Life as Fiction will be my mother, Edith Covensky’s thirty-first book of poetry published in Israel.  Her books have been published by Eked, under the leadership of renown poet and publisher, Itamar Yaoz Kest, who accepted my mother’s first book, Other Words (Eked, 1985) for publication, and by Gvanim, recently led by noted poet and publisher, Amos Levitan.  My mother’s poems have also been published in numerous Hebrew language periodicals circulating across Israel, the United States, and Canada, and have been translated into English, Arabic, Romanian,  French and Spanish. Her collection of poems translated into French is the focus of a dense and comprehensive introduction written by distinguished French scholar, Professor Michael Giordano of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, entitled: The Poetry of Edith Covensky: A Spectrum of Human Situations – a highly insightful study of the influence of French Symbolism on my mother’s poetry.  The eminent Hebrew literary scholar and critic, Professor Yair Mazor of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee recently devoted an entire book to the subject of my mother’s poetry entitled: Under a Silky Sky: The Symbolist Poetry of Edith Covensky, providing a stunningly perceptive view of my mother’s work. Dr. Mazor previously wrote the introduction to my mother’s anthology, Anatomy of Love (Selected Poems 1992-2002), and had favorably reviewed her collections After Auschwitz, Synesis and other titles in World Literature Today.  My mother’s poetry books Love Embraces Love, Pentagram, and On the Existence of Love have likewise received positive review from another outstanding Hebrew scholar, Dr. Lev Hakak, Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of California in Los Angeles. In addition to her prolific publications, my mother also performs poetry readings and appears on panels at numerous poetry forums and festivals in Israel and the United States, and has been interviewed by local Jewish media and on public radio in Detroit, Michigan, as well as in Israel. She also serves as Editor-in-America of Pseifas, the Israeli journal dedicated to promoting Hebrew poetry in English-speaking countries. Presently, my mother serves on the faculty of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, teaching the Hebrew Language, Literature, film and Israeli Culture. 

 

Given the extent and depth of her accomplishments in poetry, I admit to being a little apprehensive when my mother asked if I would like to write the introduction to her next book, Life of Fiction.  While I am a big fan of her work, I would hardly consider myself an expert in poetics.  My mother allayed my fears by emphasizing that as her son, I could offer a unique take on her poems and seemed intrigued by the idea of publishing a book that contained my thoughts.  How could I refuse? Of course, I consider her confidence in my ability a great honor and am forever grateful to her for the opportunity.  Mom, thank you.       

Renee Descartes, the 17th Century French philosopher once asked, “How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?”  Descartes’ inquiry reflects a timeless human fascination with the mystery of existence as a state that appears both real and illusory; it is a perplexing paradox that underlies the poetry of Life as Fiction. The Buddha compared life to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightening.  Albert Einstein famously said time is nothing more than a persistent illusion.  The Earth, the Sun, the stars, the seas and beaches, forests and deserts, mountains and plains, birds flying in the air and fish swimming in the lakes and oceans, animals roaming the land and people populating the world by the billions all appear tangible, physical, real yet somehow incomplete; there seems to be something else, something ethereal, ephemeral, eternally transient.  This something is more than a hunch.  In human beings the physical brain can think a thought, but also know it is thinking that thought; it seems capable of looking at itself, as if from outside, appearing to transcend its physical manifestation and the body, an ability that continues to puzzle neuroscience.  Einstein’s theories and modern physics have proven too, that the reality of time itself is deceptive; time is not linear, but can be bent, warped, twisted, and torn, slowed down and sped up.  In Life as Fiction my mother’s poems raise and explore the perplexing question of existence itself, taking the reader on an intimate journey through dualities of memory and fantasy, fear and joy, sorrow and exhilaration, silence and singing, innocence partnered with perversity, torment paired with laughter, and the erotic mated with the sanctified; where reality is found in illusion and the fiction of poetry contains the very essence of the poet’s truth.   

In the poem “Fiction”, my mother opens the collection by establishing its central theme.  The poem explores life’s paradoxical nature as ethereal and dream-like within the reality of routine existence. 

I exist in the routine of day
Desolate rustling amid the cracks of time
And the remnants of memory
Liquid like rain
Across bits of things
On a night awaiting another night.
 
