Aharon Shabtai’s Path to the Long Poem

What is the function of length in contemporary poetry and how can readers habituated to the short lyric poem tradition read—indeed, “interpret”—long sequences that seem recalcitrant to analysis? This essay tackles these questions by exploring Aharon Shabtai’s long-poem poetics. Following various stages in his writing, I focus on his turn to the long poem in the 1970s, historicizing his rejection of the lyrical “I,” which gradually led him to write book-long sequences of numbered fragments. Length becomes an emblem of extended temporality, allowing Shabtai to develop a poetics of contradictions whereby each statement is undercut by a subsequent one. For him, the long poem is an antipoetic text whose semantic stability is always-already betrayed.