Metula's Israeli Poets’ Festival returns to Jerusalem with all disciplinary guns blazing

"You’re a poet, and you don’t know it” was a schoolyard chant back in the day if some kid or other inadvertently said something that rhymed.

Of course, most of us are now aware that the line endings don’t have to follow suffix suit – à la blank verse – in order for a literary work, generally divided into stanzas, to be recognized as a bona fide poem.

Besides its sonic-flexibility freedom, poetry is an eclectic domain with vastly diverse styles and subgenres that have evolved almost since time immemorial.

For the last three years, the titular location has, sadly, been out of commission, as our northernmost community remains something of a ghost town after being decimated by Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon.

Artistic directors Benny Ziffer and Shiri Lev-Ari have cooked up a multipronged agenda which features major players in the development of poetry in this part of the world, such as the late Amir Gilboa and Dan Pagis, author-painter Yoram Kaniuk, and author, playwright, screenwriter, and translator Nava Semel.

The festival’s thematic banner is taken from Gilboa’s celebrated line: “Suddenly a man gets up in the morning and feels he is a people, and begins to walk.”

The excerpt serves as a thread connecting the festival’s events, which will explore memory, society, language, and hope. The program ranges from tributes to key figures in Hebrew culture, to tête-à-têtes between veterans of the scenes and fresh blood, to discussions of burning contemporary issues such as war, identity, and artificial intelligence.

That’s a pretty generous spread, and one that most may not readily associate with poetry. Ziffer and Lev-Ari duly shed some light on their programmatic philosophy: “This year, once again, the festival seeks to demonstrate that poetry is far more than literature,” they say.

“It is a place of encounter, listening, and hope – until the day the festival returns to its natural home in Metula.” From their lips to divine realms.

They have also culled a diverse and quality cast for the festival, including, in addition to the aforementioned, celebrated award-winning stalwarts such as Haim Be’er, Aharon Shabtai, Sami Shalom Chetrit, 87-year-old Hebrew literature professor Ruth Kartun-Blum, and Eyal Megged.

The younger crowd of writers who deservedly share the festival spotlight includes the likes of Yali Shenar, Adam Ratzon, and Gilad Kahana.

Kahana is, says Lev-Ari, a striking case in point. “He is best known as a member of the [long-running rock group] Girafot, but is a super-textual person.”

That much is clear from his writing offerings, which, to date, include several film scripts and books. “He has just put out a book which comprises three novellas under the provocative title It’s Good That My Dad Got Cancer.” That’s quite a teaser and, presumably, an efficacious marketing hook.

There is, however, a perfectly acceptable and emotive reason behind the choice of name. “Gilad says the cancer enabled him and his father to get closer and really talk.” That must have been a boon. It’s just a shame it took a terminal illness for that to happen.

Lev-Ari is a fan of Kahana’s mode of storytelling. “He communicates his texts. You see that in this book. He performs what is going through his mind in real time. It’s the same with poetry, and the songs he writes, and this book. You could call it improvisation.

“But I think it’s more than that. I call it [spiritual] channeling, because he achieves very interesting and deep insight at a given moment when you talk to him, or when he writes a song, or when he wrote this book. He is brave. He is unfettered. He does what he wants.”

Surely that is a basic tenet of any artist. Not according to Lev-Ari, who recently published a Hebrew-language book of conversations she held with poets from here and abroad, called Otzar Millim (Treasure of Words). “Not every artist does what they want. Not every poet does what they feel is right. Not everyone is brave.”

If that is the case, that doesn’t reflect well on some of our men and women of letters. But it also serves to underscore Kahana’s worth and, presumably, the value of his spot in the festival.

Lev-Ari certainly expects him to deliver the goods at his session at Mishkenot Sha’ananim on the last day – one of several she will moderate herself. “I feel poetry is much broader and flexible [than most people think].”

She strays into other creative climes in which, incidentally, Kahana is also a leading light. “Often you get rappers and hip-hoppers, and Gilad, who does something in between, sort of soft pop, who write wonderful poetry. Also, the writers we know as lyricists, like [81-year-old award-winning writer] Rachel Shapira, who is a songwriter, but she is also a poet. Gilad Kahana is also a poet.”

Her confluence with Kahana – like many dotted across the three-day program – will also feature musical entertainment. Internationally renowned guitarist-bassist Yossi Fine will do the honors at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim slot.

There will also be fitting salutes to some of the founding fathers of contemporary Israeli poetry. “Dan Pagis and Amir Gilboa both left their families behind when they escaped the Holocaust and came here,” Lev-Ari notes. “I think Pagis was also in Auschwitz. They have a lot of light and a lot of darkness, together, [in their poetry].”

That features front and center in the official festival curtain-raiser, which takes place at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Auditorium on August 25 at 8:30 p.m.

Gilboa was, in marketing terms, less “sexy” than contemporary Yehuda Amichai and, hence, had a lower public profile.

However, he unwittingly attained a degree of celebrity when pop-rock icon Shlomo Artzi performed his Shir Baboker Baboker (Song in the Morning, in the Morning), taken from Gilboa’s third book, at the 1973 Song Festival. The number took second place at the festival, and thousands of radio listeners subsequently became acquainted with at least some of Pagis’s oeuvre.

The festival linchpin quote comes from Pagis’s aforementioned work. Lev-Ari feels that heartfelt post-Holocaust vision is just as pertinent today, in post-Oct. 7 Israel. “Citing that today has a lot of meaning. Gilboa has this inner language, with both light and shadow.”

