Stanford University Press Blog

Plastic Pollution and Poetry

How American poets contend with the downstream consequences of today’s ecological crises.

by MARGARET RONDA

CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, the world marked Earth Day, the theme of which was plastic pollution. Environmental organizers around the globe are calling for increased awareness of plastic consumption and its protracted environmental effects, and hope to achieve a dramatic reduction in plastic pollution by Earth Day 2020. Contemporary poets, too, have been calling attention to the impacts of plastic on ecosystems and biospheric processes in their writings. In “The Age of Plastic,” a piece published in a recent anthology on the poetry of climate change, Chamorro eco-poet Craig Santos Perez catalogs the innumerable ways plastics are embedded in contemporary life. Found in household goods and medical products, technological, military, and transportation networks, bodily interiors and industrial processes, this synthetic material plays an enabling role in virtually all spheres of human activity. Perez highlights some of its beneficial, life-sustaining applications:

plastic keeps food fresh—
delivers medication and clean water—
forms cable and clothes—
ropes and nets—even
stops bullets—
“plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies”—

In other sections, Perez explores how plastics facilitate the prenatal development, birth, and newborn care of his infant daughter, pointing to the birth tub in which his wife labors, the Ziploc bag holding the placenta, the plastic nipple that feeds his baby milk. Drawing together this personal description of plastic’s role in his own family’s reproductive dynamics with the larger imbrications of plastic in everyday existence, Perez portrays plastic as an intimate container for and enabler of bodily experience. He wryly contrasts this synthetic substance against the delicate, vulnerable bodies of new baby and mother, calling attention to the uncanny endurance of the “perfect creation” of plastic.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration.

How We Read

10 surprising insights about how we process, recall, and engage with what we read.

by ANDREW ELFENBEIN

CC0 via Pixabay.

Reading is one of the most complex acts of the human mind: it involves everything from basic pattern recognition to complicated problem solving. Yet, while teaching reading to children receives great attention within schools of education, scholars in the humanities have been far less systematic in their understanding of adult reading. Literary scholars even use “reading” as a synonym for interpretation; in literary criticism, a reading of a poem or novel means not the act of reading it, but the interpretation of it according to strict disciplinary norms.

In The Gist of Reading, I wanted to bring reading, rather than interpretation, to the foreground, and to do so I went beyond the familiar vocabulary of literary criticism. I turned instead to empirical psychology, which presented me with an image of reading quite different from the one that I had known. Drawing on findings from this field as well as my own empirical and historical work on reading, I discovered a wide array of surprising insights while writing The Gist of Reading:

 

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WHEN YOU REMEMBER A NOVEL, YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE NOVEL. By the time you reach the end of a book, you will have forgotten many, if not all, of the sentences it contains. Instead, if you have understood it well, you will have a mental model of it that contains major points and connections between them. But, more than that, your model may also include much that the book did not state explicitly: inferences about character’s motivations and feelings; autobiographical associations; emotional experiences. None of these are “in” the book, but they can become part of your memory of it. That memory is what I mean by “gist.” I use it to foreground the difference between the work itself and what readers make of the work in their long-term memory.

The Stories We Tell

Depictions of Latinx experiences in the US grapple with upward mobility and linked fate.

by ELDA MARÍA ROMÁN

CC0 via Pixabay.

As morality tales, stories about upward mobility disseminate values and offer critiques of our socioeconomic hierarchies. Films about organized crime and the finance industry like The Godfather II and Wall Street convey that you might rise financially, but you can descend ethically. In contrast, a film like The Pursuit of Happyness, with its honest protagonist who leaves behind homelessness through perseverance and education, emphasizes that moral strength leads to success. Meanwhile, Cinderella, Pretty Woman, and Maid in Manhattan suggest that love can transcend class divisions and anyone can rise up through a generous partner or marriage.

Yet stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity. Even when they’re about individuals, narratives involving Latinx and African Americans often engage with the economic barriers that particularly affect these groups—barriers like not having the level of intergenerational wealth and resources that white families have (which determine schooling, residential, and employment options) and also criminalizing discourses that impact rates of incarceration and deportation. Despite differences in class and ideology within ethnic groups, ethnic upward mobility narratives try to impart a sense of collective identity for social action. How do they do so?

Stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity.

Right to Repair is Right to Interpret

As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.

by DENNIS TENEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

How is a tractor like a writing desk?

Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic goods.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics. Modern tractors like modern typewriters are also computers, which means that these tools now contain an inward facing surface, marked by inscription. Solid-state memory arrays are machined out of silicon, ceramic, palladium, platinum, silver and other precious metals. They are tiny storehouses for information—programming instructions—which ultimately govern the behavior of the mechanism. The presence of such a surface and the capability to respond to its commands is what differentiates "smart" devices from their lackwit counterparts. The smart device, to paraphrase Marx, is one that evolves, out of its silicon brain, grotesque ideas. It is a thing imbued with potential for symbolic manipulation.

It should not surprise us then that protections usually reserved for intellectual property have been expanded to cover such tangible goods as harvesters and combines. In her essay "Freedom to Tinker," Pamela Samuelson, of Berkeley Law, described the now infamous attempt by John Deere, a major international maker of agricultural machinery, to restrict access to the innards of its machines, thus severely limiting its customers' ability to repair their own equipment. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and repair.org have mobilized politically, resulting in "right to repair" bills adopted into law in at least eleven states, including New York and Massachusetts.

Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluck

A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.

a Q&A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.

 

Q:

Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?

 

A:

LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.

The Everyday Made Literary

How the Romantics turned their—and our—attention to the quotidian.

by WILLIAM GALPERIN

Study from Nature: At Twickenham. Painted by John Linnell, 1806.

One of the most striking moments in Wordsworth’s poetry comes at the very end of his most famous poem, where he speaks cryptically of the “meanest flower that blows” as “giv[ing] / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” This statement has long perplexed readers but there are two aspects that bear particular scrutiny: the frequency of the experience as described and the fact that the flower is demonstrably, extravagantly, ordinary.

There is a third aspect as well—thinking as distinct from feeling—best glossed by recourse to another Wordsworth poem, “The Two April Mornings,” which features an old man’s recollection of an encounter at—of all places—his daughter’s gravesite, which he remembers coming upon by accident only to be distracted by someone who is very much alive:

And turning from her grave I met
Beside the church-yard Yew
A blooming girl, whose hair was wet
With points of morning dew. . . .


There came from me a sigh of pain
Which I could ill confine;
I looked at her and looked again
—And did not wish her mine.

It’s hard to say where feeling stops and thinking begins here, given the pain with which thought is seemingly allied. Still, it’s pretty clear that the girl’s transit from something personal to something impersonal—and in that sense ordinary—is administered by a revision, a double take, where something missed and refashioned is suddenly present and freestanding. The same is true of the meanest flower. By giving rise to thought such as Wordsworth describes it, the flower, like the girl, is casting off a different kind of thought: a poetical or subjective thinking where flowers speak, where the living are stand-ins for the dead, and, as Wordsworth punningly hints earlier in the poem, where a thought can be a natural object rather than the other way around.

The Cold World of Deindustrialization

As in times past, poets are responding forcefully to the economic conditions of the day.

by JASPER BERNES

Public domain via Pixabay.

What happened? There was a brief moment, after Trump’s surprise victory, when the people whose faces appear on TV or whose words appear in newspapers were shocked enough that they were willing to consider tough answers to this question. The economy always rears its ugly head in a crisis, and for a few weeks in November and December 2016, you could actually hear some of these pundits acknowledge that the economy of the 2010s had failed almost everyone who wasn’t already affluent and that, as a result, many who could generally be relied upon to vote Democrat, both white and non-white, either stayed home, voted third party, or voted Trump. Putinoia and fake news about fake news eventually crowded these stories off the front page and into more marginal venues, but the question remains for anyone paying attention: What the hell happened? To hear Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin tell it,

a man lost a wager

with the god of good causes,
you know,
stood up for himself
a little too late
(maybe too early)

I can still see
Twenty angles of his jaw
Zig zagging through
The cold world
Of deindustrialization

“art to it,” I will tell my closest friends one day.

I quote the end of this poem, “Wave at the People Walking Upside Down,” not only because I think it’s brilliant, like all of Eisen-Martin’s work, but because I think it answers as well as any text the question briefly entertained by the pundits. The best poets have always responded forcefully to the economic conditions that surround them. In the 1960s, during the height of industrialization, poets were enormously perceptive about the destructiveness of factory and office, workplaces that were, at the time, organized according to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” and Henry Ford’s assembly line in ways nearly everyone who worked in them felt were stultifying, joyless, and soul-killing. Against the brutal repetitions of the assembly line or typing pool, poets and other artists instead imagined forms of laboring together that were participatory, creative, varied, and open-ended. In other words, they imagined that work could be made more like art.

