This week's poem is Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel."
This week I'm thinking about how, although Palestinian and Israeli poets do not always write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's easy to read that into their poems. With Palestinian poets, I find I often interpret conflict in a poem as being a reference to the occupation (I'm not saying such a reading is correct). With Israeli poets, like Yehuda Amichai, a wonderful poet who loved Israel and loved life, it's easy for me to see the conflict in the silence, the absence of reference to Palestinians.
So this week's poem is one I'm sure I read quite differently from its original intentions, with its "spilled blood."
Monday, January 29, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Susan Tichy's "Letter from Palestine"
This week's poem is Susan Tichy's "Letter from Palestine," published in Beloit Poetry Journal (one of my favorite journals -- they send the nicest rejections)! (Just so you know, the above link will open up a PDF.)
Susan Tichy's debut in 1983 was an amazing collection of poems, The Hands In Exile, the bulk of which detail her experiences on a kibbutz in Israel. Never before had I read poems that so accurately convey the ever-present fear in Israel that whatever normalcy there is could shatter at any moment -- in poems!!! I highly recommend the National Poetry Prize-winning collection and am so grateful to Cyrus Cassells for telling me about it.
"Letter from Palestine" is not actually from the collection, but I imagine that the person described within it is someone she met during that time, whom she hears from later. (I don't know whether this is true at all.) Like many of Tichy's poems (and she's written great collections since then, though not on Israel-Palestine), I learn a lot from this one. Here, that the speaker is far away from Palestine and remembering and imagining are important aspects of the poem. (This teaches me something because I often feel like I must place myself in Israel/the West Bank in the poems, that the poem lacks some documentary credibility if I don't place it there.) The occupation and its costs are fully part of the poem, but the focus is drawn tight around specific individuals. The costs are beautifully portrayed here, suggesting the many through the one. (Oh writing about wonderful poems is so difficult. Go read it! It's lovely!)
In other news, one of my Israel-Palestine poems was accepted by a really cool online journal that I'm very proud to be a part of. My poem should be published in February, so I'll let you know more about that when it happens.
Have a peaceful week.
Susan Tichy's debut in 1983 was an amazing collection of poems, The Hands In Exile, the bulk of which detail her experiences on a kibbutz in Israel. Never before had I read poems that so accurately convey the ever-present fear in Israel that whatever normalcy there is could shatter at any moment -- in poems!!! I highly recommend the National Poetry Prize-winning collection and am so grateful to Cyrus Cassells for telling me about it.
"Letter from Palestine" is not actually from the collection, but I imagine that the person described within it is someone she met during that time, whom she hears from later. (I don't know whether this is true at all.) Like many of Tichy's poems (and she's written great collections since then, though not on Israel-Palestine), I learn a lot from this one. Here, that the speaker is far away from Palestine and remembering and imagining are important aspects of the poem. (This teaches me something because I often feel like I must place myself in Israel/the West Bank in the poems, that the poem lacks some documentary credibility if I don't place it there.) The occupation and its costs are fully part of the poem, but the focus is drawn tight around specific individuals. The costs are beautifully portrayed here, suggesting the many through the one. (Oh writing about wonderful poems is so difficult. Go read it! It's lovely!)
In other news, one of my Israel-Palestine poems was accepted by a really cool online journal that I'm very proud to be a part of. My poem should be published in February, so I'll let you know more about that when it happens.
Have a peaceful week.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Mahmoud Darwish's "Identity Card"
Click here to read Mahmoud Darwish's "Identity Card" (here "ID Card") at Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper.
A couple dedicated readers of my weekly Israel-Palestine poem have told me they can't find the links, and I'm thinking this is because the link color is not bright enough, especially for those who use tablets or Smartphones. I have neither, so please feel free to tell me whether I'm right about this. So I'm experimenting with just putting the link at the top, especially because I'm a bit too busy tonight to futz with the link colors, which I promise to do soon.
Mahmoud Darwish's poem, "Identity Card," is a great poem of Palestinian resistance. The poem is one of anger and direct confrontation, speaking back to a representative of the occupying force, likely an Israeli policeman or soldier. This poem was important in establishing Darwish's early reputation -- in fact, the poem was made into a protest song, prompting the IDF to put him under house arrest. Later, Darwish moved far away from this kind of rallying cry of a poem.
