combined with the very individual voice of the lyrical self. Recurrences includes poems which mention particular events, such as ‘Update to 9/11’ and others. There are poems which deal with an appraisal of ongoing situations, such as ‘A story about coats’, whose satirical tone critiques the takeover of Israeli politics by wheeler dealers, “Celebrities / who know how to barge into the right places”.

‘This is from Deborah’s Elegy’ has the explanatory subtitle: “On the navy seals who dove into the Kishon River”. Written in ballad form (a genre widely used in political poetry), the poem juxtaposes the biblical story with current reality [pollution in the river caused cancer and other illnesses in the navy divers] and thereby expresses harsh, pained protest at those “In charge of the boys”.

Several of the poems pulse with a sense of dread of an apocalyptic future. As in Jeremiah’s prophesy, the danger threatens to emerge “From the northern hinterlands”; unlike the prophet, however, the poet cannot be certain about the cloudy vision “of something apocalyptic – truly / or our response / constant-existential-dread / we are the fortune tellers who read the clouds”. (A poet such as Sivan will not demur from sharpening the poem’s meaning by mentioning the ancient fortune tellers, who predict the future according to the appearance and movement of the clouds; he also subtly directs attention to semantic linkages using assonance “ananim-anu-nani-hayinu-meunanim”. . .) And the title of the collection points to a fear of the future: the expression “recurrence” evokes the replay of a catastrophic history.

In the afterword to his collection Collateral (Yravon), Sivan explains his need to write public verse. He refers to his first collection, published in 1963, Armoured Poems (Shirei Shirion), written following his participation in the Sinai campaign: “I, at any rate, like many other excellent Hebrew poets, from the Middle Ages to the present day, was unable to shut myself up alone and write only about what was going on inside my own body and soul. The Zeitgeist also penetrates my private space. So the situation I found myself in during the Sinai campaign confirmed the position I felt to be the right one: I am carried along with the flow of people and events, but at the same time I am able to observe what is going on from the sidelines, from my own point of view.”

Indeed Sivan’s poetry, including Recurrence, evokes a sense of shared public experience, at the same time it expresses a failure to belong, provocation and protest. In the poem ‘Faran’, which opens the collection Sling (published in 1989, during the first Intifada), the poet sees himself as “part of a convoy”, taking care to obey its rules, with a sense of communal responsibility, since the marchers have each been warned that they are “the hair’s thread on which the entire convoy hangs”. But the poet’s identification with the convoy is only partial: he has his own agenda, “to reach Hagar’s bush”, (mentioned in Genesis 21, thus hinting at the Jewish-Arab conflict) and he even considers abandoning the convoy to do so.

Sivan has succeeded in writing poetry which is socially and politically committed but at the same time complex and subtle, both because of his ambivalent attitude to the ‘convoy’ of Zionism, nationalism to which he both does and does not belong and because of his equally ambivalent relation to the public role of poetry. (The poems ‘One Day’ and ‘A Poet’s Dilemma’ included in the collection Living in the Land of Israel in 1984 each express a different standpoint with regard to the poet’s voice in society and the State.)

In order to avoid blowing his own trumpet, Sivan cites T. Carmi in the same afterword to Collateral. Carmi described Sivan as “the only one who found the correct diction and tone with regard to the Intifada. . . . The personal is not neglected and the poems are not black and white”. This is, of course an exaggeration (who gave Carmi the authority to decide who has correct diction and who does not?) But in order to understand such comments, and to appreciate Sivan’s special achievement, his suspicion of political poetry and of “those in the know” need to be recognized, as well as his rejection of ideology and slogans which would be considered execrable in literary work.

‘Committed’ poetry like Sivan’s has its vulnerable spot, emanating from its artistic merit. The desire to protect ethical, lyrical poetry from sloganeering ultimately limits its power. Yona ben Yehuda (Yabi), a naïve poet responsible for a totally different type of political poetry, once said “it’s better to be a righteous outcaste than an ugly esthete”. Sivan is not at all an “ugly esthete” but he does sometimes forget (in this and earlier books) that the ambivalence which contributes to a poem artistically, necessarily clouds the clarity of its ideas. Political poetry needs to put forward a clear message and to sharpen distinctions between good and evil.

In Recurrence, public poetry ranges between two poles of personal lyric. There are several poems at the start of the book which, typically for Sivan, express a longing for what the poet has lost in his past, including his distant childhood. These are followed by a group of poems which act as a kind of bridge to the second pole of public poetry, in which the individual, lyrical self is blended with national themes, on the two subjects which preoccupied Sivan: Holocaust memory and the Jewish-Arab conflict. All these poems are wonderfully lyrical, perfect or almost perfect forms (since perfection in art is always almost-perfection) of the lyrical moment. They also prove that even today, at the start of the third millennium, poetry still possesses limitless possibilities.

Despite emotional aridity, an inescapable result of the influence of Anglo-American modernism, Sivan’s poems do not leave the reader indifferent. The reader’s empathy penetrates the ironic self-aware cover of the text. In recent books, Sivan’s tone seems somewhat softened. The libidinal base which was prominent in his earlier work, is less noticeable in Recurrence. An awareness of the end, which is occasionally accompanied by a sense of missing out or regret, comes to him when he is swimming in the sea,or when looking at a withered tree about to be cut down. The book ends with a poem which brings together renewal after the first rain and the soft sleep of death, in which there is a coming to terms and peace-making most fitting for a poet like Sivan, who is so good at feeling the earth; the dust from whence he came and to which he will return.

In the afterword to Collateral, the poet quotes the question posed repeatedly by his readers: “Why don’t we hear more about Aryeh Sivan?” Indeed, with only a small group of poets in the limelight, promoted by someone or other, many others are pushed to the margins so that absurdly, a poet such as Sivan, who is usually very well received, remains, as he says, “in his own shadow”. Various hypotheses may be offered in answer to this question, but Sivan is a “poet’s poet”. It is in fact difficult to imagine a generation in which he will not be read by poets and poetry lovers. . . . At any rate, Sivan should not compare himself to “A destroyed flower / Stuck between the pages of one of my books / In a row of books which are never read” (‘Change of Image’). Excerpted and translated from a review in Haaretz, 21 January 2005.