  The opening verse alludes to how the repetitiveness of the day-to-day initially keeps one tethered to the confines of ordinary reality.  The “I” in the poem, who represents the narrative Speaker, and, I believe, also symbolizes a universal “self” plainly proclaims existing in “the routine of day.”  The placement of this verse at the beginning of the poem underscores the routine as an anchoring force among the paradoxical realities to come.  As the poem continues, the Speaker describes the emptiness and loneliness of daily existence with “desolate” and “rustling,” but immediately follows with “amid the cracks of time” and “remnants of memory.”  In this way, the Speaker infers that the desolation of daily life ironically and simultaneously gives rise to awareness of a dream-like state, a realm where daily life diminishes to the point of merely rustling “amid” cracks and remnants.  The inherent subtlety that this vast dream existence may only amount to a short moment lost in thought or strained in recollection speaks to the power of subjective perspective in relation to the nature of time.  

Beyond the first stanza, the remainder of “Fiction” focuses on the self’s awareness of paradoxical existence and the ability to transform this awareness into words, a process fueled by an intense romantic passion suggested by subsequent verses like “playing scarlet in the moment,” “flowing across the sun’s rage,” “dripping light,” “and hot longing.” Words, here, become an amalgam of the ordinary and the fantastic which the self sharpens as tools used to lace “a poem after a poem,” binding together new fictions into the web of reality that parallel life and all its contradictions.  

Where “Fiction”, did not question whether reality could be a dream, the example below from “Things of Fear” exemplifies the idea of rational skepticism toward life as an illusory state.  The second stanza begins: 

I am the mistress of dreams
(You say)
Singing like a bird flying round and round
Tuned to the voice of water
Hearing the sea
Connecting to things of fear
And to rain humming like from childhood.

​

The second verse here, namely, (You say), makes clear that the fantastical quality of the Speaker’s existence captured in “the mistress of dreams” is someone else’s opinion.  The Speaker never approves or accepts it as accurate.  Her silence creates doubt.  Are these her words? Are they true? Are they someone’s fantasy? In this way, (You say) causes the poem to step outside itself, cautioning the reader to view the connection between fictional expression and ultimate source of that expression with skepticism. 

“Things of Fear”, also speaks to the duality of fear and joy within the self as they dance intertwined, gracefully waltzing as connected opposites.  The “mistress of dreams” suggests a sexually dark fantasy of constriction and obedience paired with “singing like a bird flying round and round,” an expression of lightness and freedom.  Both connect to “things of fear,” and both connect to the simple joy of hearing the hum of rain “like from childhood.”  The dual connection suggests balance.  The poem seems to imply that spiritual renewal symbolized by “tuning to the voice of water” and “hearing the sea,” demands embracing fear and adult desires as much as retaining simple joy and purity.  Ultimately, it is the energy generated by balance that liberates the soul. 

The concept of life as an artistic masterwork, as an expression so superior that it transcends its reality, is touched upon in the poem “A Virtuoso Page.”  Here, ethereality and temporal transience come to mind in how time is “elusive” and moments are “streaming;” the Speaker vacillates between belonging and not belonging inferring a back and forth movement that brings to mind alienation, impermanence and an ongoing struggle for acceptance within this masterwork that is life.  The poem further suggests that life itself excels in its “artistic” achievement that even a simple flower is like “a virtuoso page.”    

   
The poem “Promises”, focuses on the line between memory and fantasy. The first stanza begins:

I lose my memory
Intentionally
Unintentionally
Rising in fantasy like a great promise
Addicted to the sun
At a moment darkening
Suspended on parchment.

​

Here, the poem illustrates how loss of memory, whether natural or caused by human will, can release the imaginative subconscious, giving rise to the thrill of a high-flying fantasy, “…like a great promise / addicted to the sun,” a state of exuberance that is innately fleeting, like the effects of a drug, “at a moment darkening.” However, it is the recording of this imaginative release suggested by being  “suspended on parchment” that ultimately sustains it, preserving its freshness and vitality in an ageless state - forever.  My mother underscores the emotional volatility associated with such a momentary flight of fancy with words like “rising,” to reflect elation, “addicted,” to connote “poetic drug” use, and “sun,” to suggest a feeling of brightness, vividness, and vitality.  Likewise, “at a moment darkening” provides an emotional peak and sudden reversal, giving the poem an inherent structure and depth. The word “parchment” which alludes to the medium of the Hebrew Prophets, who were strangely, but not insignificantly all poets, infers a connection between the poet and God.  The poet captures life in written words, just as life is thought to exist in God’s word written in the Torah - the “Tree of Life.”  The term “Scroll” which appears in poems like “Imaginary Love” and “Total Love”, likewise provides an example of how my mother connects poet and God by inference to the scrolls of the Torah and other scrolls containing religious texts. The presence of this connection suggests that the poet mirrors her Creator.  From nothingness the poet’s will manifests into the vessel of her poem.  She gives her creation form and shape, meaning and purpose, lending it life through the breath of her words.     

