Amir Or’s Poem and the sacrifice of being

January 18, 2006 The title of this book sounds a challenge. It is as if there can be no poem beyond the world of Poem; as if this is a text which takes itself to the limits of what a poem can be. Or as if this poem, in making itself, creates a world of experience so alive that it in the same movement dispenses with questions of literary identity. In that case Poem is an un-title; like an untitled painting it forces the viewer to read the thing itself. A self-transcending note, it reminds us that the work of a poem may be experiential rather than linguistic.

And yet language is still part of that experience:

And these words            their taste is full of the taste of

being, of a tone that accompanies the sight with wonder
and not with a thought-slamming din.  And this is the poem.

Language moves in and out of the experience which is human being; coloured by that experience and colouring it. We do not experience only through language – Poem says “I long for the one who sees me through touching” – nor does language come up to the edges of experience. Amir Or is no Aristotelian who believes that language, in chopping up the world into names, presents its true nature to the naturally corresponding human mind. He is a poet whose origins are in the radical uncertainties of the twentieth century, which trumped the death of God with the death of the Human. Or at least of humanism, of the comforting belief that human nature might be the repository of some ultimate dignifying dimension of meaning. Perhaps this public execution of the human is seen in the scale of contemporary public planning, trade, discourse, violence. This is an order of things which Poem resists. The turn it makes repeatedly is towards the locus of meaning, towards the intimate register of experience as it is had.

Why is this turn repeated? Isn’t it enough to present an idea, perhaps to illustrate it? But Poem is a sustained work of experience: it is a self-resisting work. Or, like Nietzsche and Heidegger – the great philosophers of the nature of language – knows that language finally speaks only itself: that in order to meet our experience in and through language we must constantly resist, not its grammar or capacities, but the closure of its logic. Once narrative is locked into language, it becomes a told thing, not something happening: once an experience is caught by language we have the words instead of the experience itself.

Or manages to resist Poem’s desire to complete itself by constantly shifting positions. We have the filmic clarity of a moment at the beach, a breakfast table in Tel Aviv. There are tableaux – an encounter with the mythic self in the fancy dress of Narcissus, a Lilliputian thought-world – and the realities of the world of the senses. Or unlocks the conventional register of the seen with taste, touch and, in this open-mouthed poem, the orality of the text. Sometimes the narrator explains, sometimes he leads the readers through their own experience, sometimes he brings that reader into his: we see a lover through his eyes, we experience his memory, desire, even his difficulty in waking up. The effect is of the collisions and colliding consciousnesses of life itself. A calling-together of the nature of things.

What is that nature? Or’s poetry does not name the stable boundaries of things – a clockwork world kept alive in the metaphysics of universalised ‘knowledge’ – but it is not a metaphysical desert either. As his narrative titles – or are they epigraphs? – show, Poem does not differentiate between being and meaningful experience. To find meaning is to be(come) alive:

                            Water me,

I am thirsty.  Water me and not with water.  Water me,
and not with clear logic.  Water me, and not with a name.

Water me and not with wine.  Water me and nothing else,
water me.  Beauty won’t do, love won’t do, God won’t do –

even this life won’t do, nor any life.  Water me,
I am thirsty.

The intimately-specific, unassuageable Everyman who offers this as an epitaph – who sheds possible metaphysics, identities, ways of thinking like a seed-pod or a carapace as he goes – is also a lover. Poem is also a love poem: to world, to experience, to the reader, to language and poetry. Sometimes the woman who figures as lover is addressed; sometimes that “you” reaches out of the poem to include the reader; sometimes “you” is also the narrator whose consciousness we have entered, “since this poem has no subject, just like you or me”. Fleeting and ambiguous as a love-affair, these shifts of position sometimes suggest ambivalence – Poem is no praise-poem – and sometimes the unimportance of boundaries. Earth, root, tree and leaf are in a relation not of difference but of continuity with each other: and with the experience of which they form part. It is not identity but presence which patterns being.

The other we live in relation to – whether human or environmental – has always formed an ‘ethical’ part of the meaning we try to find in experience. This poem of radical self-exploration is also a radical refusal of solipsism. Language is:

            wonderful, because then one can say, “Here is an oak”,
             “Here is my neighbour, Michelle”, and even more:

             “Hi, I missed you”, “Go to hell!”, “Where
            were you all this time?”

Poem transcends the political, yet is immediate and contemporary; it is local, personal, yet eschews the tradition of the exceptional individual; it demands that the mundane be understood in all its profundity; in resisting poetic traditions it shows us what poetry can be. It is difficult, paradoxical and beautiful. Constantly breaking itself down in order to create itself, Poem demonstrates that to keep making a world of meaning, to keep “adding another line” – that most private task – requires us to sacrifice ourselves into the fullest possible openness.


Reprinted with permission from the afterword to the English edition of Poem, Daedulus Press, Dublin 2004.