Poet Gilad Meiri is a leading figure in contemporary Israeli culture. He heads the Jerusalem-based poetry center Poetry Place, a non-profit literary project that promotes poetry appreciation, using social outreach to support literature and foster culture far beyond the city as well. Defining the center’s special mission, Meiri says, “Jewish culture appears to have a primeval and political fear of the poet, identifying him with the tradition of the prophets. This fear is unconsciously transferred to the oppression of poets; there is no recognition of the resources necessary for poetry to compete with popular cultural attractions, and there is no recognition of the influence of popular culture on poetry.”  In an interview given in Jerusalem, Meiri talks about his organization’s work to improve the prospects for poetry and free thought in his country.

 

AB — Could you tell our readers about the poetry center?

GM — We began in 2002 at a community center in Jerusalem. We held workshops and performances, one or two readings a month, usually including five poets and sometimes a lecture or other events lasting about an hour and a half. Our agenda was that we were sick and tired of poetry readings with 15 or 20 people where no one could hear or see because the space was overly crowded. We just wanted people to have a good time.

     We had to leave that community center. After that, though, we became an official non-profit organization.

So you’ve changed a lot in the last year.

Yes, and even in the last few months.

     Right now our activities include organizing a big summer poetry festival — Israeli, not international — involving 50 different poets, which for three years we held in the Jewish Market. That was very beautiful. Then about two years ago we moved to the Botanical Gardens. This summer will be the sixth festival. We’ve been producing a poetry review called “Ketovet,” which in Hebrew means “address.”  But the “Ketovet” group broke up in 2012, and in December we’ll publish the last review.

     Then we’ll start a new review with new editors, called Pop-Poetica. That’s a term I invented and have written about. We accept poetry that is first of all good poetry, but the idea is that like on TV, a popular medium, you can have a single evening show featuring a poet, a whore and the prime minister. In some sense you can combine the high and low. Usually, though, we’ll publish a more communicative kind of poetry.

     My PhD was on David Avidan, an Israeli poet who was the first Israeli New Ager.

How would you define New Age?

It was originally an American term. There was a magazine with that name. There are many ways to define New Age, but I’ll give just one word, from an Allen Ginsberg poem:  Bewish. Bewish is a Buddhist Jew. This combination of mystical traditions is New Age. Also in a single poem Ginsberg will talk at the same time about many culture traditions, and part of being New Age involves eclecticism toward cultural traditions. In American poetry, Walt Whitman was important. American research addressed him as a democratic spirit, but it’s not only that. In Whitman’s beautiful poem “Song of Myself,” you can see him dancing with all the mystical traditions together, so seeing him as part of the New Age is not so surprising. Allen Ginsberg was a prophet of the New Age and a hero, really the grand-grand-son of Walt Whitman on many levels — the Quaker, the Jew, the homosexual. One hundred and one years after “Song of Myself,” Allen Ginsberg published “Howl.”  These two great poets are deeply connected. There are other criteria, but this combination of metaphysical themes is the most important.

     I think New Age is the most interesting thing today in religion and also in poetry. The prophets of today are New Agers — people like Allen Ginsberg who search in new and unknown territories of faith. There’s a lot of research going on outside traditions, moving from teacher to teacher, tradition to tradition. It’s not something I’m for or against, but it’s going on. I am a New Ager. I’m not saying that I identify with every aspect of New Age, but I like the idea of God and spirituality that says you can pick your own way of faith. You can be a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim at the same time. These are all fully achieved ideas. You can read Lalleshwari (Lal-ded), the influential fourteenth-century Indian poet. She developed in an atmosphere in which Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims intersected with great force. It’s also not surprising that New Ageism is so strong in a country like Israel which has many immigrants with different religions, and also in the United States, another important intersection with a flow of many religions.

     With New Age as the new religion of popular culture or post-modernism, Pop-Poetica will deal with poems that are more communicative, that have humor, that are New Age, that obviously deal with popular culture. I’m talking about rock and roll, sports and movies and so on.

