Successful Writer Blog

Szymborska’s poetry is filled with personas even when she writes about the museum or describing a picture or the house of a great man, she would simultaneously, logically and powerfully show us a very unique point of view. But she also touches the archetype or core of the situation, where everyone – no matter where they come from – would identify with her. When she does refer to herself or her own family, it is always with a great sense of humor and to make a point like in the poem ‘Epitaph’.

This condition changes in her later poems. For instance, ‘The Puddle’, which describes her childish fear of sinking in a puddle, she is deeply lyrical but still anyone can identify with her description of childhood fears or the sunrise in ‘Early Hour’. What I take from Szymborska is indeed the understanding that a poem about a place doesn’t always have to be private; it can be more universal. Hence, as a poet, I can learn to inhabit this place of memories but not consume it with my seriousness.

In her Nobel Prize Winning speech she said that the basic point of view that every artist should begin with is that of “not knowing” and by saying “I don’t know” gives you a great deal more freedom that having all the answers. Another thing she says is that poets don’t have a monopole on inspiration. The real question is what you do with it. These are the lessons I take from her today. 

I have been avoiding answering a letter from the editor of Mashiv Haroach (a Jewish poetry newspaper) for some time. They are about to publish a volume about my homeland, the Negev and I have never written about my homeland seriously. One might say that everything you write is harks back to your home, and now, as I try to write a novel about Ben-Gurion University of the Negev I can see how many emotional charges are there, in the back of my mind. Still I feel that prose, being less concentrated than poetry is a far better way to overcome these obstacles. Or perhaps it’s because that there are some ways of writing that hurt too much, and the writer is only flesh and blood.

I did not plan this but the truth is the books that I chose to deal with this week of Polish literature somehow deal with the questions and problems that I have mentioned.  Pochwala Snow, the wonderful poetry collection of Szymborska’s poetry edited by Rafi Weichert, has the unique ability to give you exactly the poems you need whenever you need them, not only that, the book has a very interesting point of view on the subject of what is a homeland. For the very first time, I’ve read her Nobel Prize speech and there is a lot to learn from it about being a poet, as I shall write in the post about her.

Another book is Witold Gombrowicz’s book Pornografia that tells the story of World War II Poland without being there. Gombrowicz is one of the most important novelists of 20^th century Polish literature and in his first books he also wrote about the idea of youth and its internal battle in the grownup’s mind with adulthood.

The last article this week focuses on a Jewish-Polish writer called Israel Rabon. In his book, The Street, he describes his birthplace from the point of view of a Jewish soldier trying desperately to settle in Lodz. I will also talk about the simple and surreal Shund literature, which served as a basis for this book.

Lao Tzu

‘Those who speak know nothing;

Those who know are silent.’

Those words, I am told,

Were spoken by Lao-tzu

If we are to believe that Lao-tzu

                Was himself one who knew,

How comes it that he wrote a book

Of five thousand words?

This poem was not written in the 20^th century but in the 9^th century, by Po Chu-I one of the clerks of the Chinese regime. Unlike our officials today who are loyal to the state, among his poems one can find an anti-war satire, when he talks about his work he writes lines like, “I begin to think that those who hold office/get no rest except by falling ill!” which are lines every hi-tech worker can Identify with.

What I find most astonishing is the fact that the old Chinese writers had lots of sense of humor. For instance, in a poem about a man who was so lazy he had wine in his hand but was too lazy to drink it, but at the same time could ask philosophical questions and let their poetry take part in all the aspects of their life. The poems Po wrote in his old age are heart-felt, and I can really identify with the opening words to this anthology that is simply called Chinese Poems  which was collected and translated by Arthur Waley:

“A taste for Chinese poetry is not too hard to acquire. It is as easy to enjoy as chop suey and has in fact something of the same quality being many favorite and subtle, yet full of honest nourishment.”

My tip for you is to ever expand your boundaries in reading which will expand the limits of your writing. The deeper your roots the higher you’ll reach. So don’t be afraid of the unknown.

I’m taking an Independence Day vacation.

