Chana Kronfeld

Adi Keissar, the founder and convener of 'Ars Poetica, the new radical wave of Mizrahi writers, has helped bring poetry-as literary practice, performance, and polemics-back into the center of Israeli cultural life since she established the circle in 2013, in the wake of the 2011 social protest movement. In this article, I take seriously the group's name as a cross-linguistic pun on the prestigious metapoetic Latin term, linking it outrageously with the Arabic 'ars, "pimp," which is used in Hebrew slang as a degrading epithet for Mizrahi men. I show how this sarcastic re-appropriation of 'ars nevertheless retains the Latin sense, namely Keissar's-and the circle's-serious concerns with poetics and with the intersections of lyric poetry and society, in particular. Contra the masculine stereotype of the 'ars, Keissar has, in fact, insisted-not without a struggle-on an explicitly feminist, inclusive credo and set of practices for the group and its highly popular events, which she also produces. I discuss the ways the metaphors of "pimp" and "whore," commonly used to denigrate Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs, are systematically reclaimed in the work of 'Ars Poetica poets (in addition to Keissar, also Mati Shemoelof and Tehila Hakimi, among others). I demonstrate how Keissar, and the poets in the group and around it, use biblical intertextual resonances of the metaphorical "whore of Zion" in the Prophets and the history of its (ab)uses in colonial discourse as a powerful site for constructing a poetics of intersectional solidarity between women, Mizraḥim, Palestinians, foreign workers, and the poor. I read the poem "The Dominion of Night" (Memshelet Layla) as a pastiche of East-West citations and a meta-poetic rewriting of Genesis 1:16, the creation of the moon and the stars that have dominion over the night. I describe how Keissar's use of queer ungrammaticality radically inscribes women's poetic creativity in the foundational myth of creation (as the work of "elohit"). At the same time, she settles accounts with the Israeli government-the common, modern sense of memshala-and calls on dark-skinned women to "take back the night," in all senses of that expression. In the process, I argue that Keissar's project compels a rethinking of Western conceptions of the lyric as an essentially apolitical solipsistic soliloquy. As the founder and convener of 'Ars Poetica, the new radical wave of Mizraḥi (Eastern Jewish) writers, Adi Keissar (b.1980) has helped bring poetry-as literary practice, performance, and polemic-back into the center of Israeli cultural life since she established her circle in 2013, in the wake of the 2011 social protest movement. In this article, I take the circle's name seriously as a cross-linguistic pun on the prestigious meta-poetic Latin term that links it outrageously with

A central methodological question that any theory of metaphor has to confront is what type of metaphor should serve as its paradigm case. Anyone familiar with the literature has noticed that in general literary critics and rhetoricians are concerned with the so-called 'novel,' 'imaginative' or 'poetic' metaphors, whereas linguists and philosophers of language typically deal with 'conventional,' 'frozen' or even 'dead' metaphors. Those disciplines, like cognitive psychology and anthropology, which have developed an interest in the subject fairly recently, tend to use both living and dead metaphors as their examples, but they rarely present any explicit motivation for having chosen one type rather than another. Actually, the number of authors within any discipline who address this problem at all is very small. One obvious explanation for this phenomenon, as well as for the differences among the disciplines in the type of metaphor they choose to consider, is this: each discipline has asked different questions about metaphor and has thus selected the paradigm cases that most naturally fit its interests, usually without being concerned with the adequacy of these cases for other points of view on metaphor. Since literary critics and rhetoricians concentrate on the poetic or persuasive function of metaphor, their examples tend to be drawn from original poetry and oratory and are thus closer to the 'novel' type; linguists and philosophers of language wish to understand the role of metaphor in the semantics of natural language, and their examples are therefore drawn from conventionalized modes of usage supplied by the lexicon of a native speaker; cognitive psychologists and anthropologists are interested in the way metaphor affects and/or reflects the cognitive and behavioral processes of an individual or a culture, and are therefore preoccupied with metaphor function rather than metaphor type.

... PFK: Some time ago, a well-known feminist economist publicly ex-pressed her belief that any type of women's paid employment was desirable in the cause of gender equality. Her point was that globalization was finally weakening the organizations that had ousted women in ...

... PFK: Some time ago, a well-known feminist economist publicly ex-pressed her belief that any type of women's paid employment was desirable in the cause of gender equality. Her point was that globalization was finally weakening the organizations that had ousted women in ...

... All translations are from this volume. We are grateful to Marcia Freedman, Maya Kronfeld, and Dave Sutter for their insightful comments on this introduction, and to Eliyah Arnon for help with the research. ... 41. "Sof sof ani medaberet," from Ahavah amitit; in Kol hashirim, 217–18. ...

... All translations are from this volume. We are grateful to Marcia Freedman, Maya Kronfeld, and Dave Sutter for their insightful comments on this introduction, and to Eliyah Arnon for help with the research. ... 41. "Sof sof ani medaberet," from Ahavah amitit; in Kol hashirim, 217–18. ...