In the US, we too often talk about how "poetry makes nothing happen," but not only did "Identity Card" have very real effects -- both on the Palestinian people and Darwish himself -- but this poem still ruffles feathers. The rest of the Ha'aretz article about the poem is how in July 2016 the Israeli Defense Minister gave the Army Radio commander a dressing down for broadcasting a discussion of this poem on one of the station's educational programs.
Some poems stay dangerous forever.
Slick roads, people. Cold temps. Stay warm. Be safe. Go slow.
If you're not in the frozen north, go outside and dance for me please!
A couple dedicated readers of my weekly Israel-Palestine poem have told me they can't find the links, and I'm thinking this is because the link color is not bright enough, especially for those who use tablets or Smartphones. I have neither, so please feel free to tell me whether I'm right about this. So I'm experimenting with just putting the link at the top, especially because I'm a bit too busy tonight to futz with the link colors, which I promise to do soon.
Mahmoud Darwish's poem, "Identity Card," is a great poem of Palestinian resistance. The poem is one of anger and direct confrontation, speaking back to a representative of the occupying force, likely an Israeli policeman or soldier. This poem was important in establishing Darwish's early reputation -- in fact, the poem was made into a protest song, prompting the IDF to put him under house arrest. Later, Darwish moved far away from this kind of rallying cry of a poem.
In the US, we too often talk about how "poetry makes nothing happen," but not only did "Identity Card" have very real effects -- both on the Palestinian people and Darwish himself -- but this poem still ruffles feathers. The rest of the Ha'aretz article about the poem is how in July 2016 the Israeli Defense Minister gave the Army Radio commander a dressing down for broadcasting a discussion of this poem on one of the station's educational programs.
Some poems stay dangerous forever.
Slick roads, people. Cold temps. Stay warm. Be safe. Go slow.
If you're not in the frozen north, go outside and dance for me please!
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Monday, January 8, 2018
This Week: Aharon Shabtai's "Lotem Abdel Shafi"
During this last week, here, as in many places, it's been terribly cold. The kind of cold that has me rethinking my reactions to conversations I've had over the years with people who live in the Mediterranean climates of California (where I grew up) and refuse to leave. My grandmother, for one, said of the year she spent in Detroit, "you couldn't pay me enough to go live in that cold." (She lived in or around Burbank, California for much of her life.) "But four real seasons. . ." I probably retorted, when I should've shut my mouth and listened deeply. Anyway, since most of you probably survived some version -- or worse, New England! -- than I did, I'll shut up and move on to our Israel/Palestine poem of the week! (May it be warming up if it's been cold wherever you are!)
This week's poem is "Lotem Abdel Shafi" by Aharon Shabtai and translated by Peter Cole. Shabtai is an Israeli poet critical of the occupation. This poem is so interesting to me because this poem teaches me a lot as a writer, or at least presents particular approaches. Here Shabtai includes details that may be unfamiliar to American readers (this may be more Cole's problems and choices as a translator as well) such as who Haidar Abdel Shafi is. I think the poem does include enough detail that one can still enjoy the poem without knowing. (I admit I looked Haidar Abdel Shafi on Wikipedia, though I did not have to look up Ben Gurion, for example, though I wonder whether most poetry readers would need to.) Since I'm writing about Israel/Palestine to an American audience, I often wonder about what knowledge or presuppositions can I assume? how much do I need to explain? how much can I put in notes? how important is it to each poem and the whole that the reader understand these contextual details that to me seem so resonant and important? This poem shows one way of answering those questions of knowledge versus image.
What I also really like about this poem is its approach to a positive vision, a positive future of coexistence. I knew I wanted to write a poem with a positive vision of the future, but for a long time I really struggled with that. I finally did write a draft I'm still working on. In Shabtai's poem, I feel like you can see both the vision and the struggle. What an inspiration!
Enjoy! Have a wonderful productive and peaceful week!