Poets imagined that work could be made more like art.

The Language of Nowhere

Divisive rhetoric has hijacked our judgment, intervening between us and reality.

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and US President, Donald Trump, meet at the White House. Photo by Jay Allen. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Last October, as we woke up in the autumn gloom of a Disunited Kingdom after the summer referendum, and groped our way to the tea pot in order to Keep Calm and Carry On, we heard the voice of Theresa May announcing the death of the English language: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” she said, speaking to a supportive audience, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Words can be deployed to all kinds of illogical ends. They are a shifty lot.

Well, that woke us up pretty quick. We are more inclined by nature to support than undermine, much prefer to acquiesce than oppose but here was a definition of words that raised too many questions before breakfast. A citizen of the world is a citizen of “nowhere”? The entire planet, pace Butler, is Erewhon? And where does that place modern Britain? On Mars?

To be accused of having no link to this planet and its peoples may be a surprise for a fair number of us who have been born in one country, raised in another, educated in a third, married, had children, and buried family members in a fourth, fifth and sixth, lived and worked in seven or eight other countries, and might now be obliged to request naturalization in a ninth, because of Brexit. It may also be news for all those of us who had been forced to flee in desperation from our homelands as a result of war, famine, plague, terrorism, persecution and/or natural as well as financial disasters. It can even be a shock to learn that “rootless cosmopolitans” as some of us were called in a previous age, are actually part of a “global elite” in this one, even though we cannot afford London housing. Was our Prime Minister really suggesting that only those who believe in Being First deserve to be British? Can people with a world-embracing vision really not “understand what citizenship means?”

Grappling with Dystopia

Orwell's heirs in Hong Kong fiction and film yield insight into western surveillance society.

by KAREN FANG

A still from "Ten Years", a dystopian film from Hong Kong released in December 2015.

George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four recently shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, crowning a sudden rebirth of interest in the cautionary tale that has been brewing over the past few months. As many commentators noted, sales were particularly high in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia—western nations currently riven by divisive social politics—suggesting that this renewed interest in a novel about a charismatic demagogue spouting misleading evidence and trafficking in xenophobia arises because Orwell’s fiction may help us to understand the contemporary world.

Perhaps one reason in particular that the novel is gaining renewed influence now is that Nineteen Eighty-Four explicitly portrays Asia as a bogeyman and a pawn in the militarized rhetoric of fear in which Big Brother traffics. Throughout Orwell’s novel the declining white empire of “Oceania” is always at war with East Asia or Eurasia—in fact, a particularly macabre moment in the novel occurs when a professional orator charged with inciting crowds abruptly changes mid-harangue from vilifying one enemy to the other. As Orwell describes it, “it was almost impossible to listen … without being first convinced and then maddened.” As a description of political rhetoric and its use in manufacturing consent, Nineteen Eighty-Four thus presages the ever shifting, fill-in-the-blank scapegoating of ethnic, racial, and religious others that fuels so much of our post-9/11, anti-immigration and anti-China hysteria. As the novel furthermore notes, “Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had changed.”

Perhaps one reason in particular that the novel is gaining renewed influence now is that Nineteen Eighty-Four explicitly portrays Asia as a bogeyman and a pawn in the militarized rhetoric of fear in which Big Brother traffics.

History and Literature Entwined

Foucault suggests that the relationship between the two subjects is more complex than we often think.

by ROBERT LEHMAN 

Public domain via Pixabay.

In The Order of Things, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, Michel Foucault describes the birth around the turn of the nineteenth century of two new epistemological or linguistic forms, forms, he suggests, that his contemporaries have taken for granted. The first of these, which pervades all of the soft sciences, is history, here the name not only for the awareness that events and our experience of events occur in time but also for the peculiarly modern belief that a thing’s most fundamental truth can be revealed through an interrogation of the temporal processes by which it came to be. The second is literature, now in the emphatic sense of the term as it unfolds from Hölderlin to Mallarmé, Roussel, and Beckett, a mode of language concerned not with adequation to reality but with its own intransitive existence: “a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.”

