Auto-Erotic Cosmogenies: The Poetry of Ḥaya Esther after Walt Whitman

The "auto-erotic" and "cosmogonic" share a correlation within aspects of contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Both deal with a self-delight that comes from reconciling disparate conceptions and experiences of self. Self-delight as an integral component of the creative process has yet to be as passionately evoked in American English or in Jerusalemite Hebrew as in the epic poems of Walt Whitman and Ḥaya Esther. This "Afterword" (Nachwort) focuses on Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855) as a dissonant poetic precursor to Esther's אֱּלו֗֗הַּ מְדַבּר בּשַ֗רִי (My flesh speaks God) (2001). If Israeli poetry continues to serve as a peculiar nexus of public and private experience of trauma, where the value of love over-rides death, then how is the role of eros in Hebrew poetry to be read? Since the Song of Songs, I argue that these two epic poems of Whitman and Esther stand as touchstones of the songs of self-delight that recreate and rebirth the reality of the "real Me" that is the embodied soul.