Modest and Social Poetry

July 29, 2012 There are 42 years of poetry in this modest volume 150 pages long:

I leaf through the pages of old newspapers
looking for poems worthy of print
find piles of wood-free paper whose surface
has yellowed like the edges of the sun. Wait for morning. Fight off old age
with the vacuum cleaner in my hand.
My wife asked me to hang laundry.
Don’t forget, she said, first thing at dawn.
She speaks beautiful Hebrew . . .
                  ‘I Leaf Through at Night’

The picture sketched in these simple words by the poet is also beautiful. The details are beautiful; details make the statement about fighting off old age by being creative believable. I can picture him, sitting in the silent night, leafing through newspapers. “My wife asked me to hang laundry.” The sentence contains an entire life. She adds “don’t forget . . . first thing at dawn.” How much information about their lives together and their relationship is embedded in this sentence. She knows that he’ll be up till late at night, as every night, and that he’ll get up at dawn, while she keeps different hours, and they live together thus in harmony, without judgment or criticism. My wife asked me to hang out laundry – a simple sentence of happiness.

[. . .]

In the opening passage to this book, arranged as prose but full of rhymes, the poet writes “I write about the most obvious things in life.” Obvious to him, perhaps, but not to everyone. Not everyone finds the simple, everyday things “the most obvious.” Here, in this collection, which is all simplicity and everyday, the day-to-day details are obvious and cheerful; despite poverty and frustration, and despite bitterness, they are somehow optimistic. There are no stirring poems here about forbidden lusts, overwhelming desires, a yearning for something else. What does the poet want in fact? Simply “to be here. To visit my father in the old people’s home, to vote in elections, to see my friends healthy. Little things that make one happy.” Almog’s poetry blossoms within the everyday [ . . . and] despite bitterness, despite protest, leads to sanctification. The sanctification of life, of the living, of those weembrace. The sanctification of what there is and for which we should give thanks.

Almog also gathers poems from places others find annoying: the line at the post office, where he sees a cardboard notice in a child’s hand, on which is written “People in a hurry are in trouble” (‘In the Neighborhood Post Office’); in the shoe box containing bills; and standing, pushed and shoved, on the train on his way to visit his lawyer in Haifa (‘Travel by Israeli Rail’) – almost every event of this kind constitutes an entrance ticket to childhood memories for Almog.

A poem about Fellini is a springboard for talk of 1930s cinemas with their squeaky seats and sweet scent of perfume; ‘Autumn of Memories’ is a string of memories about his grandfather and father and a little about his grandmother, a mix of memories and verses in Yemenite Hebrew, with translation. Despite the ordinariness of the materials, the poems are emotional, intriguing and full of surprises. At the end of ‘Half a Poem with Tamuz on the Bridge to the Hatikva Neighborhood,’ for example, the poet makes himself coffee, in order to forget the terrible taste from decades ago when a friend persuaded him to eat the fruit of a sycamore tree on King George Street. There is also moisture in the poems, mud and leaves and juice, and youth, and life.

Most of the poems (apart from the few early ones obeying an orderly pattern of rhyme and rhythm) use truncated, disrupted language. Lines such as “Balash Cinema. Second show. First love. Railway line. So little / needed to be happy,” for example “The adjective for Jewish (yehudi) to violinist Yehudi Menuhin, from a hothouse (hamama) to a Yemenite washerwoman named Hamama, from Herzl the man to “I grew up on Herzl Street.” He also, like German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, like Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai to this day, loves quoting statistics and numbers (“Yehoshua Peretz lifted 40 crates / in the State of Israel there are 90 thousand skinny children”). By moving back and forth in time, recalling myriad details, Almog portrays a disappearing world, in which “the scent of the wide world stood in the orchards / oranges and possibilities . . . and once on Shabat Nahamu [after the mourning day of the Ninth of Av] everyone went to hear [cantor] Yossele Rosenblatt / and left their houses unlocked” (‘How Tarzan Leapt’).

He sees his role as that of a social poet, directing our attention towards misfortune, issuing warnings “I will recite a poem about extinguished lights / and about the children of my city roughened by the frost.” His poems depict both personal distress (“I have no bread in my room”) and social problems: he cries about the Iraqi newspaper and handkerchief seller, and seeing the crowd in a demonstration over the high price of bread on Brenner Street, cries over the hundreds of unemployed people, and at the banners of the suffering class.

Like many excellent poets, Almog began writing in rhyme and rhythm and orderly verses but then later, despite occasionally amusing himself with rhyme, abandoned this regime – all to the good. In a note at the end of his book With and Without Rhyme he writes, “I could never again write in a regimented form, slave to rhythm and rhyme in order to express beauty in a world devoid of beauty, a world of chaos and utter disgust; better to write poetry with cautious freedom in blank verse.” Another conscious decision Almog made was to avoid using fancy words. “One should think as little as possible of fancy words, / so as not to become accustomed to them” (‘To the Victor on the Death of a Footballer’).

In ‘Contempt’ the poet comes to terms with his father, who didn’t prepare him for such a materialistic, greedy world.

I speak in general terms which is the language of mirrors typical of
                                  poetry.
All poetry.
And try to create a symbolic dialogue
with monkeys, presidents, swings and wind, when I
really mean something beyond abstract symbols of
swings and wind.
I’m talking about an essentially bad life and amazingly
no one rises up against it.

In ‘Epistle to the Corinthians,’ the poet wonders with bitter humor to whom he is writing:

I was stuck writing to the Corinthians
a people who have ceased to exist since the beginning of the Common
                                  Era, they conducted a census and they’re all gone
I write to them they don’t answer
I’ll try my luck with the Ephesians or maybe the Galatians.

His position is that poetry has no value unless it affects something in this world.

From a personal point of view the poet failsas well, since he is unable to make a living for his family. In a heart-rending poem, ‘Lassie Go Home’ Almog writes of the poet who stands by his daughters’ bed at night, the poet who goes to sleep late, who writes poems, after he’d knocked on the doors of the newspaper editors “and knows not what he will bring home for his children.”

[…]

I admit, that if once I believed in definitive concepts of “male writing” and “women’s writing” they have been undermined and blurred after reading Almog. His writing, or at least part of it, is intuitive. In “And there will be a king in Yeshurun” he moves from speaking about a hothouse (hamama) to a washerwoman named Hamama: “It will be hot without a hothouse / for some reason I was reminded of Hamama the Yemenite washerwoman in Mandate times.” He goes on that way for three lines, then goes back to the story of the poem’s protagonist, the poet Avot Yeshurun. ‘I Have A Longing’ evolves from “I have a longing for the sandwich I took to school” to the sandwich he took to his day job as an adult, to looking for work later in life.

[…]

Aharon Almog has been writing poetry for 50 years . . . The book opens with a poem telling us that the poet didn’t write poems for many years and ends with a poem telling us that he will write no more. But he also tells us “I said I will not write and here I am writing.” Please continue, Mr. Almog.