Chinese and Japanese writing is pretty much based on the Zen philosophy. What is most interesting is the way that this philosophy highlights the limits of the use of the words. Unlike the common belief, Zen and Daoism don’t attack words, but rather check how we refer to them. I mentioned someplace else that words are limited because they cannot describe the future or the present, just the past, and that’s what Zen says. Zen says that words have no connection with our true self or reality and so the Zen teacher does not teach in a regular manner. Instead, he teaches in a dialogue of traps. The Zen teacher will never teach you something you won’t discover on your own. The teacher can give you a Koan which is a riddle or a beginning of a dialogue that one can ponder for years and years to develop his consciousness. An example for a koan is, “Does the ring of the bell come from the metal or from the air?” or “Use the shovel with empty hands!” which for me feels like a metaphor for a true base of writing.

The book that I would like to recommend for you today is Ten Bulls sometimes called Ten Ox Herding Pictures, not only because of the dialogue between the pictures and writing or as the Wikipedia says it:

“The pictures, poems and short pieces of prose tell how the student ventures into the wilderness in his search for “the Bull” (or “Ox”; a common metaphor for enlightenment, or the true self, or simply a regular human being), and how his efforts prove fruitless at first. Undeterred, he keeps searching and eventually finds footprints on a riverbank. When he sees the bull for the first time he is amazed by the splendor of its features (’empty and marvelous’ is a well known phrase used to describe the perception of Buddha nature). However, the student has not tamed the bull, and must work hard to bring it under control. Eventually he reaches the highest Enlightenment, returns to the world and ‘everyone I look upon becomes enlightened’.

Taming the Bull

Common titles of the pictures in English, and common themes of the prose, include:

1. In Search of the Bull (aimless searching, only the sound of cicadas)
2. Discovery of the Footprints (a path to follow)
3. Perceiving the Bull (but only its rear, not its head)
4. Catching the Bull (a great struggle, the bull repeatedly escapes, discipline is required)
5. Taming the Bull (less straying, less discipline, the bull becomes gentle and obedient)
6. Riding the Bull Home (great joy)
7. The Bull Transcended (once home, the bull is forgotten and the discipline’s whip is idle; stillness)
8. Both Bull and Self Transcended (all forgotten and empty)
9. Reaching the Source (unconcerned with or without; the sound of cicadas)
10. Return to Society (crowded marketplace; spreading enlightenment by mingling with humankind

So check out how a story can grow throughout the generations. Try to experience some of its ideas about being lost and being found and if it really matters anyway. In a way the story of The Bull is a story of being enlightened by the idea of a story. From the moment of inspiration until the moment the story reaches out and in turn enlightens other people, is another way of reading the story of the Ox, showing that inspiration is a recyclable resource. In the next article I will try to follow a Chinese poet’s career, and hopefully we’ll see that some phenomenon in poetry are’nt new or western.

I guess there’s no need to introduce this form of poetry, but I’ll tell you the laws quickly. An ideal Haiku should be composed of three lines (with 5, 7, 5 syllables) and it should include one word or so that describes the season in which the poem was written (not necessarily the name of the season). The poem must be written in a present tense and there are those that say the three lines must not be connected literally, although there are many Haiku poems that tell a story or ask a question, and that’s completely legitimate.

More than that, I wish to say that since we’re not writing in Japanese, the natural language of this art form, we are allowed to choose to ignore some of the laws, although I believe the beauty of poetry is when you follow all of the laws. And this is what I want to show you today – a guide to the gates of poetry.

Haiku is the perfect ‘gateway to poetry’ because it forces you to write a story in 17 syllables and to make the poem as solid as concrete.

For example, the lines:

“It is raining outside. My son has not returned from the pub. Someone is knocking on my door, a cop, oh my god.”

Could be translated to a poem like:

Rain, fingers tapping
Knock on the door, the future
I cannot open.

