Transcriber: Shinemoos Gong Reviewer: Mile Živković
Sawadika! Welcome, everybody.
I'm going to talk about poetry.
Every time I say the word "poetry,"
I get this raised eyebrow: "Poetry? Really?
These days? Come on."
My name is Boaz, and I am a poet.
It's almost a confession.
I say to people, they ask me: "What are you?"
and I say: "I'm a poet."
They say: "But it's a job? Being a poet?"
I say: "It's OK, don't worry!
I'm also an artist, a musician and a writer."
So I have a long list of jobs and none of them makes any money.
But that's just because I am not practical.
Very sorry, I'm not practical.
How do I know that I'm not practical?
Because my business partners used to tell me I'm not practical.
My bank manager used to tell me that I'm not practical.
My ex-wife used to tell me that I'm not practical... a lot!
(Laughter)
This is exactly why I'm trying now to have this talk to explain to people
why poetry is so important, and maybe even the most important that we have.
And the thing is that people don't understand poetry.
I don't mean that people read poetry and don't understand it.
People don't understand the concept of poetry.
The written part of poetry is just a small part of what a poet is
or what a poet does, or what poetry is for our life.
Actually, I've published three books of poetry
just because I don't like poetry.
I read everything that I could find,
it's all so old fashioned, and strange words,
I mean, come on, all these whiny things, "I wandered lonely as a cloud"...
Get out of here before you get another wedgie.
Poetry, if you look at it right,
is a way of thinking, it's a way of life.
But let me start from the beginning
and tell you a little bit about who I am, and how I got here and why.
I was born and raised in Israel.
For two years, I was a farmer.
I was specializing in banana plantations and irrigation systems.
For three years, I was a soldier.
I was specializing in trying not to get shot
and counting the minutes until I could get out of there.
(Laughter)
Ten days after I got out of my military service
I was already living in New York.
I went to see the world.
After that I followed with 7 years in Italy,
where I studied industrial design.
Now, I'll give you a small anecdote of why I went to Italy,
so you'll understand.
There was a friend of mine that did some consulting
for agriculture in the south of Italy,
and he was driving by and he saw a field
that was full of one line lettuce, one line cabbage,
one line lettuce, one line cabbage.
Now he was thinking, maybe it's because there are different pests,
or maybe the water is different,
so he stopped and asked the farmer:
Why do you have one line lettuce, one line cabbage, one line lettuce?
And the farmer looked at him, almost insulted, and said:
"What? Isn't it more beautiful like this?"
Now when I heard this story, I knew that these are people that know how to live.
If I want to go and live somewhere and study, this is the place for me.
So I went to study industrial design in Milan, in Italy.
That was a long, long time ago, almost 20 years,
which meant that I had the privilege and the honor
to meet some of the great giants of Italian design,
the people that made Italy so famous in the 60s and the 70s.
And then I started to understand what is real poetry.
From people like Achille Castiglioni,
I understood that an ashtray can be pure poetry if you do it right.
A chair, if you design it correctly,
if you have the right mindset, is pure poetry.
From Ettore Sottsass I learned that a logo,
even just the letter head, on the stationary, if you do it right,
if you put your mind and heart into it, it can be real poetry.
And this is exactly why I'm saying that poetry
is the most important thing in my life.
The title of the story, of the talk, is Poetry, Accounting, and Maintenance.
I believe that the world is divided into these three things,
this is how we live.
I concentrate on the poetry because, I'm a poet, this is what I know.
A couple of years ago, 6 years ago, I decided that I'm also a photographer.
Now what do you do when you decide you are a photographer?
You go buy a camera,
and you go and you print a business card that says "photographer."
This is almost what I did, only instead of putting the title "photographer."
because I didn't really want to be a photographer.
Let's face it, it's a boring job to be a photographer.
I put the title "visual poetry,"
because poetry gives you the license to do whatever you want.
It's freedom.
It's not only that you don't have any rules,
you're encouraged to break the rules that you already had,
build new rules, and do something completely different.
