Writing a mythology of women’s relations

18 januari 2006 Q: How has your work with the Helicon Society for the Advancement of Poetry influenced your development as a poet?

A: It wasn’t exactly what I did in the Helicon framework as much as being exposed for the first time to a group of people whose unifying passion was a passion for writing. The most amazing thing about Helicon from my point of view was understanding that writers could take up space, in the most physical sense. When we arrived at {id="3098" title="Mishkenot Sha’ananim"} [the cultural center which sponsors PIW Israel, and which includes a guest house], we were given beautiful rooms. I remember the Armenian ceramics, sitting in the bathtub with these ornamental blue tiles and saying to myself: it can’t be that because you write you’re sitting in a bathtub surrounded by Armenian tiles. It wasn’t extravagance in the manner of “The Rich and the Famous” but rather an attempt to transform biography into a kind of aesthetic significance which had brought me to a place with a different arrangement of matter, of stones. For me, this will sound naïve, it was a shock that I could, through the power of writing, move from [my own private] work space to public space. It amazed me, and I was very grateful for this mobility. At Helicon, the serious, democratic and non-discriminatory interest in the material we wrote was also important for me.

Q: When was this?

A: In 1994, eleven years ago. I felt the interest in us was in no sense therapeutic, and there was no need to develop someone who could not develop, but rather that there did exist this thing called ‘Poetry’, and we were to be measured against its cold light, our abilities examined.

Q: Who started Helicon?

A: {id="3159" title="Amir Or"}, Irit Sela, {id="3171" title="Liat Kaplan"}, Vivian Eden and the late T. Carmi. There was much generosity, and interest in what everyone was doing, a lot of respect. It was the first time my work was exposed to the eyes of others, not necessarily the professionals but people like me, who simply wrote and took an interest in writing. I was exposed to a large variety of voices and different poetics, opposite which I understood clearly what I wanted to do. Don’t ask me what that is, because what I do is what I want to do, I can’t really say what it is from the outside, but I was able to sharpen my own poetics opposite the others.

Q: Can you define your poetics?

A: Not really. There are people who claim that one must have quite a broad knowledge of culture to understand it. I can’t define my poetics, not because I’m lazy, but because it changes. In my first book The Mountain Mother is Gone it was important to me to try and create a world which would contain my personal experience, for which I had no documentation and no model. I felt that I was inventing the wheel and that I would change the face of Hebrew. It’s obvious that this is not the case, but I felt I had a great mission, to give expression to a place within me that had been seized by silence – my relations with my mother and my lover – in the absence of a mythological-psychological-cultural space, one which I did not find in literature, an unwitnessed and wordless space. The crisis of [my] writing was a crisis caused by the fact that I couldn’t read anywhere what I wanted to say. I had no choice but to write it myself. That was my motivation, to give the world a mythology of women’s relations. To my amazement I had no trouble finding cultural stories that would support my relations with my father, with ‘the Father’, but I found no stories about ‘the Mother’ that resonated with the truth. What I read did not suffice, or was filled with lies, or was too manipulative, or contained only old truths. From this point of view, The Mountain Mother is Gone is an attempt to create a nearly visionary world . . . a space – of women or of womanliness.

Q: Have you discovered any poetry which speaks to you about this space?

A: The myth of Inanna descending to the underworld in Mesopotamian poetry. And the orphaned state of Jesus is also [a] strong [influence]. He has no father and no mother, Jesus is essentially completely abandoned. That is, from the moment he’s born it’s clear that it will end badly. And of course the Greeks were there, they had the poet Sappho. I have to say there’s also a lot of my childhood [in the book], many scenes from my childhood, which are perhaps connected to my sources, to inspiration, and the distance between private life and the material of writing. Having read The Mountain Mother is Gone, you still wouldn’t be able to write my biography. For example, many people thought that I was motherless, that she was dead, and that isn’t so. The orphaned feeling I transmitted was of a completely different type. Much of the material from my childhood is the stuff of visions. ‘Real’ visions, that I’ve actually seen, and things that happened to me, but within my poetics I am required to turn them into other visions, that is, I transform them into extremes from the point of view of mythological language.

Q: With respect to your translations from English to Hebrew, it seems that you’ve chosen the most difficult poets, yet ones with a common denominator: Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and Jorie Graham. Do these poets have an influence on you, to the same degree that Hebrew poetry does?

A: It’s easier for me to think about the poets I read in other languages than about Hebrew poets. My first step was to distance myself as much as I could from others in order to try to hear my own voice as strongly as possible. Obviously this is wishful thinking but I’m almost talking from the angle of poetic instinct. Over time I’ve become more interested in what people do in Hebrew.

