Sivan Har-Shefi’s Poetic Signature

Sivan Har-Shefi’s Poetic Signature

This presentation analyzes a contemporary Hebrew love poem with a focus on the writer’s methods. The poem originates in a sequence called Masa Ha-Kalla by Sivan Har-Shefi, who identifies with the Mashiv Ha-Ruaḥ writers. Specifically, this paper identifies three of the central poetics in the poet’s writing, then narrows its concentration to a vital, formative one, arguably her poetic signature.

Two of Har-Shefi’s principal techniques for the contouring of motifs are écriture féminine and intertextuality. Har-Shefi exercises the former to write poems that are subtle, reverent, and breathtakingly intimate. They swell the scope of the sacred and the sensual in modern Hebrew poetry. Har-Shefi implements the latter, namely intertextuality, to shape and reshape classical and contemporary Hebrew sources in conversation with one another. She further textures them with culturally specific elements that amplify the undertones of her writing. The poetry analysis of this paper contemplates how such an admixture of intertextual undertones contributes to a phenomenon that Barthes calls “stereographic plurality.”

Further, the presentation shows that the poet’s crafting of “stereographic plurality” in successive layers constitutes a third technique for the shaping of motifs that I hail as “exponential imagery” and distinguish as Har-Shefi’s poetic signature. To demonstrate and elucidate, this paper examines an exemplar with an accent on this technique.