That conjured up thoughts of wartime artistic efforts, and how the starkness of hostilities can spark creativity as it latches onto visceral energies. “The muses are not silent as the guns roar,” Lev-Ari posits.

Indeed, immersive reflection and raw emotion are staples of the average poet’s fueling system. And the reader, Lev-Ari suggests, gets that. “There were encounters in the past two years, when the festival was hosted in Jerusalem, when everyone sat, including those on the stage, and simply cried.

“They recited poetry and talked with tears in their eyes. It was like group therapy.”

Besides appreciating the basic beauty of the creations, the audiences will hear, read, and discuss at the festival, some of that restorative and alleviating power would do all of us very nicely, thank you.

The Gilboa session takes in a glittering cast of writers, poets, and scholars who have engaged deeply with Gilboa’s world and will discuss his life and oeuvre, including Prof. Ariel Hirschfeld, Biton, literary scholar Bilha Ben-Eliyahu, poets Mishol and Roni Someck, and Rabbi-poet Elhanan Nir.

The musical addendum to the festival opener will be provided by an A-lister lineup of composer-writer-singer Israel Bright, voice artist Victoria Hanna, santour player Adi Forti, Yossi Fine, and singer-songwriter-poet Hadara Levin Areddy.

Poetry, by definition, utilizes language and juxtapositions in its own special way, generally divorced from the prose flow. As such it also reflects the zeitgeist as well as current word usage.

That may be truer of Hebrew than most languages, given the relative youth of the modern form of the ancient biblical language, and the nature of Israel as a cultural melting pot, with each wave of olim bringing its cultural and sociopolitical baggage to the unfolding national fray.

The latter also infers errors made in day-to-day speech by newcomers who have yet to master the local lingo, and the way some of those mistakes eventually found their way into the fabric of spoken and written Hebrew and even, over the years, were sanctioned by the Academy of the Hebrew Language as kosher.

How does all of that come into play compared with Gilboa’s time?

“I have confidence in our language,” Lev-Ari declares. “Even when I see people making errors around me, or youngsters who don’t know how to enunciate words, I continue to believe in the Hebrew language. I just think it is so deep and ancient, and it has wisdom. It is wiser than its speakers,” she adds somewhat enigmatically. “It is more ancient that the people that use it.”

Poets are, it seems, out there on the front line. “There is a constant flow of innovations. And you see that in poetry first, before prose. Poetry responds faster than anything else. It comes from the guts, and the poets’ ears are very much trained on that.”

As exemplified by Adam Ratzon, who intentionally and merrily incorporates linguistic blunders in his writing. One error in daily vernacular is the use of the masculine third-person singular instead of the first person.

Consider Ratzon’s “Habayit Ha’aher.” The title translates as “The Other House,” “The Other Home,” or even “The Other Stanza.” The first line reads: “Ma ani yagid lecha adam” (what can I tell you, man), whereby “yagid” should have been “agid.”

The following line compounds the left-field grammatical free flow with the use of “komo” instead of “kemo” (like). His work fuses incorrect wording with refined literary vocabulary in seamless fashion, much like late poet-troubadour Meir Ariel, who gained the sobriquet “the singing paratrooper” after taking part in the IDF conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Ariel was a wiz at sculpting phrases and words and coaxing them away from their original – official – form.

According to Lev-Ari, there is nothing new there. “If you look at the beginnings of Hebrew poetry, the [Hebrew] revival poetry by the likes of Bialik, Tchernichovsky, and their contemporaries, they raised major issues concerning the Jewish people and Israeliness, and they used biblical wording together with many layers of ancient Hebrew. That was a sacred language. You could really feel the holiness in them.”

I get a guided tour through our linguistic literary timeline. “Then you get the generation of Natan Alterman and Leah Goldberg and [Avraham] Shlonsky,” she notes, none of whom was born in Israel or pre-state Palestine.

“Although they were born in Europe, they were part of the Hebrew renaissance here. They ‘imported’ European poetry here, with the European metrics, rhyming, and symbolism. They brought those European elements into Hebrew poetry, and they did it in an exquisite manner.”

We trundle on further down the evolution of Israeli poetry. “Then you had the generation of the State [of Israel], although not all were born here. You had Natan Zach and Yehuda Amichai.”

Both were born in Germany but made aliyah as children.

“There was also Amir Gilboa and Dan Pagis. Natan Zach was considered the great rebel of Hebrew poetry. He shattered all the conventions and made poetry freer. His use of language in poetry was free and not chained to metrics or rhyming.”

It was a time of seismic shifts in Hebrew poetry circles. “They used very harsh language, with sexuality and willfulness. Amichai took colloquial words and brought it into lofty domains. He brought the street, the mundane, into the previously hallowed realms of Hebrew poetry. Lots of poets now do that, including Agi Mishol.”

In addition to spotlights on individual men and women of letters, the widely-reaching program encompasses political poetry, ideology, religious poetry, Arabic poetry, writing in the aftermath of Oct. 7, the place of poetry in contemporary Israeli society, and even AI and literary creation.

The festival will close with a tribute to poet Alexander Penn, marking the 120th anniversary of his birth in Russia, and there will be appearances by some celebrities from other cultural fields, including 86-year-old TV personality and author Yaron London and irrepressible 88-year-old grande dame of the Israeli showbiz scene, Rivka Michaeli.

Michaeli will front a tribute to playwright and Hebrew language hell-raiser, late Israel Prize recipient Nissim Aloni.

If your idea of poetry is a neatly rhyming ditty, attending the Israeli Poets’ Festival in Metula should thoroughly disabuse you of that constricted notion and open up broad new vistas for your literary epiphany enjoyment.