I understand that Zolt’s poetry revolves around the conflict between Israel and Palestine and is therefore political. I see too that because she uses texts that already exist as raw material, her work is conceptual. None of this helps me when I get to the poem “L’eveil.”  This conceptual work is presented in a four quadrant grid and the idea is that the text in each quad is from a different newspaper. From this the reader is to get a better understanding of how a particular event is reported from four perspectives.

I looked for a way to connect the quads and noticed that in each there were words that relate to war. In “Day one;” for example; the words “conquering,” “war-war,” “Holocaust,” “air strikes.” Beyond this exercise, I am not sure how to make meaning of the work.

Like the author in our reading assignment for today, I am much more comfortable with the section “Innocent Abroad.” In this section, the poems at least appear in a visually familiar format on the page. In the poem “How to shape sacred time,” the “stanzas” appear in orderly five or six line groupings. But that’s about as close to traditional as the poem gets.

There is an ample sprinkling of the expected words such as “Palestine,” “fevers,” “displacement,” “catastrophe,” “destruction,” “Promised Land,” etc. With some effort, I am able to get into the spirit of the piece which again is somehow related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

I like the whimsical feeling in “Jews in space (a lunacy).”

This poem offers an intimate slice of Jewish culture as two women engage in

talk about a trip to the moon. When asked “where is this lebensraum?,” the respondent replies that although “Israel has great spas and bomb shelters…the moon’s the only place we’re safe from anti-Semitism.”

It seemed comical at first and loaded with allusions more easily deciphered by the Jewish community. I thought there was  humor in the lines “And my niece, who’s bringing a barbed-wire mezuzah, a dollar bill and a tiny/Torah scroll from Bergen-Belsen” until I learned that Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp.