How to corner a poem (and watch it thrive): A timely confession
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How to corner a poem (and watch it thrive): A timely confession
Ariel Zinder Department of Literature, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Abstract The medieval tradition of Hebrew liturgical poetry (called Piyyut, after the Greek Poesis) treated ritual time with reverence, allotting poems their specific slots in liturgical events. Later in history, those same poems crossed boundaries of time and custom. Instead of remaining fastened to their original timing, some of the poems changed their temporal setting several times, acquiring a new liturgical and temporal context. In this essay, I confess my love to both gestures: to the attachment of a poem to its time, and to its recurrent uprooting and recontextualization. To love poems this way means one must adhere to the most traditional philological procedure of reconstructing an original context for a poem, just so one could bear witness to the loss of these origins, and to the unique, perhaps utopian possibility that such loss reveals. One corners these poems, simply to watch them thrive elsewhere. Through personal scenes from my upbringing and through brief readings in the words of ancient sages, medieval poets, and continental philosophers, I wish to think through this passion for the time and counter-time of poetry. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 291–300. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00185-6
Anyone who reads a verse at its time brings good to the world. – Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 101a
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 291–300
Zinder
1. I am writing this piece from a quiet museum hall. I am sitting on a comfortable bench right outside a new exhibition. It is called ‘The Veiled Women of Jerusalem,’ and the centerpiece is a video installation depicting a Jerusalemite nun, an ultra-orthodox married Jewish woman, and a married Muslim woman, as they dress in multiple layers of dark clothing, covering them from head to toe. It is a slow process. While the installation is running, people come and go, many of them hurrying on to the next exhibition. I feel strangely and sorrowfully at home in this corner of the museum. Perhaps this is what I seek: the lush time of a real life practice brushing against the blank time of video art and museum installations, an awareness of something taking root and uprooting at the same time, a strange thriving.
2.
1 The notion of the autonomy of art and literature has not disappeared, despite repeated announcements of its obsoleteness. It still haunts the discourse and imaginary of many art institutions and scholarly discussions. For a recent description of its insistence and persistence, see Doorman (2005).
I do not enjoy art museums as much as I used to, especially the halls of hanging paintings and photographs. Their coolness unnerves me. The art seems to float on the walls autonomously, timelessly.1 I flee from such blank, bodiless walls to installations and to whatever else allow
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