I wrote Here Lie: Poets and their Graves in English in the last decade, and hoped to publish it in northwestern press.  the editor jerked me around for a long time and it took me a while to realize that he wasn’t going to publish the book at all.  a little politics gradually crept into our discussions, but it was unthinkable for me then to think that he was jerking me around because i was israeli.  

Finally I pulled the book out and decided to leave it alone. 

But I kept writing chapters, collecting more information, photographing new graves.  So one day when I was talking casually with this editor and I mentioned this book, and he expressed an interest in it, Iwe agreed that it should be published.   Just as casually, he offered his wife as editor.  This was a strange offer to me, but as we started working, it turned out to be magical.  I wrote 4 other chapters under her encouragement, and only stopped when the deadline for the grant we  got for publication was due. 

Since then, the book in hebrew has been published but this encouragement has remained.  I’m overwhelmed by the reviews and the interpretations I have been getting, like the one below, and have much more to add.  

Ofer Chen

Memory as Interpretation in Karen Alkalay-Gut’s Book Here Lies the Poet (Keter, 2025)

Karen Alkalay-Gut’s book, Here Lies the Poet: The Final Stories of Great Poets, is one of the rare works in Hebrew in which personal essay, cultural research, and theoretical reflection meet and merge in a harmonious, original, and to a large extent unique way within the landscape of Hebrew literature. It is a sensitive and profound work, written with a master’s hand, that succeeds in reopening fundamental questions about memory, creation, and authority—not through abstract theoretical declaration, but through a light-footed journey—one not devoid of humor and wit—through cemeteries in Europe and the United States. From this emerges a wide-ranging meditation on the fate of the author after death, on culture’s relationship to the bodies of its creators, and on the ways in which a work continues to exist—or to change—beyond the life of its writer.

To appreciate the book’s innovation, it is worth briefly recalling one of the central concepts in modern literary criticism: the “intentional fallacy,” coined by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1954. According to their view, the meaning of a work does not depend on the author’s biographical intention; it arises from the text itself and from the way the reader encounters it. This position, which became a cornerstone of New Criticism and the basis of anti-intentionalist approaches in the second half of the twentieth century, sought to sever the work from the figure of the author and to establish the autonomous status of the text.

An even more radical move was proposed by Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of the Author.” Barthes sought to dismantle the authority of the author as the organizing center of meaning: the text, he argued, is not the expression of a single original consciousness, but a weave of voices, quotations, and cultural codes. The metaphorical “death” of the author enables the “birth of the reader” and frees the work from dependence on its creator’s biography. In this sense, the author ceases to be the source of authority and meaning; he becomes a cultural function, not an interpretive anchor.

It is precisely against the backdrop of this tradition that Alkalay-Gut’s unique contribution becomes apparent. Here Lies the Poet does not seek to restore the author to the center of the text in any naïve or romantic sense, nor does it dismiss the achievements of modern criticism. Instead, it proposes a subtle yet profound shift in the discussion: no longer the author’s intention in life, but the author’s fate after death; no longer authority over the text, but the way culture rewrites the author through both the physical and literary monument.

The grave, in Alkalay-Gut’s work, is a text. It is a physical, material, topographical text: stone, inscription, date, symbol, geographical location. Yet at the same time it is also a social and cultural text, written and edited by family, close circles, communities, and cultural institutions. Where New Criticism sought to separate creation from biography, Alkalay-Gut proposes examining their renewed encounter—not as an authoritative basis for interpretation, but as a site of memory. The author does not return as ruler of the text, but as a symbolic entity shaped retrospectively by society.

In this way, Alkalay-Gut sheds new light on the concept of the “death of the author.” If in Barthes death is a metaphor that abolishes authority, in Alkalay-Gut death is a real event that generates an additional layer of meaning. The grave does not restore the author as interpretive authority, but neither does it allow him to vanish entirely. It produces a “final text,” a kind of cultural epilogue—concise, sometimes ironic, sometimes pompous, sometimes modest—through which culture continues to conduct a dialogue with the work and its creator. Thus, when John Keats requested that it be written on his tomb that his name was “writ in water,” he seems to embrace the idea of disappearance. Yet the very act of carving the phrase in stone contradicts erasure and creates a myth. The grave thus becomes a site where the desire for oblivion and the need for commemoration meet. The stone speaks—not only in the name of the poet, but also in the name of those who chose how to remember him.

Here the depth of Alkalay-Gut’s innovation becomes clear: she does not restore biographical intention as a criterion of interpretation, but proposes to see commemoration itself as an interpretive act. Who chose the engraved line? Who determined the location of the grave? Why does one poet receive a monumental tomb while another remains in a forgotten corner? These questions expose the cultural mechanisms that shape canon and memory. The grave becomes testimony to power relations, literary hierarchies, and the politics of commemoration.

The book adds a topographical and tangible dimension to the concept of “literary legacy.” Legacy is not only printed texts and critical editions; it is also place. The physical pilgrimage to a poet’s grave is a bodily act of reading: standing, observing, remaining silent. In this encounter, it becomes clear that the work does not exist solely in an abstract space, but is bound to the body that was buried and to the stone that marks it. Poetry, which often seeks to transcend materiality, is returned to the earth.

The various examples brought by Alkalay-Gut—from the once-forgotten grave of Herman Melville to the carefully planned and performative tomb of Walt Whitman—demonstrate that there is no simple correspondence between literary value and the form of commemoration. The grave may amplify, diminish, or distort the image of the creator. In this sense, it is not merely a biographical conclusion, but a continuation of interpretation.

It is precisely through this move that Alkalay-Gut’s approach proves not to contradict Barthes but to deepen him. If “the death of the author” sought to free the text from biography in order to enhance the freedom of reading, Here Lies the Poet shows that even after this liberation, the author continues to exist as a cultural site—not as binding authority, but as a nexus of memory, myth, and politics. Death does not abolish the author; it transforms the mode of his presence.

In this way, the book succeeds in expanding the boundaries of literary criticism beyond the page. It invites us to think of creation as an ongoing process in which the poet’s life, the text he wrote, and the stone-spatial text of his grave together form a complex system of meaning. Alkalay-Gut’s reading illuminates and deepens our understanding of both creator and creation—not as a romantic fusion of intention and text, but also not as a complete separation between them. Between life and death, between page and stone, it becomes clear that reading is not only an interpretive act but also an act of memory. Alkalay-Gut teaches that culture never ceases to write its poets—even after the text is sealed and the earth is closed. In this sense, Here Lies the Poet becomes not only a book about tombstones, but a book about the continuing life of literature itself, about the way a work continues to take shape even after the death of its author.