The Poet as Entrepreneur: The Case of David Avidan

David Avidan (1934–95, Tel Aviv) was a revolutionary shapeshifter throughout his poetic career. As early as the 1950s, while his Hebrew contemporaries were publishing postsymbolist poetry, Avidan’s work already embodied the desire to produce poetry that would be read and consumed as both an avant-garde and a commercial product. Four decades later, at the age of sixty-one, Avidan was found dead in his apartment in Tel Aviv—alone, ill, and destitute. Avidan’s notion of the poet as merely an “entrepreneur” of his own work can be understood against the background of affinities between high modernism and economics. This article will also consider this stance against Avidan’s own economic background.