There is a poem by Bashu that shows how refined the Haiku poem can be. One of Bashu’s teachers asked him, ‘Where is your conscience now?’ And he answered in a Haiku poem:

“Old pond…
a frog leaps in
water’s sound”

This was a criticism against his teacher who bothered his meditation. One must know that a classical Haiku has the spirit of Zen all over it. There are many genres in this ancient Eastern form and some of them are present in Western poetry, for example, there is the Death Song that wasn’t necessarily written as the final poem and could have been written several times during the poet’s lifetime. Here is a touching Haiku by Senryu:

“Like dew drops
On a Lotus leaf
I vanish”

While a modern poem can deal with such mundane matters as an escalator in the mall. We’ll deal with modern poetry next time.

Weekend – fundamental truths in writing
I, as an author, believe that the basis for knowing the other is to know thyself. Therefore, I believe that there are but a few stories that exist, and that just as there are those who claim that all of Western philosophy is nothing more than footnotes to Socrates, and that human beings can be divided into Aristotleian people and Socratesian people, so there are those like Jorge Luis Borges. When I studied writing I was told that Borges thought that there were but two stories in the world, the story of Christ and the Odyssey. When I finally got to read his most interesting book of lectures – The Craft of Verse – I understood that what he was really saying is that there are three sources for stories in the world: the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Borges thinks, or at least that is how I understand it, that all of the stories that we need are in those three books, and original modern stories are a novelty we should put aside.     
I have no intention of quarreling with this point of view, but I do think that you do not have to be original all the time. I think that a nice writing exercise is to take for example the story of Cain and Able and to tell it again from your own point of view. Dan Pagis, who is a wonderful poet, brought this story to new heights and still, I will not discard any work just because Pagis has already written on the subject. The only real test for an artwork is whether it is good or not and whether it contains the spirit of its time.
This week I wish to deal with several plays that are so famous they have become classics. I would like to look at them from an arspoetic point of view. I do not know whether what I will say is a novelty, but I am certainly going to give them my perspective.

“As the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel… it is not, any more than a painting, expected to apologize.”

“Beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

                                                                                                                  – Henry James 1884

There are many essays and books with this title, and normally they are meant to teach you how to write or take yourself seriously. Ayn Rand, who authored a book called The Art of Fiction, talks about the need to know the language well, about using the words clearly, about theme, about plot, but what about the basic question – what is that makes poems and prose different from day to day life and stories?

Many Israeli books are freely based upon reality. Whenever editing other writers’ fiction, I try to dig deeper or to understand why this or that line was written in this sort of manner and not another. I usually come to the conclusion that it must have happened in real life. But literature isn’t real life, it condenses, it enlarges, normally I say that it takes three real people in order to create a fictional character. That is to say that the writer has to take the qualities of at least three different individuals to form one single character. It’s sort of like a 1:100′000 map, it’s only a representation of real life and if we would construct a city identical to the map, we would fail miserably. There is one literal historic epic that tries to do just that – À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust that is known to the English reader as In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past. He attempt to write down decades of his own life. This work of art ended only with the author’s death and one can say that this is also a failure to grasp and describe real life.

One can ask, ‘What is the importance of real life?’ and ‘Isn’t literature more important?’ Shakespeare wrote in the 18th Sonnet to his lover that “So long as man can breathe or I can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” and in a way this shows us how literature can be almost like a time machine. Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, a Hebrew essayist and thinker made a mockery out of Jewish researchers who tried to determine whether Moses was a real person or not. In one of his essays he claims that the importance of Moses as a literal character who affected so many people along the ages is far more important from the question if he is a truly historical figure, so this brings me to the question, ‘What is important in the art of fiction?’

I believe that in order to create something meaningful one must strike a nerve, a fundamental truth in his writings and that is something we are going to talk about next week.

The Dwarf (originally ‘Dvargen’ in Swedish) by Par Lagerkvist is one of the crown jewels of literary works that deal with evil. It was written during World War II and was published in 1944. The book tells about an evil dwarf who cares only for his prince, literary researchers guess this is The Prince Machiavelli based his famous book on. He despises what people like and love except from misery and war. The book tells about the preparation for a war as the dwarf is ordered to kill the prince’s enemies with poisoned wine but he also kills the prince’s wife’s lover. In the end the dwarf is locked in the dungeon, never to be released but he is certain that the prince would call on him some day because the prince needs his dwarf. Such an ending seems to harm the idea of the book, but there is a clue that the dwarf never existed but in the mind of the prince.