Foucault wants to show how we’ve moved away from an earlier moment guided by the rationalist ideal of clear and distinct ideas.

History and literature, then: two uniquely modern forms. Although expressed in the sometimes oracular language typical of his milieu, Foucault’s claim about the roughly coincident birth of these forms is not, I think, especially controversial. History was indeed “born” in the nineteenth century, not only in the grand sense that Foucault intends but also in the more prosaic sense that it was codified as a discipline almost simultaneously at the University of Berlin (1810) and the Sorbonne (1812), and very much in the wake of the French Revolution. And it was certainly present to the consciousness of the age. Literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, for example, could write in 1798 to his brother August that “I am disgusted by any theory that is not historical”; half a century later, Flaubert would write to the Goncourt brothers that “the historical sense dates from yesterday. And it is perhaps the best thing about the nineteenth century”; and Nietzsche’s warning in the second essay of the Untimely Meditations that “there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture” would hardly have seemed as urgent a century earlier.

The 85th California Book Awards

Stanford University Press receives the 2016 Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize.

James Karman accepts the 2016 Prize for Notable Contribution to Publishing from the Commonwealth Club of California.

Last night Professor James Karman and Stanford University Press were honored at the 85th Annual California Book Awards. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers—the third and final volume of which debuted last year—was recognized by the Commonwealth Club of California with their 2016 Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize.

The publication of the third installment of the letters of poet Robinson Jeffers dovetailed with the publication of a biography of the seminal Californian poet’s life and works, also written by Karman (and reviewed glowingly in The Wall Street Journal). Together they marked the culmination of a 15-year collaboration between the Chico-based author and professor and Stanford University Press. This comprehensive series of letters in tandem with Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet unveil the hidden worlds of one of the most reclusive, controversial, and artistically divergent poets of the 20 century. His letters and Karman’s biography afford an intimate view not only into Jeffers’ own oeuvre, but to the literary culture of California writ large, during a tumultuous chapter in American history.

A Poetry Month Reading List

6 new books on poets and poetry, from British Romanticism to Moroccan Leftism.

CC BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In honor of National Poetry Month—a now 20-year strong tradition—we’ve pulled together a few of our latest books celebrating the genre and its many diverse cultural traditions, including an anthology, a novel, a biography, and a bevy of poetry analysis and criticism. 

 

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The Full Severity of Compassion »
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by CHANA KRONFELD

The late Yehuda Amichai, widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and perhaps the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, was, in life, never interested in playing the role of the Great Poet. Such is the observation of Chana Kronfeld whose account of Amichai and his work (described as “penetrating” by the New York Times) blends a critical literary perspective with personal insights derived from her own lifelong friendship with him. Lionized by the literary canon, Amichai became required reading in Israel and beyond. Yet despite his notoriety, he remained always the “everyman” of the genre, whose accessible poetic style contained profound political and theological reflections, the nuances of which are often lost in prevailing interpretations of his work. But “in a series of crystalline readings,” writes James Wood in the New Yorker, Kronfeld restores the “cultural dangerousness” of Amichai's poetry in this volume.

ALSO OF INTEREST:
The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
by PAUL CELAN, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Hein Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris

 

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Watchwords »
Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

by LILY GURTON-WACHTER

Drawing on the works of the darlings of British Romanticism—Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith—Watchwords explores the Romantic tradition’s preoccupation with attention, particularly against the backdrop of the great national events that surfaced during this period: war, invasion, surveillance, and general national alarm. Lily Gurton-Wachter contends that the Romantic poets explode the deceptively simple question of what we attend and how we attend by formally managing, deflecting, and distracting the reader’s attention in their own verse. Her account offers a persuasive argument for how the poetics of attention reflect the political debates and technological innovations of the time. “This book,” says Nancy Yousef (author of Romantic Intimacy), “will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War
by ERIC C. WALKER

Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism
by JOHN BUGG

The Truths Fiction Tells

What literary invention can reveal about the reality of the Iranian Revolution.

by ROXANNE VARZI

Iranian theater, 2006. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Thirty-seven years ago on February 11, 1979, on my eighth birthday, Iran, my country, went through a radical shift. My family left Iran a year after the Revolution, and I have been trying either to understand what happened or to explain it ever since. My latest attempt is Last Scene Underground, an ethnographic novel of life in contemporary Iran.

What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction.

