When poetry books are this timely, it’s rare they’re also this good. You could read Tom Haviv’s A Flag of No Nation, perhaps the best recent poetry book centered on the state of Israel, to better understand the Israel-Palestine conflict, flaring up as it has in the last few weeks, but reading it for the plot, so to speak, would be a disservice to the book’s poetics, various and innovative as they are.

At the start of Haviv’s sharp, weird, sincere first book, he makes a kind of improbable wager, telling the reader exactly what’s coming—allegory, oral history, lyric assemblage, performance texts and political visions—but rather than giving away the book’s many surprises, he reveals a project of such ambition that its contours camouflage the family epic at its heart.

An extended invention where parents blind themselves so children sing them an island lines up next to a grandmother’s emails and phone recordings gently lineated; lyric ladders of a present-day romance with a soldier break next to the struggles of Turkish Jews during WWII. A Flag of No Nation centers on Haviv’s grandparents—his grandmother, Yvette, in particular—and on the country of Israel, the dream they left home for. Docupoetry often calls to mind state archives, with a historical scope that can encompass hundreds of years, but Israel’s founding remains in living memory. Haviv’s recordings of Yvette are especially disarming because she is as much an archive relevant to the state as she is his grandmother. About losing her memory, we can feel his pain when she struggles: “It was a simple word./I can’t remember it now.” The challenges of writing political poetry are many: boring didacticism, sentimental abstractions, agitprop generalities…Haviv wrestles with these like they’re “wire angels.” I don’t know if there is anyone who has better captured the hope of the old Zionist refuge while baring his disillusionment with the nation in its current form. Such an odd power: to be able to recover the myth, while at the same time letting it go.

In Judaism the past and present are enmeshed in each other much as understatement is enmeshed in statement, and in the poems too recurrences course across the oral history, in the stories Haviv self-consciously tells and re-tells, in the allegory that opens the book. Despite the ambiguity of telling the same story across varying formal and structural mechanisms, there’s a refreshing emotional clarity throughout, as in Haviv’s lyric poem about a romance with a soldier, “Ladder”—and the myth of Israel he grew up with—breaking, where the breaking itself becomes a chorus:

we are here because

breaks

they behave this way because

breaks

they set fires

breaks

our destiny is to

breaks

this is how one survives

breaks

this is how we learned to survive

breaks

this is why they hate us

breaks

Haviv, in speaking about his poetry, has described how the myths he was raised on had their roots in “violent self-determination.” One way for him to battle those myths is to make evident the “hinges of this constructed machine,” the “master and meta-narrative.” The myths threaten obscurity and erasure, as in one passage that interrupts the chorus of breakings:

The field

thickens

into a forest

the soldier is

leading you

out of the poem

He points ahead

over there

you will find nothing

no answers

to your questions

no richness lived in

no community

I suggest you go there

since it’s where I’m from too

home.

Haviv’s understanding of Zionism as an “inherited narrative” is not theoretical, but personal: the son of an Israeli fighter pilot, his grandparents fled to Israel in 1949, his grandfather, Izzy (short for Israel), served in the foreign service for years, and Yvette was a speechwriter for four Israeli presidents. National myths are often presented as teleological: the state becomes inevitable as it looks back. But Haviv’s attention to his grandparents and his excitement in their young lives in Turkey rescues the past in all of its texture...although that’s not quite right, rather, he lets them rescue what made them individuals, before the state collapsed the myth they helped make of it.

The texture of his grandparents’ early lives was unrelentingly adventurous: Yvette tells of going to the police station with her mother, where the older woman shamed corrupt cops; Izzy was jailed for attempting a crossing of the Turkish border to evade the draft; Yvette shares how her Istanbul “was a/city full of spies.” Diplomatically they served in Romania, France, Ethiopia. Izzy goes mostly blind as a young adult, progressively more so as he ages, and Haviv tells this story in several ways: as Yvette’s remembrances of it, as a grounding detail while relating the history changing around them, as something that Izzy refused to let hold him back. One wonders about the connection between Izzy/Israel going steadily blind and Haviv’s choice to begin his book by allegorizing blind elders whose children build an island for them. The allegory is fantastical, clumsy, made more interesting by preceding the text that follows, weirding Izzy’s blindness rather than over-determining it. 

In many ways A Flag of No Nation’s forms are performative, as in the case of the ‘breaking’ mentioned above. “Ocean” is described as “A line of silent marks on an expanse of white,” quiet in the corner of a two-page spread. Photographs are interspersed throughout the book, often dramatically, as in the mixing of the line, “New travelers were approaching the island” with a photograph of a boat his grandparents might have ridden to Israel. The emergency in Haviv’s soul emerges over the course of A Flag of No Nation, as he alternates between writing history and critiquing it, writing myth and critiquing it. Is writing history always a kind of writing myth?

The popular conceptions of nonfiction as (only) real and fiction as (only) false is of course strained by poetry, which is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but especially by docupoetry, which relies so much on the appearance of engagement with objective documentary texts (even if that engagement is often to destabilize the supposed objectivity). In utilizing documentary evidence, the poet chooses to direct the reader's attention either to something the reader did not know, or something the reader would see differently after the evidence of the docupoem. But just as often the documents or archival materials serve as a correction of the historical record for the poet: Haviv juxtaposes Yvette’s testimony that she is “no longer obsessed with Israel,” by parsing the dimensions of the word ‘obsession,’ as “a synonym for patriotism?/A synonym for family?”

The intersection of Haviv’s family saga with Israel’s growth causes friction that’s ultimately resolved in the poet’s earnest political project, which concludes A Flag of No Nation: he proposes a flag for a one-state solution. This is an admirably ambitious end to a book of poems, though his earnestness is most affecting when its married to tragedy, as it is in “Ladder”:

in 1945 the Americans liberate

breaks

in 1948 we landed

breaks

the story began in

Istanbul

breaks

The story began in

Thessaloniki

breaks

Auschwitz

breaks

Cordoba

breaks

Gaza

breaks

Jerusalem

breaks

One of the great pleasures of the emerging tradition of docupoetry is that no one is entirely sure what it isn’t: What isn’t a document, anyway? What isn’t poetry? There’s a disturbing inevitability to some books that make a claim on a pure lyric poetics, where every other poem ends with something catching on fire, or the otherwise unique—when it’s not constantly pointed out—combination of blessing and horror. Few of either kind of book have the practical ambition of proposing a new flag.

The flag Haviv proposes is of the hamsa, “the natural symbol of the merging of two peoples. The open palm.” It’s a remarkable idea for a flag, and a reminder that a flag is far less history than myth. If you’re an American who’s seen a Jasper Johns “Flag” in the wild, for instance, you might have wondered: is this ‘the flag’ or ‘a drawing of the flag’? A nation is a collective delusion supported by legal arrangements and history. Families are as much the stories we tell about ourselves. Myths too have borders: what might be believed or hoped for, what might be real. When a nation grows in such a way that it crushes the myths that made it, can its flag stand for the nation as it could be? Can the myth that founded the nation assert itself against the myth the nation becomes? What isn’t a poem?

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Poet Lore, Concision, Rattle, Berru Poetry Series, and Brooklyn Rail. Multimedia work and hybrid writing appears in MAYDAY Magazine, Bat City Review, andTalking Writing. Currently he tutors in a writing center and teaches creative writing to seniors and schoolchildren.