The two poets I most admire are {id="3160" title="Avoth Yeshurun"} and {id="3158" title="Aharon Shabtai"}. Yeshurun is inimitable linguistically. What is possible to learn from him is his honesty, the correct proportion somewhere between shamefulness and shamelessness. Impossible to imitate, Yeshurun nonetheless taught me that within Hebrew one may arrive at a precise position, which doesn’t sound like anything else, whose signature is distinctive from the outset. Avoth Yeshurun taught me that there is a great difference between one single poem and the world invented by the poet. That is, there are poets with a few wonderful poems but their world repels me or doesn’t interest me. With Yeshurun, if you read just a poem or two you say, “What the fuck? What’s going on here?” but when you read his corpus, it’s breathtaking.

I really love the poetry of Aharon Shabtai; in my eyes he’s the biggest poet we have today. When I was younger, it was important for me to see the way he made continuing and interesting use of the ethos and mythology of a foreign culture, the Greek, and of the option of speaking Hebrew while working against the backdrop of a foreign culture.It was a time when the Bible did not interest me, but the Greeks did. I found the way that Shabtai investigated Hebrew through foreign cultures really gripping, and it was also gripping to see the transformations the poet underwent over the years. I learned that one shouldn’t be afraid of changes. I learned from Shabtai that the poetry of the body is always intimately connected to the polis, even if it isn’t articulated that way in the beginning, and that’s what’s been emerging in his poetry over the last few years. Shabtai has also made his way from the body to the polis, from entirely domestic to broadly public poetry, what is called ‘political poetry’. But whoever reads his political poetry correctly will see that all of it is also love poetry dedicated to a woman, to Tania [Reinhardt, Shabtai’s partner].

All this division between inside and outside, between public and private space, I’ve learned from Aharon Shabtai that these spaces are intimately connected, and it’s only a type of frozen, external literary criticism which separates them.

Q: How do you see the connection between writing poetry and the political situation?

A: It’s true that there are poets for whom current events constitute a large presence; and there are poets, for example {id="3176" title="Nurit Zarchi"}, whom I love and admire, in whose work you won’t find a single political reference. An open discussion of the polis is a talent like any other. The demand that all poets respond to current events is a bit fascist in my eyes, and leads to the creation of mediocre poems with an obvious expiration date. The moment you read the poem you know that it will become irrelevant tomorrow, because it lacks genuine linguistic and spiritual transformation. It’s like paying lip service to what political poetry is supposed to be. Different poets have the ability to soul search in different areas. For one it’s easier in the domestic area, for another it’s her inner being, and for another it’s the polis, or the connection between eros and polis. But the minute that a poet does do some soul searching, it will always be relevant. What’s most relevant, and most important, is how language guards its power, its potential. In this way poets are entrusted with the mission to guard language from erosion. Real poets do this. It’s true there’s a genre of political poetry, and sometimes it’s highly important to slap the reader in the face, but it’s rare for poetry like this to survive.

Q: Are the borders between the sexes clear in contemporary Hebrew poetry, and where does your poetry stand in this regard?

A: In this connection, it’s impossible to ignore {id="3182" title="Yona Wallach"}; she excited us all with the simple fact that the soul is not monolithic. More than this, the gender of the soul is not so clear. Wallach understood, perhaps more deeply than any other artist, male or female, that the ‘I’ who writes is transparent to itself – neither man nor woman – and can write about feminine and masculine experiences. Wallach taught me something about the fluidity of syntax. She taught me that a poem can hold its own even if it is not clear, that it’s permissible to generate cloudy and mysterious spaces. If a poem is good, one returns to understand what it says; this is not interpretation, but taking part in the world the poem creates. There’s no need to be afraid of taking the language of ‘I’ to extremes. It’s okay to take chances. The matter of women and femininity is terribly complex; I don’t really understand my own sexuality. It’s an ongoing business. I live with a woman but I love men; I live with a woman and write love poems to her, and I write love poems to men. It’s very mixed up and confused, and not simple, and won’t be solved with one answer. It’s true that femininity contains ongoing protest, which means that you’re constantly coming up against what isn’t you, or is you, but it’s rare that what they say about you really is true. And if it is, does this provide a feeling of redemption or of entrapment, if what they say about you is true. And it changes. Feminism isn’t one thing. My poetry doesn’t lean upon any external ideology, and so no word with ‘ism’ at the end seems fruitful to me.


Just before she left in August for a three-month stay at the International Writers Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa, Sharron Hass was interviewed in her Tel Aviv apartment. Questions were supplied virtually by PIW Israeli editor Rami Saari, via email; Israeli English language editor Lisa Katz provided recorder and microphone, willing ears, and the translation.