     Another theme for our magazine is a term with roots in a different context, nanopoetics. The idea is for writing to be short, like a combination of haiku and SMS. It’s a technological concept. You might think about the impressionists, who used a similar combination, Japanese paintings and the camera, to produce a cultural change. In nanopoetics, once again the Japanese caused change with technology. People are writing short poetry on a large scale.

Nanopoetics sounds like the opposite of Walt Whitman, a single person with an expansionist scale.

Whitman did write haiku. Not many, but in the beginning he wrote a few. The ideas of nanopoetics and Allen Ginsberg are sort of in contradiction. But it’s not a surprise that you have the same thing expressed in different ways. Let’s say, Allen Ginsberg’s feeling of freedom has to come with the long verse. You expect it. And on the other hand when you have cellphones and the Internet, it becomes like dialectics, the other side. Often with dialecticism the different sides are the same thing: like Communism and Fascism. I think post-modernism in poetry is basically an expression of the same thing: two opposites being very much alike.

     So Pop-Poetics talks about nanopoetics and New Age. Basically, that’s my idea.

Is Ginsberg primarily known in Israel through translations?

There are translations of Ginsberg into Hebrew, not many but very powerful, done by Nathan Zach, who is a very good Israeli poet. But also in English Ginsberg has become well-known in Israel, especially in the last 20 years. It took some time for the Beats to get through here, but in this day and age, Ginsberg is very popular in Israel.

     From what I know of Russian poetry from that same era, Russian poetry went through its own form of Beat poetics. I didn’t do research, but I could tell it was the same sound. I don’t think the Russian poets were New Agers like Ginsberg, but they had similar anti-establishment ideas, among the bards, for instance.

What other activities would you like to continue in Poetry Place’s next era?

Beyond the workshops and performances, which we’re continuing to host, I must say it’s also very important that we have a very big social program. It’s quite an amazing project. I don’t know of anything like it in the world. We work through community centers to locate instructors among the writers or poets in communities. Last year we held 23 workshops and 12 to 15 meetings in different kinds of places in Israel — in Arab, Bedouin and Jewish villages — for people with special needs, with people who are deaf or mentally ill, for instance. It’s a ten-year project, but last year was the biggest year.

Are your workshops in villages conducted in the languages of the given community?

Of course, they have to be. We’re talking about deaf teenagers, 16 or 17, often living in extremely humble circumstances.

In locating community writers, do you find someone in each village itself?

At least from the general area, if not from the same village.

     The idea is to build communities around Israel with a new kind of venue for poets living in the North and South, not just in the cities. It’s very important to have relationships between poets and writers in communities. Writers are usually lone wolves. Poets usually go in groups, but still, when you live in North and South, you don’t have anything. You don’t have a group. So you have to create a community, like we have in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The whole idea is very deep-rooted in the way we operate.

     So that’s basically the Poetry Place: a huge amount of work, with readings, workshops, the largest poetry website in Israel, and a magazine… We’re also in charge of Poetry International’s Israeli translations site. And we publish books. Come on, this is crazy.

Could you speak about the role of multiple languages and translations in your activities?

We’ve hosted readings by poets from around the world — writers like Adam Zagajewski from Poland, and Joan Margarit from Spain. Our literary reviews always feature translations from many languages. The Pop-Poetics magazine will have an especially strong Arabic presence, but we’re always open to any language, English or French or Albanian or Persian. We publish anything that’s good and quality, from France or Spain or Egypt, you name it. And also Russian poetry, translated into Hebrew. We have a lot of Russian poets who live in Israel — Jewish Russian Israelis — but we didn’t have a lot of Russian poetry published in our magazines.

And there’s a tradition of Arabic writers who also write in Hebrew?

Yes, sure.

Is such bilingual writing a matter of happenstance, or poetic evolution of some kind?

I know some poets, say, who were born and raised in Jaffa, who find it easier to write only in Hebrew or only in French. I don’t even know where the French comes into the picture, but it’s something I’ve encountered.

     Some Jewish poets find it much easier to write in Hebrew, and some poets write both in Hebrew and in Arabic. There’s this polyphonic  situation, not only for Arabs but also for Jews that immigrate. I know many Israeli poets from Morocco who want to write in three languages: either in English, or Spanish, French, Moroccan, Arabic, Hebrew. It’s a big carnival of languages here. Ultimately, since Hebrew is such a communicative language, it’s not a surprise for me that Israeli Arabs sometimes write in Hebrew, because they want to have the audience.

