Dialogue on dichotomies

January 18, 2006 Q: What’s important to know about the background to your poetry?

A:There was a period of about ten years when I didn’t write any poetry at all. I supported my family. My husband is a physician now, but during that time he was a student. I wrote [non-fiction] books for money, and out of my political and social involvement. In 1991 we traveled to New York City for a year and I took classes at the New School, because I wanted to learn the techniques of conducting writing workshops. The classes were in English, and I began to translate myself from English into Hebrew. My first book, Kitchen, was written out of this [conversation]. There are some poems written in cycles, in which the poems are closely interconnected. For example, there is a group of poems dedicated to {id="3164" title="Dahlia Ravikovitch"}. I had to write a paper about the entire oeuvre of any writer for a course at an Israeli university. I chose her, I read and reread everything she’d ever written, but I didn’t manage to write a paper; instead I wrote a long series of poems and handed them in.

Q: Has Ravikovitch influenced your work?

A: Yes. I never met her except briefly a few times, and I didn’t have a personal relationship with her, but her poetry influenced me strongly [although] it is very different from mine. It’s strange, but she influenced me profoundly. There’s something so exposed in her work [as though] she didn’t have a skin. I always think about her as someone completely exposed to the world, pained by everything; everything that happened any place to anyone affected her directly. She wasn’t a political person in my understanding [of the word] but rather, everything happened to her. Not because of an idea or an ideology.

Q: What is the importance of contemporary Hebrew poetry for your work? To which writers do you respond? And which writers leave you cold, or are repellent to you?

A: I read quite a bit in Hebrew, and in fact my knowledge of world poetry is a bit deficient. I meet hundreds of people and they don’t read or hardly at all. It’s strange for people like us. Many different poets have influenced me, especially those who wrote for children. I come from a kibbutz, where they read to us quite a bit. Later my family moved to Jerusalem, and I was confined to bed for five months as a child due to illness. It was wonderful, I was very happy. I already knew how to read and so I read a lot of books: children’s books and whatever poetry we had at home: Bergstein, {id="3163" title="Bialik"}, {id="3155" title="Rachel"} and Anda Amir. There are many terrific poets who write only or mainly for children. To this day I know by heart the poetry for children of {id="3174" title="Nathan Alterman"} and Shlonsky. They are part of my vocabulary and they enter into my own poetry.

Q: Which poetry do you dislike? Which poetry leaves you indifferent?

A: It’s hard for me to relate to Uri Tzvi Greenberg. I try all the time but I have a hard time with elevated tones. I really like {id="3163" title="Bialik"}, but his prophetic poems leave me cold. As soon as something is ‘important’, Zarathustra preaching on a mountaintop, I step back immediately. Poets who know everything interest me less and less. As I become more mature, what interests me is doubt, error, adventure, searching, wandering, failing, associations. There is a lot of good poetry which I know is skilful, for example, that of Shlonsky, and among contemporary poets that of {id="3159" title="Amir Or"}; I read them but I’m indifferent rather than enthusiastic. I have nothing in common with them. Poetry that I don’t experience as personal also leaves me out in the cold.

Q: Does foreign poetry translated into Hebrew have an influence on you?

A: More and more in recent years. I started out being influenced by Hebrew poetry but recently I’m going more in the direction of translated poets. Of English language poets, practically only Dickinson. I think she’s impossible to translate; she’s had the most influence on me. I really like T. S. Eliot, I like to listen to [recordings of] him reading, and I own a lot of them. But English and American poetry don’t interest me very much and I don’t read it much. In contrast, I really like Polish poetry, especially Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zagajewski. I read a lot of translations from Arabic, for example Mahmoud Darwish and Ayman Agbariya, who was once my student and is a wonderful poet. I’m less familiar with other Palestinian poets; I read a lot of eastern European writing as well as poetry from Japan, China and some from Thailand. I’ll tell you a story: one day in New York I went into the huge bookstore in Asia House. I asked for the best translations of haiku available. They said, “We have many books, but there is one which is clearly the best”. All the salespeople were in agreement and they handed me a book: the name of the translator was Joel Hoffman, our [Israeli] Joel Hoffman who translates into Hebrew and English – the most fantastic translations. There is something about Hebrew which is receptive to the translation of good literature. Hebrew is very special this way.

Q: Is your poetry more a monologue or a dialogue? With what or whom?

A: There are many dialogues in my first book. For example, a dialogue with a flowerpot, an erotic dialogue, erotic poems dedicated to women, in which one makes love with a piece of fruit. But most of the book is monologic. The later books are mostly dialogic, more than that, they are books which conduct a dialogue with a partner. One is a dialogue with Japanese poetry, zen and haiku and tanka, but also with a good friend of mine, the poet, photographer and graphic designer Tamir Lahav-Radlmesser. Another book, Triangles, is the result of a dialogue with the artist Tamara Rickman; we traveled together to Sinai, returned, sat in her studio for four months, she drawing wonderful pictures while I stared into space and then wrote poems in triangular shapes, rhyming, metered poems – that’s a dialogue. It is also a dialogue with the desert and with other subjects and of course a dialogue between ourselves.

