On the Necessity of Poetry Festivals & Poetry for Humans

January 18, 2006 On the Necessity of Poetry Festivals:
Elite Karp makes several arguments about the lack of necessity for poetry these days. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t attend the festival in Metulla and so I don’t know which poetry inspired her writing. Nonetheless, as a person who reads poetry, not “upon my bed at night,” [Song of Songs 3.1] but with the special attentiveness it requires, I would like to correct some mistaken assumptions in her arguments.

1. Lyric poetry has never aimed at the majority but rather at the individual alone inside four walls. The negative rating voiced by Karp doesn’t really make sense in relation to poetry. False seekers of culture have always existed, along with forgettable poetry: imitative, mediocre or boring. Genuine readers (that is, those who make an effort to understand) have always been few in number, due to the effort involved, and without connection to whether or not the poetry is rhymed. Contrary to what Karp says, rhyme and meter and such do not make poetry easier to understand; when they are a substantial element—the same as in the case of an accompanying tune or poetry that is sung—they add another semantic level which requires interpretation. By the way, this level doesn’t have to be analytical or rational or even conscious.
2. Paradoxically, in our world, controlled by mass culture and its “instant messages,” good poetry is clearly the refuge of the individual. It’s simply that we see and hear better alone, and the effort to understand is easier andmore satisfying.
3. Poetry doesn’t owe anything to anyone, except for requiring genuine inner attentiveness to the voice of the speaker, whose expression should be polished and exact. The burden of the effort to understand –whatever its significance may be – falls on every reader who seeks to approach poetry. In the case of good poetry the effort is worthwhile; then the reader is lucky to hear poetry’s pure and lucid voice, in the midst of the deafening beats of media drums and the loud uproar around them.

Nevertheless—

4. Public poetry presentations (that is to say, festivals) are necessary for several reasons. Among them is the opportunity to hear the poet in action: sometimes this dimension enables us to see the text in a new light. (It goes without saying that not every poet is interesting in this role.) It also provides an opportunity for poets to step out of their isolation and make contact with readers. And, too, there is exposure to unfamiliar texts.
5. It is hard to believe that audiences attend the Metulla festival because it is free of charge. For my part, I would not attend a boring performance even if you paid me.
As to the other questions raised by Karp, like the one about differences in rhyme in Hebrew and in English, and the blurred borders between a popular song and a poem put to music—they are no doubt worth a more cautious and exact discussion than she offers.

– Rina Litvin


Poetry for Humans:
It’s hard not to agree with many of Elite Karp’s ideas about poetry in modern culture. In every language the differences between a poem (put to music or not) and a song are at the root of the poetry-reading experience. Poetry arouses the reader’s imagination, thoughts and feelings, while a popular song is light and airy, giving what one takes for granted anyway, a predigested, overly familiar statement, offering a moment of solidarity.

Not only the depth of the message but also its transmission to the reader is of value. The modernist laboratory of the Sixties and the Seventies ignored the communicative aspect of poetry and in a sense betrayed its audience. The idea that the only goal of poetry is self-satisfaction suits those who keep personal diaries or practice automatic writing. It’s hard not to accept Karp’s call to bring poetry down from its private Olympus to “our” place, where we may conduct a cultural dialogue worthy of the name.

However, these understandings do not sit well with the writer’s conclusion, which calls, paradoxically, for the house arrest of poetry, far from the reach of many. What should be done with horses in the twenty-first century? Give them wings. Our material world has changed over time, but it’s doubtful that the human soul has changed in the same way. Perhaps poetry requires a more unbuttoned and spirited framework; perhaps survivors of literature classes, victims of the oppression of thought in our schools, no longer see the fun in it. But the way to share the richness of poetry with the culture at large is not to hide it.

It’s a pity that Elite Karp wasn’t present last Friday at the Arab-Jewish Theater in Jaffa for Helicon’s “Festival of Joy.” She would have seen and felt the same “fun for the spirit” spreading throughout the audience which overflowed the hall. The Metulla festival also drew mainly young writers this year. I can’t say exactly what happened at Metulla, but the same writers, most of them graduates of Helicon’s poetry workshops, appeared earlier in Jaffa, where poetry’s live public did not require any additional explanations.

– Amir Or