This week's poem is "Lotem Abdel Shafi" by Aharon Shabtai and translated by Peter Cole. Shabtai is an Israeli poet critical of the occupation. This poem is so interesting to me because this poem teaches me a lot as a writer, or at least presents particular approaches. Here Shabtai includes details that may be unfamiliar to American readers (this may be more Cole's problems and choices as a translator as well) such as who Haidar Abdel Shafi is. I think the poem does include enough detail that one can still enjoy the poem without knowing. (I admit I looked Haidar Abdel Shafi on Wikipedia, though I did not have to look up Ben Gurion, for example, though I wonder whether most poetry readers would need to.) Since I'm writing about Israel/Palestine to an American audience, I often wonder about what knowledge or presuppositions can I assume? how much do I need to explain? how much can I put in notes? how important is it to each poem and the whole that the reader understand these contextual details that to me seem so resonant and important? This poem shows one way of answering those questions of knowledge versus image.
What I also really like about this poem is its approach to a positive vision, a positive future of coexistence. I knew I wanted to write a poem with a positive vision of the future, but for a long time I really struggled with that. I finally did write a draft I'm still working on. In Shabtai's poem, I feel like you can see both the vision and the struggle. What an inspiration!
Enjoy! Have a wonderful productive and peaceful week!
Monday, January 1, 2018
Happy New Year! Happy First Weekly Poem about Israel-Palestine!
I have several resolutions this year. One is to go for 100 rejections in 2018 -- to put myself out there again and again. Hopefully there'll be some acceptances in there too, but the real goal here is to get really brave.
Another resolution concerns this blog. I'd like to write here more and not let the blog languish. It seems to me that my studies in the psychology of genocide and human rights abuses have given me some insight -- or at least a different perspective -- on politics and, especially, othering. I'd like to share some of that and will be thinking of different ways of doing that in the coming days and weeks.
But more concretely, I've decided to link a poem related to Israel-Palestine here each week. (At first, I thought I would type it up here, given that actually writing someone else's poem with one's own fingers is such a great practice. But then I started researching copyright of poems on the web and found that those-in-the-know recommend not even quoting a line of someone's else's poem without explicit permission. So, linking it is!) These poems might be explicitly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or by an Israeli or Palestinian poet (though I'll probably choose it for what it suggests to me about the conflict or perspective on the conflict), or by Palestinian-Americans or Jewish-Americans explicitly or obliquely about the conflict.
This weekly link and the research to support it will help me with my own poems about Israel-Palestine. I include American poets here because sometimes poetry in translation assumes cultural information I don't have -- and certainly translations from languages as different from English as Hebrew and Arabic can sometimes leave a gulf that is difficult to cross as a reader. Since my own poems are an attempt to cross the distances between people and they grapple with how to talk about the conflict to readers who may or may not have a background in the conflict, poems by Americans here are particularly useful to me.
This week's poem is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Palestinians Keep Warm." I'm so happy to find the poem online because I've been reading and copying certain poems out of her Red Suitcase and especially loved this one for the themes of legacy and story. Don't let me ruin it for you. Go read it at the Academy of American Poets.
For all in the northern climes, keep warm!
Another resolution concerns this blog. I'd like to write here more and not let the blog languish. It seems to me that my studies in the psychology of genocide and human rights abuses have given me some insight -- or at least a different perspective -- on politics and, especially, othering. I'd like to share some of that and will be thinking of different ways of doing that in the coming days and weeks.
But more concretely, I've decided to link a poem related to Israel-Palestine here each week. (At first, I thought I would type it up here, given that actually writing someone else's poem with one's own fingers is such a great practice. But then I started researching copyright of poems on the web and found that those-in-the-know recommend not even quoting a line of someone's else's poem without explicit permission. So, linking it is!) These poems might be explicitly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or by an Israeli or Palestinian poet (though I'll probably choose it for what it suggests to me about the conflict or perspective on the conflict), or by Palestinian-Americans or Jewish-Americans explicitly or obliquely about the conflict.
This weekly link and the research to support it will help me with my own poems about Israel-Palestine. I include American poets here because sometimes poetry in translation assumes cultural information I don't have -- and certainly translations from languages as different from English as Hebrew and Arabic can sometimes leave a gulf that is difficult to cross as a reader. Since my own poems are an attempt to cross the distances between people and they grapple with how to talk about the conflict to readers who may or may not have a background in the conflict, poems by Americans here are particularly useful to me.
This week's poem is Naomi Shihab Nye's "How Palestinians Keep Warm." I'm so happy to find the poem online because I've been reading and copying certain poems out of her Red Suitcase and especially loved this one for the themes of legacy and story. Don't let me ruin it for you. Go read it at the Academy of American Poets.
For all in the northern climes, keep warm!
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