Par Lagerkvist was born in a simple religious house in Sweden in 1891. He published his first work in 1912. Throughout his life, he published poems, novels and plays that were very successful. His works are based on the tension between religion and heretics. He defines himself as “a religious heretic”. In 1924 he published Onda Sagor (The Tales of the Devil); most famous among them is the story ‘The Elevator who went Down to Hell’. During the 30s he became increasingly interested in the Fascism that swept through Europe. When The Dwarf was published he was compared to Jonathan Swift in his ability to describe the human evil.  Some Israeli readers have compared him with Agota Kristof who we shall discuss in an up-and-coming post.

In 1951 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is an anecdote about his winning: apparently he was supposed to win the award in 1949 and again in 1950 but he voted against himself as a member of the Swedish Academy giving the 1949 prize to Falkner and the 1950 to Bertrand Russell. When he finally won in 1951 he was asked if he had a message and he replied: “I have no message. All that I have to say is included in my work.” He died in 1974. But to this day, his creation is considered to be most original. We can learn much from his literary solutions, it has been said that in his writings he dealt with most of the problems that stand before a writer.

I was lying in bed the other day waiting for the end of the world.
I didn’t honestly believe it would come, but one of the news sites that I’m reading promised it would happen, and that it would happen that night, and I was wondering how it feels to be burned alive.
I was thinking about Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’
Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

He lived in a very interesting time and I believe that today with religious extremists on the one hand and tyranny on the other we are in the same situation as described in the poem, but perhaps there is an equilibrium that prevents the end of the world to come.
But still the end of the world could be a very private affair. Take Lord Alfred Tennyson for example:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
While someone is experiencing the end of the world someone else could be having the greatest time in the world. Tennyson’s private end of the world proved to be very productive for him. Tennyson used his private hell in his poetry all of his life, even when his condition was better and he became A Poet Laureate.
On the other hand the end of the world won’t necessarily kill you, like Eve Lipska says in her poem ‘Flood Didn’t Save Me’:
The end of the world didn’t save me
because it didn’t have time.
Nothing saved me.
I AM ALIVE.

So what is this end of the world as we know it?
What does the end of the world mean to you? How would you describe the end of the world?

Hello everybody,
I was so preoccupied with the closing of my favorite bookstore, which saved me numerous times while I was looking for sources for my writing classes that I was unable to finish the posts I promised you about evil.  Instead, we’ll have to deal with it this week.
One of my friends criticized my point of view about the literary condition in Israel. This friend, let’s call him J, says that he thinks the reason that literary criticism in Israel is in a shambolic state is because the critics in the past were well educated and they were not a part of the academy. Today, all of the well educated critics are doctors and professors, and they are subjected to politics and they do not keep the old calling of Barukh Kurzweil: “If I would pity the writers, who will pity the readers?”
The newspaper critics are not as educated and talented as those who come from the university and the literature suffers. Alex Zehavi, god rest his soul, who was a critic and editor, told me that when he wrote criticism for Keshet – one of the most important literary magazines in Israel from the 50s – 70s and later during the first decade of the 21st century, the editor concealed his identity and would not reveal it despite authors’ pressure. Would there be an act so generous today? I doubt it. Not just because the editors are not like they use to be, but today writers write for glory and this affects their writing. Today it’s not the writer nor the reader that are important, but the critic himself.
About my claim that if the literary genius would show up today the book market would not help him thrive. J says that a society should be ready for the successful writer to appear like Russia in the second half of the 19th century, and Israel is well ready to groom the next genius. From what I see in my writing class, Israel has many talents, most of them are wasted for all sort of reasons, some psychological, some economical, but no one can deny that today, despite the economical crisis, the price tag for taking part in Tel Aviv’s cultural life is not cheap, and does not assure you successes.
I told J that one of the reasons I’m so happy writing this blog is that it can be a meeting place for all sorts of literatures and we talked about the fact that this dialogue is much more present than people think. But that is something to talk about another time.
Yours,
Yoav