Q: Is it possible to write poetry which is entirely a monologue?

A: A lot of times the poetry of people who have a message to deliver is a monologue, hermetic, hard, unchanging and silent. Perhaps it has an addressee in terms of principles, but not within the poem.

Q: Many people see in your poetry the importance of sexuality, of femininity and of figures of women. Do you believe in the existence of women’s poetry as a significantly different and separate kind of literary art?

A: My poetry is quite varied, that is, you won’t find only one signature in it. There are many poems, like the fruit poems, which are read as being very erotic and feminine, and justifiably so. The subjects of pregnancy and abortion also appear in my poetry from time to time. But there are also poems entirely unconnected to these matters, such as the triangle poems. I believe there is a women’s poetry, because there are women who write poetry and declare it to be women’s poetry, but in my eyes there isn’t so much difference between men and women, and to be honest, I don’t think this is such an interesting topic. Such definitions are uninteresting; they don’t contribute to the significance of poetry. To me there’s no point in this division; I don’t find much point in classifying. On the one hand, there are elements which receive more emphasis in the poetry of some women. Many women do not have the urge to appear as all-knowing, some women are willing to err, not to show off their intelligence all the time, but rather to take risks and be adventurous. That’s how it is in women’s professional life too. A man studies a profession, and that’s what he does. Women experiment more, change, come and go, change professions. It’s quite common, at least among the women I know. There are men poets in Israel, and I don’t know any women poets like this, who write the same thing for thirty, forty, fifty years. I won’t name names but we know who they are. It’s as if they haven’t changed, nothing has changed, nothing has happened in the world, there haven’t been two intifadas, no one has died of hunger in the streets anywhere. I think that this [obliviousness] doesn’t occur in women. I can’t think of any woman poet who isn’t always changing, who doesn’t wander around and get her hands dirty with all kinds of things.

Q: To what extent is your poetry the result of inspiration, and to what extent does it require practiced techniques which were studied or acquired in some way?

A: I don’t understand the term ‘inspiration’. I understand ‘work’. I’m not comfortable with the concept of technique. It’s not exactly technical. I believe people who say they are inspired just as I believe people who say there is a god and they can speak to him. I believe that they undergo this experience. But I can’t connect to this, it’s not my experience, and I’m far from this place. I’ve never been inspired and I don’t miss it. I have a profound experience of working very hard. I’ve been working on a book for three years and enjoying every minute. I write and rewrite. Reading for me is part of the work, obsessive reading. And going to the outdoor market that’s also part of my work, I go to the beach every day, meditation is part of my work, many things are, cooking spinach soup is work for me, that is, work and life aren’t separate. Inspiration [flying] on wings isn’t really part of my life.

Q: How has your work with the Helicon Society for the Advancement of Poetry influenced your development as a poet?

A: I was raised, and raised others, in many places, and I don’t see Helicon as a place [which set me going in] one poetic direction. Nonetheless, for me Helicon was a riveting episode, and I accomplished things there which I considered important and which I enjoyed. I was there for about 12 years, but at the same time I worked, wrote and taught at other places. It’s no accident that I didn’t publish any books at Helicon. It was important for me to maintain a separation. Working at Helicon influenced my poetry in that for 12 years I read dozens of other people’s poetry every week, I was in touch with contemporary poetry and that contact influenced me.

Q: Do you consider your poetry to be ‘confessional’?

A: Not really, although my work is not separate from my life. That is, I write, teach, raise children and edit. Everything is connected to everything else. Elements of my life appear in my poems but they don’t stand out, they’re not central. What is key is the connection between language and reality and a preoccupation with memory. So my poetry isn’t really confessional.

Q: What about the external reality of life in Israel in these politically complex and difficult times?

A: For years, I wasn’t involved in poetry but rather in all manner of politics and social concerns. Over time I lost my faith that we can have an effect [on politics]. Today this has entered my poetry. The first intifada did not, but I wrote [non-fiction] books which did deal with it. Recently, the situation has become a constant presence, [and I write] poems which may be called ‘political’, and political material enters my poetry in other places. At first I repressed this material because I’d dealt with it in other forms. I don’t believe I’m wrapped up in myself. Avoiding politics today means not being honest with yourself. These things are part of us; no matter what, this is where we live. For me, a foreign worker who doesn’t receive medical treatment is a completely political issue which is completely mine. A third of the children in Israel live beneath the poverty line, and that’s me, my responsibility, my actions, and I write about this.


Liat Kaplan was interviewed on August 18 during a visit to Jerusalem, just three days before the suicide of the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch; sadly, the present tense of the remarks on Ravikovitch has been edited to mark her death. Questions were supplied by PIW Israeli editor Rami Saari, via email; Israeli English language editor Lisa Katz provided a garden, several interjections and the translation from a transcript typed with precision by Merav Pitoun.