In a broader sense the idea that a work contains the breath, in fact, the essence of its creator, exposes a core subtext running through the poetry in Life as Fiction: the paradox that my mother exists physically as a poet and ethereally as the essence within her poems.  When I once told my mother that I got to know her better after reading her poems, she replied, “well that’s me, I’m all in there.”  Conversely, her poetry is all in her.  She has told me that poetry gives her life, as necessary for her existence as breathing.  This subtext illuminates the duality of truth that naturally arises between poet and poem. The poem “Naked Speech”, refers directly to this duality. Here is the first stanza:

I create myself a love like no other
Curling at such a moment
Streaming among true words
Untrue
Rising in me
Like from the first day
Roaming from heaven to heaven
Resembling God.

​

The poem exemplifies how my mother’s existence within and outside her work underscores her emphasis on the duality of truth.  Although my mother has said she is “all in there” (with regard to her poems), the “I” in her poetry is a fictional Speaker. She relies on this fictional voice because it gives her freedom and latitude for expression. 

The poems in this collection further explore how and where personal truth may exist within fiction.   Often my mother combines the word “enfolding” or its variants, with an emotion, an existential state, or tunefulness.  In “Fiction”, the Speaker “enfolds” “yearning within yearning.” “Words Accompany me”, describes the Speaker as “enfolding fear within fear.”  “I Sing in the Middle of the Street” shows the Speaker “enfolding a tune within a tune.”  The words “enfold”, “curl” suggest that this true reflection becomes concealed, meaning that fiction lies curled and folded up within the poet and she must continually work to discover and bear it out.  

To illustrate specifically the presence of the creator’s truth enfolded into its fictional likeness, I will again focus on the book’s reigning motif: that of my mother’s existence as a person outside and within her work.  

           
As a child my mother grew up in Haifa, Israel, surrounded by both great natural beauty and heavy industry.  In her poems she writes about the sea and sky, sun and sand, mountains and water, and often alludes to childhood.  “Naked Speech” brings the reader “from the highest place” to “castles in the sand,” which appears reminiscent of Haifa’s Carmel Mountain and a child playing on the city’s Mediterranean coastline.  In I Love the Simplest Things my mother writes of “time breaking on the page” as if it were a long ago wave breaking on the beach “mixed with the flow of water.”  More subtly words like “curling” and “streaming” may come from a mental imprint of wafting plumes rising from Haifa’s refineries and the many cargo ships filling its harbor.  In “Naked Speech”, love curls and streams, words rise toward heaven.  In “Rustlings”, stars curl and stream and in “Scented Love”, “blue light” curls, while “yearning mixed in speech” climbs toward heaven.  As the city where my mother came of age – the city from where her father sailed the world on the Zim Lines ships he worked on -  the city she has returned to time and again throughout her life - the city to which she compares all others - I believe such references and allusions to sea and sand, sun and sky, to wafting plumes, mountains and high places, and memories of playing in the sand, though seemingly general, actually reveal how Haifa is forever ingrained in my mother’s heart and therefore, in her poetry.

In school my mother studied French language and literature, a subject she loved dearly and continued to focus on intensely as an undergraduate and graduate student in the United States.  Tropes of the dark romanticism of Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas Père manifest in poems like “I Laugh at Midnight”, which opens:

I laugh at midnight
Because of all the frightening things
Drawing words in the order of my breath
Streaming at the instant of poetry
And imagined biography
Unimagined.

My words come to me like suitable music
And like memory of a chat within a chat
Fantastic
Real
Leading to a sketch collecting my longings.