Does Poetry Place take an active role in bridging Israel’s different language communities?

For some years we had translation workshops, run by the Jerusalem-based translator Lisa Katz. We do try to give an answer to the linguistic question. There’s a big French-speaking community in Jerusalem, but this community isn’t interested in poetry. The English-speaking community, including people from England and America, has an interest in poetry. This isn’t a large community, but for certain readings a lot of people from it come. So I know there’s a community here that is open to poetry, to American poetry, especially Jewish-American poetry.

     In February we’ll take part in the “Kisufim” conference, which involves Jewish writers and poets from all over the world. The third one, to be held in 2013, will be the biggest so far. We don’t organize that one, but it’s an interesting congress. In December there is an international festival; we don’t organize that one either. Maybe in March we will bring a few poets from France, because in France March is poetry month.

     It’s very hard to organize anything with the United States, because of capitalism. They don’t put money into culture like in European countries. It has to come from private pockets. Sure, this works for popular culture, but poetry is high culture, poetry doesn’t sell, and that’s problematic.

     Israel has a social, left-wing background. In the last 20 or 30 years the situation has been different, but the tradition remains. In Israel many of the sports teams are called “Hapoel,” which means “The Worker.”

     We’re not a political organization, but usually poets in Israel are on the left side of the scale of values, and as poets and people who run this place, we do belong to the left, which is not such a surprise.

Is there interaction between Poetry Place and conservative organizations in Israel, such as centers for religious education?

We go any place that will welcome a poetry reading, and this is part of the Pop-Poetics idea, to be communicative, to be open, and to reach new zones.

You’ve served as the editor of a number of poetry anthologies:  there was a collection of prayer poetry, and one with a football theme…

In my football anthology I even included some poetry on American football, because I wanted to spread the word that some people out there still think the world is an ellipse and not round.

     I have two anthologies on the way. One is a social anthology, to be published in January, and hopefully one dealing with the sex industry, whores and porno, which is also kind of social.

     So the anthology is an idea, something that is social, very pop-poetics, which involves a large crowd. It’s a way of making worlds in post-modern poetry.

How did you yourself come to poetry?

It’s hard to say exactly why things happen in a person’s life. Like many Jews, I had a grandfather who was a rabbi. I’m not an Orthodox Jew. I believe in God, but I don’t follow that code. There were always texts in the house, and for some strange reason, writing poetry is just something that appeared to me, when I was fifteen. Also for three years at a time I lived both here and in the United States — the first time between ages two and five and the second between ages twelve and fifteen. The second time was in San Francisco. So I’m a big Giants fan. But I haven’t written any baseball poems. Not yet, anyway.

     The first time that somebody ever reacted to my writing was when I was ten years old, in the fourth grade, when I would write stories for class. Then I had a block; when I was asked to write, I couldn’t. Then we moved to the United States. I remember in composition class I told the teacher, “I’m going to be a writer,” and she pointed her finger at me and said, “No, no, no.”  I forgot that gesture, and it took me ten or twenty years to remember. When I did, I thought, “Wow, she knew!”

     Then we returned to Israel again when I was fifteen, and again, composition class, and also Hebrew literature class, where something happened. I read the work of Hebrew poets and thought, “I can do better than that.”  That’s when it really happened, at the age of fifteen when I read poetry by Dahlia Rabikovich, and I thought, “I can do better than that.”  Since then I’ve been trying to be better than that.

As you write, do you have a sense of participating in the evolution of language?

Yes, of language, of culture, of poetry, of religion… Like any crazy poet, you think you’re leading the revolution, and why not?  It’s a fun game. Thirty thousand years from now nobody will remember it, but it’s always important to remember that it’s good if what you’re doing now can echo for maybe a hundred years. Still, though, everything passes, nothing lasts forever. So it’s not that I have a super ego, but I can talk about myself as a leader knowing that everything passes. And that leaves room for a kind of self-humor.