"Visual Poetry" was also the title of my first exhibition
and this is how I made it a career basically, by doing what I want.
It's very easy to do poetry,
where you have beautiful subjects in strange positions,
but if you keep it simple, it's not bad.
If you manage to catch that moment that something special is happening,
it's not about giving information,
it's about creating the feeling, creating the sensation.
When you look at something like this,
it's supposed to stir up something inside of you.
But I don't like this. I'll tell you why.
This is cheating. This is too easy.
When you have the best known aerial acrobat in Thailand
coming to visit your studio and you can hang him upstairs
from the steel beam like that, it's too easy.
The beauty about poetry
is that poetry is in every aspect of our life, if we just look enough.
The most simple things. And this is exactly what poetry is:
it's not something that you can quantify, it's not the information,
it's catching the feeling.
Poetry is that added value that gives taste to our life, like art.
It is like salt; without it, life is tasteless.
And you find it in the most simple moments.
Now I did a huge project about Thai street food.
I have a pack like this high of rejection letters from publishers,
and everybody said: "No, we already have a book about Thai food."
So I went and I bought the books about Thai food, especially street food,
and in fact, there were a lot of beautiful images of food;
but in a place like Thailand, street food is not about the food.
It's about everything that is around it, the culture.
For me this kind of picture is poetry, it tells something.
I don't need to know what is cooking there because I get the feeling.
I can almost smell, I can feel the smoke in my eyes
when I go through these packs of feeling.
Of course the rejection letters from all the publishers
because nobody's interested in poetry.
We want facts. We like things that we can control.
We like the part about accounting.
This is how we live. What is accounting?
It's where I work. What kind of phone I have.
How many children do I have. What kind of clothes I'm wearing.
What titles I got.
I used to go around with a business card that says "Boaz Zippor, ND."
Everybody was impressed, "Wow! Boaz Zippor ND!"
Nobody asked me what "ND" means.
ND means "no degree."
(Laughter)
I'm sorry.
So we have the accounting,
we have this list that we make of who we are supposed to be
according to what we own.
And what we own is also our friends.
If I have respectable friends, I'm respectable.
This is not life.
This is accounting, this is keeping score.
And then we have maintenance.
Why do people eat?
Because we need calories, we need energy.
Why do people exercise?
Because we need to lose all the calories that we took in when we ate.
(Laughter)
Where do we live, we need shelter.
Even our off-time is just maintenance.
How many times did you hear at 6 o'clock in the evening
from somebody in the office, "I need a drink,"
"I need a vacation."
It's maintenance.
It's not, "I want to go out and have fun with my friends."
"I need to unwind."
But maybe if you don't wind during the day,
you won't need to unwind.
Even information. Most of the information that we are getting
is just maintenance, it's things that we are supposed to know.
There are very few things that we learn because we love this kind of things.
And these are the extra things, the special things, the poetry of life.
Even social ties, maintenance.
So what do we have, we have poetry, which is:
everything that we feel,
every experience that is real,
our sorrows, our joys, our emotions, our anger...
We have accounting, come on, and we have maintenance
Now you tell me,
what is the most important thing out of these three?
Not poetry?
And this is exactly why I became a poet.
Because poetry is a way of life,
poetry is concentrating on the important things that we have.
Now I wish you all that your life will always be full of poetry,
and I will finish with a short poem.
This time, a real poem, written on paper,
from my first book.
And it goes like this, it is called "Advice."
''The poets are crazy.
They expect you to reach for the stars at each moment
and forget all the lies.
The artists are worse:
they are trying to teach that nothing is real,
it is only your eyes.
The lovers are stupid:
they still haven't learned that grey is the way to survive.
The children are ignorant:
They still don't know that it's sinful to say you're alive.
Just listen to me: go to work every day, save and build your little domains.
You will never find out at the end of the day
you have nothing, and nothing remains. "
Thank you very much.
(Applause)