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 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.

‘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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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?