The Comic Sybil

18 januari 2006 Readers who were familiar with her earlier work, but who perhaps had notdevoted enough attention to it, were presented with a poet of extraordinarystature upon the publication of Plantation Notes (Jerusalem: Keter, 1986). Even current-day readers, pampered by her later collections, have not yet digested everything voiced in this splendid book. It contains much of the emotional fluency characteristic of her earlier poetry and the openness andcognitive flow that mark her style. Nonetheless, this liquidity and opennessare poured into substantial molds, whose influence is prominent in individualpoems, as well as in the book as a whole, which forms a complex but continuousstatement. The overall structure is indeed surprising; the poet’s previouspoem cycles simply did not prepare us for this. There is continuity thatnonetheless offers variety, a continuum that provides sharp turns, ambiguitythat does not exist at the expense of directness (sometimes rather pointed) and clarity of poetic expression. Plantation Notes is a breakthrough book by a young poet who has reached her full strength, the maximum capacity and power of her lyric voice.

Fax Pigeon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1991) seems to present thereader with a much narrower area of meaning and tone. This is the impressionit was meant to give; the poet declares her intention to contract, to limitherself. In this work, make no mistake, Agi Mishol builds a small, dense anddisagreeable world. Almost everything in Fax Pigeon is the opposite ofwhat is found in Plantation Notes. Whereas in the earlier collection we found ourselves in the toiling village, between the winter pruning and thehot summer harvest, between outbursts of youthful energy and exhaustion at theend of the season, in Pigeon we are located inside the farm house, none of whose inhabitants is occupied with simple farm labor anymore. And in thishouse in which the speaker lives, it is not at all simple to sweeten one’ssorrow with a waltz, even if the waltz is as tasty as a Viennese strudel.The dance awakens not only the speaker and her suffering but also the crystalplaced atop lace doilies and behind glass: they vibrate “out of the desire toknock about” and to crack. The dragons in the Gobelin tapestry become morethreatening in the darkness, and on the sideboard, “horny spirits ofdrunkenness” ferment in red wine. This collection was the first of Mishol’sbooks to receive serious critical consideration.

If Plantation Notes is Agi Mishol’s classical symphony, The InteriorPlain is a romantic one—complex, with less clearly defined divisions,moving back and forth between opposing moods: an opening piece of deep gloom,a long meditative adagio, sehr langsam; joking, energetic scherzos (thesupermarket poems, deconstructions of classic texts); and the closing section,which mixes light and shadow, and fear with happiness in a tempo that increasesas it moves toward a brilliant prestissimo. In contrast to all this, LookThere (Tel Aviv: Tag, 1999) is a kind of inner chamber music, restrained,free of dissonance as well as of the intense blows of harsh chords.

Agi Mishol belongs to a mode of Hebrew poetry that is not limited to any oneparticular period, and which does not constitute an uninterrupted historicalsequence. Its major representatives in the generation preceding Mishol areShaul Tchernikovsky, Chaim Lenski, and Nathan Alterman, poets among whom thereare few similarities except for the shared aspiration for humor. These sovery different poets believed that a humorous glance at the world, andparticularly at the self, is a necessary condition for personal mental health,as well as public health and the health of culture, and necessary, too, forthe correct balance between critical solidarity and critical distance, in orderto achieve equilibrium between the self and the world. It seems that AgiMishol shares this belief completely; it has guided her on a difficult pathfrom the primitive state of the soul, shut within itself, of her early poetry,to her mature work, linked to the reality principle, without losing any of itsfascination for the wondrous or the “other light.”

Agi Mishol’s poetry acts not only in the literary-poetic field of an Israeliculture struggling to consolidate itself; it also makes a broader attempt toshape a way of life and a world view. For her part Mishol contributes to thiseffort the splendid example of the possibility of moving from imbalance toequilibrium; from diving down in the depths of the self to knowledge of theworld and consideration for the Other; from an enthusiastic affinity for thepleasure principle to the ability to combine it with a more courageousconnection to reality, without losing grasp of joy. It is difficult toexaggerate the importance of this balanced cultural model in the midst of acultural reality which has no mental and intellectual equilibrium whatsoever.

Mishol has written approximately thirty new poems since the appearance ofLook There (1999) [including {id="3292" title="‘Woman Martyr’"}, which may be found on PIW].Her work marks a long course of wandering between successful and failedattempts to realize the pleasure principle, and successful and failed attempts to pass the test of reality. As well, we have found in her poetry long,intermittent periods of wishful thinking and daydreaming. Still, the force ofthe reality principle found expression in Mishol’s work no later thanPlantation Notes (and in fact, even earlier). Her hold on it has neverbeen as strong as it is now. As we have seen, the poet exhibits a strong,inherent tendency to break through the boundaries of the real toward a desiredspirituality. The opposing tendency in her new work, to face reality directly,no matter how painful it is, is, therefore, surprising and wondrous. In herlatest poems, Mishol arrives farthest ever in her journey from the poems of her youth, marked by wishful thoughts and daydreams and responding, not with an integrated organization of the soul around the reality principle, but ratherby splitting the personality into pieces, some more and some less protected from reality’s claims. In contrast to her earlier work, the new poems revealthe tremendous difficulty raised by adherence to the reality principle, and the complicated coping mechanism it requires of the poet.

We tend to think that contemporary Israeli poetry, which many view aspostmodern, is missing a dominant element, an influential and formative poeticcenter, even just to serve as provocation. If such an approach is true at thispoetic-historic moment, it still doesn’t mean that Israeli poetry lacks areasof surplus vitality in contrast with those of reduced energy. In contemporaryIsraeli poetry, intense, white flames appear against the dark, burningbackground, whose smoke is greater than the fire. Anyone with eyes in his orher head can see: Agi Mishol’s poetry is one of the brightest of these flames.