If the Q&A at book readings is anything to go by, when you’ve written a book that’s both a novel and an ethnography, the question on most people’s minds is: What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction. Ethnography and literature have in common a very fluid boundary between the real and the fictive. Even in science fiction, a writer creates a work of fiction based on his or her own understanding of human relations, impulses, and desires from lived experiences and factual knowledge that feeds the imagination.

If an anthropologist were to set-up a camera and begin to record a “scene” of life somewhere, the very decision of where to place the camera frames the scene with a subjective and therefore not fully honest view. This does not mean that what was recorded is not real or the “truth,” but in excluding major parts of the scene, it skews and changes “reality.” If I focused my camera on one section of students in a lecture where only men are sitting, one may have the mistaken impression that only men take my anthropology class. The camera recorded “reality,” but it was not an honest representation of the class. When we social scientists translate and write about an “objective world” through our subjective positions, we may be factual but not necessarily honest about all the ways in which we are creating a new meaning or a fiction, possibly even a fantasy.

Who Writes Iran?

Better US-Iranian relations could usher in more diverse portrayals of Iran—in popular literature and scholarship.

by AMY MOTLAGH

A mural at the former US Embassy in Tehran. Photo by Ninara—CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

With the signing of a nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S., years of sanctions on Iran have ended and I hope a new era in U.S.-Iran relations begins, an era which will enable both Iranian and American scholars to complicate their notions of the other nation through fieldwork and research. Up to now, it has been very difficult for non-Iranians to visit Iran, let alone spend time there as researchers, creating a peculiar situation in which the majority of Iran scholars in the U.S. are first- and second-generation Iranian immigrants. While these scholars have produced some excellent research, we must nonetheless acknowledge the strange nature of a field in which citizenship (or parents’ citizenship) in the country is a necessary credential.

Scholarship in the first twenty years following the revolution was principally concerned with why the revolution happened. It was primarily authored by Iranians who left during the revolution, or learned (while in graduate school in the U.S.) that they could not return. This scholarship, while often excellent, also often reflected a (strong) political bias. In time, those discourses began to change. For better or worse, the past ten years have been defined by what we might call the “autobiographical turn,” best symbolized by Azar Nafisi’s controversial Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita’s incredible commercial success enabled the publication of a spate of other memoirs, which capitalized on similar themes, traded in similar stereotypes, and generally promulgated the idea of Iran as a place that was mysterious and foreign. Critics accused Nafisi of promoting a neo-conservative agenda. This was, of course, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, when Washington insiders were bandying about phrases like “Real men want to go to Tehran” and fear of an imminent invasion of Iran was running high.

If one’s degree of “Iranianness” is now inevitably part of Iran scholarship, is there a way to be reflective about it without becoming autobiographical in all the ways that offend scholarly notions of objectivity?

The Everyman of Poetry

The quiet subversiveness of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry has been too long overlooked.

by CHANA KRONFELD

Yehuda Amichai reading at Tmol Shilshom café in Jerusalem, June 1994. Photo by Yair Medina. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My first meeting with Yehuda Amichai, in the fall of 1970, was what we call in Hebrew a chavaya metakenet, a “corrective” or “healing experience,” one that mends a messy or unpleasant earlier experience. Overeager and all too young, I was trying to put together a series called “Rendezvous with an Author” for Israeli Educational Television, which would allow high school students to meet with cutting-edge Hebrew writers in a relaxed roundtable discussion of the writers’ work. I was still reeling from a failed attempt to produce the series’ pilot: an author whose stories I adored was so sadistically cruel to the young students that we had to stop the taping! And then it came to me—Yehuda Amichai, of course.

He was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet.

Having gotten into the habit of reading his poetry daily for my own emotional sustenance since age fifteen, I was sure: Yes, Amichai would be the one to start with. He would know how to connect with the students and put them at ease; he would be able to talk about the most complex poetic issues with utter simplicity and without egocentric affectation. I had never met him before, but from everything I heard, he was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet—even though by 1970 his status as the most revolutionary, indeed the most important poet of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina) had solidified and he was acquiring an international reputation. Regardless, he was synonymous with unpretentiousness. And indeed, in his Everyman appearance and unaffected manner, Amichai proceeded to treat the students as his equals, joking his way into all our hearts, and thus the series was off to an exciting start. That experience was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the man and the catalyst for my dedication to study and teach the work of the poet.