A horse of a different color: Picasso’s horse

December 30, 2013 In an interview preceding the release of Israel Bar Kohav’s ninth book Rumors (2009), the poet-psychologist remarked that if he were asked to write the biography of any artist-poet-writer, he would create one that “liberates him or her from biographical and psychological interpretations; I would place the artist’s soul – free of reductive elements – in the spotlight.” This statement, however, offers a challenge to the readers of Bar Kohav’s poetry, now available in a stirring volume of his selected works. And, after all, he is the author of the lines: “Our language emerges/ from the swamp of childhood.// The body accumulates/ words and fear.”
 
As a psychologist by profession, and a writer whose works often return to his childhood and the difficulties he experienced with his father, Bar Kohav’s poetry begs for just such the biographical-psychological reading that he seeks to avoid. It may be, however, that what the poet is trying to say is that poetry provides a moment in which the soul is saved from everything that would dilute its value: one’s body, daily burdens and human relations [ . . . ] Does he in this way grant poetry a romantic, metaphysical dimension? Here too Bar Kohav treads a fine line. Just as his more personal verse attempts to avoid defining the structure of the human soul, his philosophical poetry rejects sentiment and all attempts at metaphysics. Still, it aspires to the heights, to understanding [ . . . ] “Will we never see the land from the other side/ and what poetry is?” he ask, and then answers, elsewhere: “There is an absence/ toward nothingness.”
 
At least according to his poetry, Bar Kohav has a pessimistic view of the world. [ . . . ] There is also breathtaking mystery and a sort of cheerful beauty. His work usually revolves around the axle of childhood. “When the stables of childhood opened/ the horses escaped./ I understood that this was the right direction/ but hadn’t the strength to run like them/ and I couldn’t not look back.”
 
This childhood is not a longed-for, nostalgic region. It is sometimes an arena of simple terrors. “I freeze on the way to the blackboard” – how much anxiety and humiliation are contained in this short sentence. And sometimes it is a secure and happy place. Both are fated to extinction. “The dead teacher returned to trumpet life’s truths in his dull voice:/ Just wait, you’ll see!// And when it was over/ we did.”
 
Nonetheless, the poet’s depictions of his early life in Ramat Gan and Givatayim [now suburbs of Tel Aviv] are among the loveliest to be found anywhere; they arouse sublime sensations, as do the descriptions of foreign cities – Venice, Istanbul and London – and of sexual love, and encounters with literature and art, from Dante to Damien Hirst. “Picasso’s horse will never set his foot upon the ground,” Bar Kohav writes about the famous painting, and:
 
What is the horse?
A clue that might have gone out into the world.
What is the boy?
Something looking over the dream’s shoulder.
 
It seems that Bar Kohav seeks his freedom in the brief moment when the horse’s hoof hovers in the air, in the tiny space between the dream and the knowledge that it will surely explode, in the crack between the desire to exceed the boundaries of this world and the unfeasibility of doing so. Perhaps this is why it is so important to Bar Kohav to distinguish between the artist’s self and the self of actual experience.
 
The book is undeniably biographical, but the poet’s biography does not overtake his poetry. He doesn’t believe in the beyond yet he does have metaphysical aspirations. To a certain extent, the wonder in his poems stems from this balancing act.
 
How does he do it? It’s a matter of tone, that is, of poetry. Bar Kohav pits his astonishingly controlled, rich and clear language – free of excess, and as refined as possible without sliding into transparent lyricism – against the chaos raging at home and outside. Tenderness laps over sentences hewn in rock. It is endowed with a spartan beat that, among other things, makes its sound tangible; it is free of excess. In other words, it is precisely Bar Kohav’s sensitivity to what stimulates his poetry – again, psychology, biography, wonder at the human condition – that seems to obligate him to emphasize its uniqueness over other forms of expression – what can’t be translated into another language.
 
These joined sensitivities and obligations make Bar Kohav an extremely lucid and profound poet and grant his work a fascinatingly melancholy quality; intimacy slowly accumulates into a human encounter both simple and rare. Selected Poems sets Bar Kohav’s place in the front rank of contemporary Hebrew poets, not just as the poet’s poet he is often considered to be, but for a broader readership too. Israel Bar Kohav is apparently the best poet you’ve never read.
Although the image accompanying this article depicts Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the poem references Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (1906).