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Speakers): Vered Karti Shemtov

One of the oldest metaphors for describing a poem is comparing it to a house, a building, or a place of dwelling. Hazal, the Jewish sages of late antiquity, argued that the poetic lines of the Bible can be compared to “bricks” or “blocks” that form a building: “… songs and poetry in the Bible is like brickwork, with alternating long and short lines set up like a building.”  (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 16a-b) The measuring of lines as long or short is the feature that allows the poem to become a structure; this process turns the poem into parallel units that can be accumulated, measured, compared.

The notion of the poem as a place for dwelling appeared in numerous essays and poems in Western culture in the 20th century and underwent many variations; some of the best known are Emily Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility” and Martin Heidegger’s reading of Holderlin’s poem “Poetically, Man Dwells.” These works go beyond the mere metaphor of poem as home and focus on the idea of the home as text, looking at the kind of dwelling that can be created in measured language.

In Hebrew literature this notion became especially central with the Zionist focus on Home and homelessness.  Three factors shaped and contributed to the writings on the text as home; the double meaning of ‘Bayit’ in Hebrew as both home and stanza, the idea that without a physical land the people can dwell in texts, and the idea that a homeland that is familiar to people mostly through texts can becomes a physical space. Hebrew literature perspectives of home and homelessness were also shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust.

Using concepts derived from Heidegger and other thinkers I look at contemporary Hebrew poetry, and especially at the work of the poet Dan Pagis, and argue that Hebrew poetry requires us to include the idea of ‘visitors’ (to quote Emily Dickinson) and of ‘hospitality’ (to use terms coined by Levinas and Derrida in their critique of Heidegger). In different variations and contexts, Hebrew poetry calls for a theoretical thinking that accounts for the  politics of exclusions, inclusions and of Otherness when discussing the possibility and impossibility of dwelling in texts. 

Vered Karti Shemtov teaches in the the department of Comparative Literature and in the Middle Eastern Program at ������ý. She is the Coordinator of the Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture project.  She served as associate Director and as the Co-Director of the ������ý Center for Jewish Studies from 2006 - 2011.  Shemtov’s book  Changing Rhythms: Towards a Theory of Prosody in Cultural Context came out in Israel in 2012. Some of Shemtov's other publications include: “Hebrew Poetry: 1781-2010”  Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Revised edition, a chapter on “Discontinuous Spaces in A. B Yehoshua’s Novel The Liberated Bride,” Intersecting Sights, Heksherim and BGU Press, “The Bible in Contemporary Israeli Literature: Text and Place in Zeruya Shalev's Husband and Wife and Michal Govrin's Snapshots" Hebrew Studies, a co-edited volume (with Amir Eshel and Hannn Hever) on History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature and 1948, and a co-edited volume (with Charlotte Fonrobert) on Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space.