Eran Hadas

New! Hadas' interactive 'book'

An article about Hadas in Wired points out:
 
Lest this seem too easy, we may remember that computer-free poetry is not necessarily profound, both processes have their source in humans, and the conventional pen-to-paper process of poetry writing is not completely understood either. A Los Angeles Daily News columnist muses:


Hadas' poetic soul seems just as tortured as that of any Romantic poet, although perhaps for a different reason - its exposure to the world, as in TERMS OF USE:


When it comes to content, Hadas notes that,


Hadas’ first book, Heavy Meta, introduced avatar poetry with a fictitious female character named Tze’ela Katz writing about life within the world wide web. His second, Era? (?ערה, the Hebrew code word that signals sexting) was also “by” his avatar Tze’ela Katz, and is situated on an internet wiki-site, which means anyone can edit the poems. His third book, People You May Know, consists of computer-generated poems, some created without a human touch, while others introduce cooperation between a human writer and a computer. The fourth, Center, was a project written with other poets, regular readers of his blog and friends invited to participate in a joint day of mourning.

Center, reviewer Shira Stav writes in Haaretz, “rescinds, with pleasure, the unwritten contract obliging the poet to present a unique self, a defined, autonomous, creative personality”. About the decision to print a book in Hebrew without vowel markers - the diacritic signs that are the norm in published Hebrew language poetry and children's books - Stav writes that this omission amounts to “a willing relinquishment of the classical, almost sensual splendor of vowel-marked black letters in [the customary] Frank Ruehl font. The faint and flexible font used in the book…Alef… brings to mind other kinds of documents”, that is, texts read on the internet.  Hadas’ fifth book, Space Bar, the poet says, is all about cyberskepticism:

                                                
Hadas' sixth book, Code, is his experimental approach to the Bible in haiku. Here, for example, are several of his computerized versions of lines from Genesis 1:


And in his seventh book, Testimony, the poet treats Israeli ethnicities. These last two volumes are part of what Hadas plans as "an identity trilogy". About his own ethnic background, however, Hadas, who was born in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, will say only that his family had a "nomadic lifestyle". The poet holds a master's degree in computer science from Bar Ilan University and makes his living as a software developer. In 2017 Hadas served as the Schusterman visiting artist at Caltech. During his stay there, he worked on a new theoretical book, currently titled Computational Literature, which deals with the history of computer-generated literature, and how it interacts with literary tradition, forming a joint lineage with Romanticist, Modernist, Postmodern and Internet-age writing and software.


Biblography

Books in Hebrew
Heavy Meta (as Tze’ela Katz)   Mendele ebook 2009
Era? (as Tze’ela Katz)   Mendele ebook 2010
Anashim sheh-atah asui leh-ha-kir/People You May Know Tel Aviv, Plonit, 2011
Center online, 2012
Makash ha-reh-vakh/The Space Bar Tel Aviv, Maayan, 2014
Code Haifa, Pardes, 2015
Edut/Testimony Tel Aviv, Gnat, 2016


Links

in English
The poet’s blog
LA Daily News: On reason and rhyme
From Wired
On the poet’s 2017 CalTech course






Sponsored by POETRY PLACE