Poetry for Students

(Rick Simeone) #1

146 Poetry for Students


children describe their emotions in terms of the out-
side world (“I love you like the whole world”), so
he too has the need to describe his emotional re-
sponses in metaphoric terms, by using objective
correlatives in the outside world.
When I pointed to the despair displayed in his
so-called love poems, to a kind of disillusionment
with heterosexual love as such, he told me that he
usually wrote his poems as a summary of a partic-
ular phase in his life. When a person is in love, he
told me, he does not analyze or reflect on it. He is
too busy experiencing it. When the relationship is
over, it is time to think about it and write about it.
Indeed, many of Amichai’s love poems refer
to the physical remains of love, to an impending
separation, or to the results of an actual separation.
In “What’s it like to Feel a Woman,” Amichai
refers to the remains of seminal fluids in the body
of a woman, and to the woman’s remains on the
male body. These remains “augur the hell” and the
“mutual death” that awaits the lovers. Is the hell
the yearning for the full erotic moment, the mo-
ment of love that is gone? Amichai does not usu-
ally offer information about the circumstances
leading to the “mutual death” of the lovers, or to
the termination of love relationships, because love
in his poems seems ephemeral by definition. In
“Once a Great Love,” Amichai describes the ter-
mination of a love relationship as a violent cutting,
which leaves half his body writhing and “twisting
like a snake cut in two.” The second stanza de-
scribes the abandoned lover as a man lost in the
“Judean desert.” The man remembers the woman,
like one who notices the sign “Sea Level” in the
middle of the desert. There is no sea, no sign of
water or life, just like the woman’s face that is no
longer there. All that is left is a sign recalling an-
other geological level, or a memory corresponding
to another existential and experiential level. The
metaphor of a violent cutting recurs in yet another
love poem. But whereas this poem alludes to a vol-
untary separation, “A Pity, We Were Such a Good
Invention” alludes to separation as a violent impo-
sition by an outside social intrusion. “They ampu-
tated your thighs off my hips. As far as I am
concerned they are all surgeons. All of them.” The
couple’s divorce is depicted as a violent surgery.
“They” is a general reference to other people
who may have meddled in the couple’s affairs, or
who may have completed the legal transaction.
“They” refers to a collective pressure that caused
the couple to break up. Amichai indicts the sepa-
rators as “surgeons” and “engineers”—the practical
and lucrative professions that are here indicted for

their blindness to the more subtle expressions of
love. Amichai uses the unlikely metaphor of a plane
to capture the united couple, and the experience of
flight to express their erstwhile happiness: “A pity.
We were such a good and loving invention. / An
airplane made from a man and a wife. / Wings and
everything. / We hovered a little above the earth.”
The couple’s divorce is presented in this poem as
a violent cutting off of body parts from each other.
Love, whether marital or casual, is bound to
end in Amichai’s poetry, is bound to die. But its
transitory nature cannot obscure its force. The
metaphor for love here is an airplane; in another
memorable poem, love is compared to the human
struggle with a divine force. In “Jacob and the
Angel,” Amichai uses a Biblical allusion, Jacob’s
struggle with the mysterious messenger who
changes his name from Jacob to Israel to frame a
poem about casual love. The process of making
love is described as a kind of struggle for playful
supremacy. The lover does not know the girl’s
name, which he learns only when she is called
“from upstairs.” Jacob, in Genesis 32, is also named
twice—his name is changed by the angel who wres-
tles with him. The use of the Biblical allusion
serves a double purpose: on the one hand, it trans-
lates the heterosexual encounter into sacral terms.
For the lovers, their fleeting moment is indeed sa-
cred, despite its anonymity. On the other hand, the
Biblical allusion undercuts the heterosexual en-
counter by juxtaposing it with a truly momentous
encounter between the nation’s progenitor and a di-
vine emissary.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Amichai showed a
continued predilection for privacy, pensiveness and
sensuality, preferring a colloquial insularity to fig-
urative and allusive discourse. The female love ob-
ject in his poems nevertheless proclaims Amichai’s
belief in the validity of personal-subjective
expression.
In my interview with Amichai, the poet in-
sisted that he wrote poems because they gave him
joy. He insisted that he was no professional poet.
He objected to the tendency among other poets
to philosophize about the poetic process, and to
analyze or theorize upon it. He assured me that his
poems were spontaneous responses to his personal
experiences. Amichai objected to the modernist
tendency to use difficult and figurative language.
Nevertheless, as Chana Kronfeld demonstrates,
Amichai’s poetics of simplicity is often combined
with aesthetic sophistication and artistic complex-
ity. On the one hand, Amichai succeeded in “gen-
erating a truly popular poetic voice able to reach

Not like a Cypress
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