Ma'ayan (A Journal of Literature, Poetry, Art and Ideas), Vol. 2, edited by Yehoshua Simon and Ro'i Arad, published by the Ma?ayan Association, 145 pages, NIS 17
In the cover of the second issue of Ma'ayan (A Journal of Literature, Poetry, Art and Ideas), is a photograph of a swan sculpted from plastic spoons and a cigarette lighter. The editors, Ro'i "Chiki" Arad and Yehoshua Simon, came to the "Poetry in the Desert" festival at Sde Boker last month with copies hot off the press tucked under their arms. From the stage the two explained to the audience that the swan was done by Sadeh Halbrecht, who usually creates sculptures from disposable materials. "In reality it looks sort of slapdash, but when it is printed on the page suddenly it looks different," said Simon, hinting that this is also the case with respect to the texts inside.
Indeed, a similar degree of "slapdash-ness" can be found, for example, in "Passover" by Shira Kedar: "Passover in Ashdod / too many starches / but still optimistic / even though it no longer seems to me / that he will ever propose." Or in Michal Hillel's scribbles, in which there are "a man swallowing a mouse," "a man vomiting a newspaper?" and so on.
Advertisement
In his review of the first issue of the journal for Haaretz, poet Aharon Shabtai compared the approach of Ma'ayan ("It is not even obvious that this is poetry") to that of writers at the beginning of Modernism - Rimbaud and Mayakovsky - and their love for the one-dimensional and the silly. Also evident is the editors? connection to the minimalism of Japanese poetry, to the idea of "campiness" in American culture, to what Jean Dubonnet called art brut - naive art - and also to the politics of the radical left.
However, Arad and Simon do not wish to appear as postmodern intellectuals, who proclaim in the name of all the above sources a polemical jihad on the literary establishment. There are few manifestations of declared antagonism toward the tradition. In fact, Ma?ayan tries not to hold any dialogue with high culture, but rather to talk to shopping, television and random sex.
On the one hand, there is the totally serious investment in "the traffic ditch at Allenby 58," in the long documentary poem "The Steel Carcass" by Ro'i Arad, which continues the interesting motif of mythologizing urban events and sites. On the other, social and political issues are touched on only through a calculated screen of the vulgar and the infantile - as in Avishai Sivan's poem "Mushrooms," which begins like this: "I came back from going out the mushrooms and the poverty in the trances karaoke lies and sniffing at the Muqata / near the steps I found your Ashkenazi sister lying there bleeding from a rape / I took her to my bed / even though I wanted to - I didn't have her."
At Sde Boker, poet and translator Moshe Ben-Shaul complained to the editors that in the new issue of the journal, unlike in its predecessor, the poems are printed without vowel-pointing. The reply he received also appears in the introduction to the current issue: "Ma'ayan talks about life, the life that we know occurs without vowel pointing. None of the Ma?ayan poets vowel points his poems by himself and therefore adding the vowel points is an addition and not the natural weave of the poems ... Shattering the concrete wall between 'poetry' and 'life' is the basic
process in Ma'ayan," the introduction declares.
So very leftist Putting the words "poetry" and "life" in quotation marks testifies that this is not a matter of a dichotomy that is overly sharp, but rather a refusal to distinguish between the two, and doubtfulness as to the definitions of the words. Arad and Simon are not trying to replace the concrete wall with an open border. They are trying to shatter it. This basic process is doomed to failure. Doomed because there is nothing equivalent to reality, because it cannot be printed. Doomed because the reality, too, for its part, cannot compete with the arts in their fields.
There is a tension between the editors' credo and the works in the two issues. The works at their worst are but a pale and unimpressive imitation of reality in its meagerness. At their best (like Arad's long poem, for example?), they soar beyond the everyday and the banal that the editorial board seeks to honor, use lyrical means and succeed, after all, to resemble good modern poetry/literature/art.
Moreover, the ways in which the Ma?ayan people seek to get close to the reality tend to miss the target. First of all, the constant courtship of the naive and the primitive seems - in light of the journal's platform - a bit arrogant. There is nothing wrong with all of these characteristics in and of themselves - some of the works here draw considerable artistic value from their innocence or false innocence. However, a sense emerges that there is no "life" here - and in many cases, no "poetry" either.
Secondly, the so-very-leftist nature of the issue - from the excellent essay by Zvi Elhayani that attacks the architectural thought behind the Rabin Center, to the translations by Arad and Aharon Shabtai of Amiri Baraka?s poem "Someone Blew Up America" - reflects a discourse that is ostensibly the province of a tiny enclave within the reality known to us. The three stories that appear in the issue, among them an Arab narrative or a treatment of the Arab narrative, are not (as the introduction suggests) "a look into the mirror that presents the reality: We are Arabs." Voicing the Arab narrative is welcome in and of itself, but let us not get this reality wrong. At present, some of us are not Arabs. Sorry to disappoint.
Despite the internal tensions, Ma'ayan is heartily recommended. In it, a fresh, new aesthetic outlook is crystallizing. The history of art is paved with failed experiments that have left an important creative corpus behind them, and even though the ideology here sometimes harms the work more than it helps it, all in all, Ma'ayan is one of the best and freshest things that have happened to us in a long time in the field of literature and poetry.
Daniel Oz is a poet whose works have been published in the journals Hadarim and Akhshav.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