​

The poem’s first two verses set a maniacal, maddening tone.  The Speaker does not laugh at “all the frightening things” or despite them, but because of them.  Unafraid of harm from these “things” of the night, the Speaker appears mad.  Perhaps it is fear leading to madness which sparks the flow of creativity?  Like a brilliant composer scrawling feverishly in the middle of the night.  Under such a spell words come to her “like suitable music.”  This combination of darkness, madness, and fear releasing something beautiful also reflects the influence of another element found in French literature - the Sublime.   

“I Draw in Charcoal”, which appears in the collection, alludes to the Sublime with fearful images like “shards of night” and “black rain.”  With “shards of night,” the poem speaks to a dark and violent force shattering the subconscious into razor sharp fragments, an ending of mirrored illusion in deep pain.  “Black rain” connotes death falling from the heavens, blotting life from wherever it lands, draining color from all that exists.  It also suggests an expression of damnation, reversing the traditional view of rain as a heavenly blessing necessary for life’s growth, sustenance, and purification.  Such dark and terrifying images, combined with the colorlessness of drawing in charcoal inferred by the title, clash in the poem with the vibrant beauty of “flowers seen to me in real colors” and the sense of liberation and spiritual ascension associated with a “wild wind crossing heavens / climbing high.”  The presence of this clash intimates that the seeds of life’s beauty exist in its pain, the seeds of renewal exist in loss, those of freedom exist in fear, and those of redemption lie in transgression; destruction clears the land, death waters the seeds, and there, out of the bleakness, life’s colorful “flowers” grow.  In her life my mother has experienced her fair share of fear, pain and darkness: these are the seeds that under her love, guidance, and nurturing flower into poetry. 

Music has always played a big role in my mother’s life.  She fervently loves classical music, grand opera, and listens to popular Israeli music at nearly every opportunity.  My mother grew up playing the violin and always stressed the importance of music to my sister and I, who took piano and violin lessons throughout our childhood.  Music relates the ebb and flow of mood and of passion: themes that also correspond to the influence of French Symbolism on my mother’s work. Opaque and subjective, my mother’s poems often refer to the musicality of words and feelings of alienation, passionate eroticism, and perversion.  Note again how the Speaker in “I Laugh at Midnight” says words come “like suitable music” bringing to mind the vision of a composer in the darkness of night hearing the beauty of her notes.  “Poetics 2”, similarly references musicality with “linking a tune after a tune” and the verses “And then I trap the music / mixing in song crossing my lips. “Total Love” offers motifs of sexual eroticism and the subjectivity of perversion, as well as the musicality of words and alienation. Here are the first two stanzas:

My poetry bursts forth on the scroll
Streaming in the murmur becoming
And in memory hardening like stone
Rolling in such silence
Sliding amid all the words.

I find it hard to explain myself 
As belonging
Not belonging
Listening to the voice of the night
Moving with such freedom
Among signs and formulas
Spread out at a time predicting the sun.   

In the first stanza, phrases like “bursts forth on the scroll,” “streaming,” “hardening like stone,” “rolling” and “sliding amid all the words” appear to suggest euphemistically, bodily arousal, acts of lovemaking, and climax, which are juxtaposed against the sanctity and holiness of the Torah again implied by the word “scroll.”  While this juxtaposition may simply allude to an inability to curb un-Godly appetites, sex for the purpose of procreation is considered a sacred act condoned by the Torah.  Perhaps, the poem suggests that the creation of poetry too, is a form of procreation born of passion and baser impulses.  The opaque language in the poem also exemplifies my mother’s intent to open the poem to other subjective interpretations as well.  For instance, in the birth of poetry, the poet’s primal inspiration is juxtaposed against the more cerebral act of writing.  Another interpretation may be that poetry bursts from the heart by way of the poet murmuring her words, an act similar to prayer.     

In “Total Love”, again, my mother stresses musicality as a symbol of freedom where the Speaker says, “and then I see myself as music / still / stuttered / free connecting to the poem.”  My mother also touches on the theme of alienation and the duality of a poet’s truth in her work with “I find it hard to explain myself / as belonging / not belonging, and alienation again with the phrase “in such basic loneliness.”  These expressions of alienation seem to intimate something is missing: that no matter how thrilling or stimulating writing poems may be or how connected to a poem or how spiritually uplifted the poet may feel, total love requires a bodily connection.  The poem may be suggesting that total love of poetry is impossible simply because it cannot be corporeal.  Rather, such love only exists as fiction represented by the subtext that these are the words of a fictional Speaker and not my mother.  At the same time, this illusory feeling of completeness by the poet may be inexplicable to others, a feeling that compels and champions her to persevere in her art.  

