I am the Model of Poetry

January 18, 2006 Sound: Melancholic Pop
Crowd: Visual theater people and those who’ll never miss Pina Bausch
Girls: All in cotton pants, mouse gray and even dark blackBoys: Surprise, surprise! T-shirts and jeans. Another variation: loose pants and sneakers
Reason for the gathering: The Efrat Mishori Show on a scale that assures she’ll never be granted the official Israel Prize for Poetry

Reading poetry subtly, with intonation, sensibility, sensitivity, shouts, whispers and shouts in a cheap manner, dressed as an understatement, but still cheap – this way of reading poetry is turning over in its grave. Efrat Mishori is the Model of Poetry! (And this is also the first line of her show.) With Mishori you won’t have to deal with reading glasses and pre-verbal coughing, deep breaths before and long pauses afterwards. She shouts poetry like no one else, like a rapper with a master’s degree in literature. This phenomenon is the farthest thing possible from sticky intimacy or hypocritical modesty.

With a screen in the background projecting flashes and patterns, Mishori staunchly does her thing: “Hodebo Dekodebo”, she explains to the audience, “Why does poetry stop progress?” While performing an aerobic march in a bathing suit and sunglasses she shouts her poems to the audience.

I think she is probably the only poet in the world who shaves her legs in order to read her poetry aloud. I also think about the fact that the only Israeli poet who can fill the Real Time nightclub is a mad poet. Right about now Mishori dons a pair of velvet pants and a Madonna mike and says, “In bed with Efrat”. Actually she looks like an Israeli version of the German punk singer Nina Hagen.

Mishori creates a poetic mix, breaking words into syllables, mixed with the English-French voices stupid adults make to scared infants, and that scared infants make to stupid adults. Her vocalizing is influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and Rap. Rhythms are repeated like mantras and reach trance level. Words are de-automatized, their cores felt, syllables broken and forms changed. Repetition gains power, like a scratched vinyl points to its matter and basic structure and breakability. “I shake words in music. The difference in intonation is an act of protest and liberation. It’s as important as saying, ‘I’m against cliches, I’m against Occupation’, etc. A poem of mine is like an instrument with a one-second guarantee. People don’t go past the cover of my book because they are so angry at what they think my ‘image’ is, my ‘megalomania’, as if the content and form are separate from each other. I can’t define myself inside obvious channels, in the narrow version of ‘What is a poem?’”

We might hold a huge symposium about how young people drift away from poetry. Mishori speaks to young people. Mishori’s mind seems like that of a seven-year-old in a white judo uniform, in the afternoon, on his way to practice, one leg on the sidewalk, the other on the road, making up words, adjusting them to the beat he is making. A kid that won’t grow up to be a fighter, but a punk, who won’t make money, who will make art. “Maybe I’m inside and they are outside,” she says, and the strongest part of her show is when Mishori screams: “Open this door that I’m pounding on crying!” Finally there is someone who insists on being larger than life, unashamed of the ambition to total art, and not separating the sublime from mockery, holiness from the banal. Now that finally there is a “mad poet” I don’t feel like arguing who’s in and who’s out, and who should open the door. The show is running at Real Time and you should run too.

Excerpted from an unsigned translation of The Tel Aviv Review, Yediot Ahranot, June 1997.