March Hiatus

As you can see, I've fallen down on the job of putting out Israeli and Palestinian poems each week. I've been very busy preparing new classes and now I'm sick. So I'm going to take a March hiatus so I can get well and then back to prepping these classes. See you in April!

"Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony"

This week's poem is my own "Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony" published today in Blotterature's Propaganda issue.  It's on page 12.

This poem is a found poem, so in a sense it's not really mine (so can I get away with using it as my weekly Israel-Palestine poem?). It comes from the documentary, The Law in These Parts, an examination of the system of military administration in place since the Six Day War in the Occupied Territories through interviews of Israeli judges, prosecutors, and military advisors. I highly recommend it if you're interested in human rights issues.

I've never had two poems published within a week of each other before! I feel very blessed!

And today it was nearly 60 degrees! Feels like spring!

"On Arafat's Yahrzeit"

It just so happens that my "On Arafat's Yahrzeit" was published today by HEArt Online Journal: Human Equity through Art! And as you can tell by the title, it's about Israel-Palestine, so I'm counting it as my poem for the week.

The long winter seems to be letting up, and we're in for a four-day spell of rain, complete with all manner of warnings. But it's rain! It won't be that cold! I've always read that peas don't mind a little snow, so today I went and did my best to plant peas in one of my soil's-only-frozen-in-the-corner raised beds. I rarely plant my peas early enough to be good and sick and them by the time it's time to pull them up and put in the green beans, so here's hoping. We'll see what happens. But probably because I didn't start artichokes in the basement this year (after two years of meager rewards), it felt good to have my hands in the dirt again.

Elana Bell's "There are things this poem would rather not say:"

This week's poem is Elana Bell's "There are things this poem would rather not say:"

I'm thinking about how American poets announce that their poems are about Israel/Palestine this week. I was thinking about some of Irena Klepfisz's poems and Ellen Bass's "Moonlight" and thought I would spend more time with how they announced -- or really located -- their subjects, but I discovered that I couldn't find these poems online. This brings up some interesting questions about which poems get posted online and why (that aren't specific to Israel/Palestine). So instead here is a poem that never actually announces that it is specifically Israel/Palestine, but all the specific markers are there. But by not actually naming Israel or Palestine, the poem also opens up to being about the situation -- of being a remorseful person who is a member/descendant of a colonizing and ruling force, which is, alas, a more common situation than being an Israeli or a Jew. This poem is almost an apology and gives me a lot to think about. For example, what would this poem look like if it were in the voice of an American speaker to Native Americans?

Enjoy!

By the way, I'm sorry about posting this late, but last night when posting this poem was the last thing left on my to-do list, my ear started to ache; I decided rest was the best thing.

Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus"

This week's poem is Taha Muhammad Ali's "Exodus."

Last week I was thinking a lot about how I come to poems by Palestinian and Israeli poets with an expectation that I'll find traces of the conflict. If I don't find them, as in last week's poem, then I mark the silence. In Amichai's poem, this silence can be seen as privilege. But of course all poets write about many things; while it's safe to assume that a poet may speak to his/her own oppression or specific historical situation, it's not required. What's more, every trace of conflict in a Palestinian poet's poem may not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When reading Taha Muhammad Ali's poem, it seems safe to assume that those who refuse to leave are Palestinians. And this may be true. But there are interesting complicating factors. The poem's title, "Exodus," has a particularly Jewish cast to it, at least to me, Exodus being the name of the book of what most people think of as the great Jewish story in the Torah/Bible -- the story of Passover, the most important holiday in the Jewish year. (Probably most Jews will agree that Passover is most important; but not all. After all, two Jews, three opinions!) At the same time, the Biblical story of Exodus was a story of leaving, not of refusing to leave, not cleaving to the land. But then there's the interesting date at the end of the poem "5.11.1983." When I look up May 11, 1983, I don't see anything. Maybe this has personal rather than political significance. But when I look up November 5, 1983, inverting the month and day as people in the Middle East do (I remember this from when I lived for a short time in Cairo), I see that's the date when a truck loaded with explosives crashed through the entrance of an Israeli compound in Tyre, Lebanon, setting off a bomb, killing 39 people and injuring more. Muslim Jihad claimed responsibility. Israel responded by striking Palestinian targets on the Beirut-Damascus Highway. So if we bring the specifics of this particular set of events into our reading of the poem, as may be suggested by the date, then who is refusing to leave? Is it the Palestinians? Is it the Israelis?

I don't know. But the poem is bigger than these answers. Enjoy!

Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel"

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."

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.