5 - Israel Is Not Only Land: Diasporic Poetry

Summary

IN SACHS's POSTWAR POETRY, the poetic text is not a refuge, but rather a space in which the reader's conventional associations and beliefs about language are destabilized. The reader is confronted with obscured perspectives, exposed fallacies or states of denial, and most of all, with his or her own agency. Sachs accomplishes this in particular through her use of cyclical structure, her primary mode of composition after the war. Writing in cycles allowed her to create an extended textual landscape in which the reader moves from poem to poem, that is, from textual space to textual space. The reader is called, upon entering the landscape of a cycle, to pay close attention to the continuously shifting terrain that he or she must map out. As many of Sachs's images of cartography and astronomy suggest, an individual uses constellations and maps to shape space and thus create meaning. As the reader wanders through each poem, he or she finds intertextual references and recurring semantic, structural, and grammatical features whose meanings unfold with each poem. The changing terrain allows words to appear differently and to be redefined; the cycle is often its own lexicon. In mapping the terrain of the cycle as he or she reads, the reader also creates the cycle by arranging constellations of meaning. Another dimension is added when the reader follows the logical form of the cycle: proceeding from the final poem of a cycle around to the first poem creates an entirely new reading experience, in which the reader reads not in a closed circle, but in a spiral, rearranging the constellations previously constructed, building from experience but reshaping the space of words. This process is very much akin to the images of cosmic constellations, weaving, and sewing from “Völker der Erde”; we join individual pieces together in a way that is meaningful to us, yet each spiral requires us to rearrange the pieces. The cycle can repeat in perpetuity, and has the potential to appear different each time for each reader.

This cyclical spiral structure mimics the Jewish conception of time, which is not a linear progression moving away from a point of origin, but rather a spiral that passes its point of origin even as it moves away from it.