    
My mother also has an affinity for expressing poetry as dream-state or vision born into reality by the poet’s hand, which touches on elements of French Surrealism.  My mother told me, she lets ideas flow from the subconscious when she writes, a process similar to the “automatic” writing techniques used by the Surrealists of old.  Her poems often paint dream-like landscapes filled with images of night and stars juxtaposed with the sun, where logic dissolves, time becomes unbounded, fright and ecstasy jostle, and differences between reality, illusion, past and present, memory and imagination cease to exist.  A sense of this dreamy place can be gleaned from the poem, “I Live from Illusion tor Illusion”, where the first stanza begins:

I sing about illusion after illusion
With words existing together
At a different time
Different place
As if there is no dissent between day and night
Preserving my longings.

The writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “The absolute mystery of life can only be captured in symbols and mythic metaphors.”  This ability to capture life is the poet’s magic.  In “I Live from Illusion to Illusion”, the reference to illusions conjures up the image of poet as magician, waving her wand of words, moving time to “a different place,” ending divisions between day and night, preserving the ethereality of desire in the reality (and fiction) of her poem.  

Lastly, my mother’s faith and connection to the Jewish people flows throughout her poetry.  References and inferences to heaven exemplified in poems like “Naked Speech” which I discussed earlier, and “Scented Love” which appears in the collection, not only suggest the spiritual significance of the “mound of God”, combined with allusions to rising smoke in words like “curls” and “rises” raise the image of ancient burnt offerings made to appease the Divine.  That such words have multiple connotations, including sexual, again illustrates my mother’s emphasis on the duality and subjectivity of truth and what one may find profane or sacred.  

In the context of the 20th century, the idea of rising smoke also recalls the horror of the Holocaust and its grotesque perversion of industry into a tool of mass extermination.  In “Imaginary Love”, “love” again exists like rising smoke, but this time it is “rising against the chimneys of my eyes,” perhaps referring to an offering to heaven of painful sadness, prayer, and visceral love for the millions who perished so unimaginably. As “Imaginary Love” continues, the intensity and depravity of mass genocide connects to the intensity and depravity of “ringing with a moan / and longing spread on the scroll” where “scroll” once again invokes sacred texts.  The appearance of the word “base” in the poem and the verses “and I mix within the womb of the night / and the base of a dream caught in me” further highlight the poem’s emphasis on the duality of primal urges.  Relevant to the central theme in Life as Fiction, such primal urges serve paradoxically as catalysts for the extreme destruction of life represented by inference to the Holocaust and to the creation of life manifested “within the womb of the night.”  Likewise, the words “moan” and “longing” suggest primal urges resulting in the creation of life (and perhaps poetry) in a duality that suggest deep pain and suffering which occurs in its destruction.  Further, the verse “like music resembling God’s voice” shows yet another duality: that just as the previous verses showed desire could be expressed as annihilation and destruction, desire also can be the genesis of pure and absolute music expressed as love, freedom, and renewal.   

While the existence of paradox explored by this volume may cut against the human instinct for logically definitive answers, it is the poetry’s emphasis on the duality of truth shifting back and forth like an image in an Agam painting which infuses it with seismic power.  For my mother the duality is real.  Poetry is her life beside her life.  Her poems are the fictional accumulations of spare moments stolen and preserved.  They occur at a restaurant table, a seaside café, a snowy day, an office lobby.  Through her fictional Speaker, my mother stays true to herself, neither limited by the boundaries of her own life nor devoid of them.  Her work mirrors life’s irrationality, its mad logic, its twists and turns.  As the Yiddish saying goes, “man plans and God laughs” implying life is innately uncertain: full of unimaginable terror and inexplicable miracles, dreams shattered and fulfilled, impulses that create and destroy, passion that completes and alienates.  Life is, among others, thought and emotion re-captured by the poet on a draft of fictional words.  The words become poems, the poems become books, and the books become part of the poet’s reality: life, as fiction.

  
Jeffrey L. Covensky
Attorney and screenwriter, Los Angeles, California.

The bi-lingual book (Hebrew-English) entitled: Life as Fiction was published in 2017 in Tel-Aviv, Israel by Eked Publishers.