Chris Hedges' :War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"/The Addiction of War

In what must be seen as unusual act of courage, WCPN (90.3 FM in Cleveland) had a hour-long presentation this morning of Chris Hedges' lecture on the addictions of war. If only our media--whether public or private--could have been as direct and courageous as our radio station this morning, since before the beginning of this misguided adventure in Iraq. Thank you, WCPN, for showing the mettle it takes on the homefront to speak truths about war that go beyond the cliches.

Memorial Day/A Tour (Through) Behind the Lines

For today, Memorial Day, I went through the archives of previous posts on "Behind the Lines" blog that deal with veterans and the costs of war. From March 22nd's post:

My father just returned from a trip to Vietnam, some forty years after his initial service to our country, as a Naval Advisor on a South Vietnamese patrol gunboat. The day after his return, he was rushed to the hospital because of edema in his legs, which had swelled frighteningly during the trip. Unknown causes. Almost no one in contemporary Vietnam wanted to talk about the war, and he was both relieved and saddened by this. Where did it go? What wounds were--and are--just below the surface of languages, of faces, of skin?

Who knows how we will remember and memorialize this current war? It's difficult to imagine a memorial as moving and provocative as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C.--that black scar of mirroring granite half-sunk in the earth. If there's a limit to its representativity, it's that there are no Vietnamese names, names of the 2.5 million dead. Yet, despite this framing, it's still a testament to how art can act both as elegy and as outcry.

Here are a selection of the past posts:

Abu Ghraib Torture, American Veteran Suicides (April 28, 2008)

Winter Soldier 2008 post (April 8, 2008)

Poems on/about the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial (March 22, 2008)

Operation First Casualty/Iraq Veterans Against the War (November 11, 2007)

Poems of Peace and Change (including veterans Brian Turner and Yusef Komyunyakaa and survivor Dunya Mikhail) reading (July 7, 2007)

Peace,

Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan

Jeff Newberry sent along birthday greetings to the Weird Bard, Robert Zimmerman (a.k.a. Bob Dylan). And so why not? From his second album, when Bob was doing the folk protest better than anybody (before he did the transition to electric, better than anybody), he wrote as vituperative a critique of the military-industrial complex that's ever been written: "Masters of War."



"Masters of War"
Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

And, as a special treat, from D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

"Forty Years After Catonsville"

Published on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 by The Nation
"Daniel Berrigan: Forty Years After Catonsville"
by Chris Hedges
Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm. Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended and sent to prison for eighteen months.

Father Berrigan, unbowed at 87, sat primly in a straight-backed wooden chair as the afternoon light slanted in from the windows, illuminating the collection of watercolors and religious icons on the walls of his small apartment in upper Manhattan. Time and age have not blunted this Jesuit priest’s fierce critique of the American empire or his radical interpretation of the Gospels. There would be many more “actions” and jail time after his release from prison, including a sentence for his illegal entry into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, with seven other activists, where they poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads.

“This is the worst time of my long life,” he said with a sigh. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I find those expectations verified in the paucity and shallowness every day I live.”

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

“Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians,” he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. “She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking.”

Berrigan’s relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton’s “great contribution to the religious left,” he says, “was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, ‘Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.’”

“He could be very tough,” Berrigan says of Merton. “He said you are not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your discipline and tradition.”

Merton’s death at 53 a few weeks after the trial left Berrigan “deaf and dumb.” “I could not talk or write about him for ten years,” he says. “He was with me when I was shipped out of the country, and he was with me in jail. He was with his friend.”

The distractions of the world are for him just that — distractions. The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that “if voting made any difference it would be illegal.” He is critical off the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, “introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church,” including “anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny and secrecy and the placing of company men into positions of great power.” He estimates that “it is going to take at least a generation to undo appointments of John Paul II.” He despairs of universities, especially Boston College’s decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. “It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored,” he says. And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now “disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline.”

“The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life,” he says. “It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base.”

All empires, Berrigan cautions, rise and fall. It is the religious and moral values of compassion, simplicity and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human existence, although he says ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”

“The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual,” he adds. “We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is astonishing.”

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere,” he says. “I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”

“We have not lost everything because we lost today,” he adds.

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

“The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living — the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet — was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place,” he says. “We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.”

Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author, most recently, of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press).

Bill Berkson and Philip Metres at Myopic Books: Our Celestial Respiratory Function(s)

Thanks to poet Jennifer Karmin (who led me to Larry) and Larry Sawyer (poet, editor of Milk Magazine, and curator of the Myopic Poetry reading series), I found myself reading with Bill Berkson, whose works were introduced to me by Mike Magee some years ago. (If you've never heard Bill read before, you can hear a number of his readings archived at PennSound here.)

Bill has the blessed curse of having befriended such New York School dazzlers as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, whose literary immortality has been in inverse proportion to their time on earth, and a number of his recent poems reflect on this dilemma, including the aptly titled "The Pantheon is Flooded." One of a series of epigram poems, "Friends," begins: "my friends are ascending...destiny does things like that." Among my favorites of his reading were "Salad Spinner," with its derangement of Picabia ("you must grab time by the hair...tickle the impossible,)" the political found poem, "Public Service Announcement," "Without Penalty," among others. Though it's fairly safe to say that the New York School poets eschewed very explicit political poems, it's also true that they themselves at various moments, and critics like Mike Magee, have made compelling arguments for their engagement in the progressive political traditions of pragmatism. In his recent work, Berkson demonstrates his engagement in both the explicit and implicit political work of poetry.

All of our poems were read to the accompaniment of caterwaulers strumming on guitars and banjos on the street below, much to our sonic confusion. If only they'd been in the same room, we might have been able to syncopate. Afterwards, we went out for gelato and other Italian delights at Francesca's, where I had the chance to talk with Connie, Berkson's wife, curator at UCal Berkeley, about recent political art.

Thanks again to Larry Sawyer, Jennifer Karmin, Patrick Durgin, Alan and Diane Levin (for the photos!) and my folks, all of whom participated, even just by being there. And to Hugh, for videotaping the event.

Lisa Jarnot and the Poetics of Outrage(ousness)

Reading through Legitimate Dangers for an independent study this past semester, I came across Lisa Jarnot. While her blasts of language and steely irony clearly place her within the presiding aesthetic of Legitimate Dangers, her political outrage and outrageousness--blended with a relish for absurdism--made her stand out, at the edge, as it were, of "legitimacy."

The ability to be outrageous and yet also dramatize outrage is no easy balancing act, but somehow Jarnot expertly handles it. For one thing, very few people I know (and in particular, Arab Americans) would never, never, NEVER, joke about terrorism or being a terrorist. It's not good for one's health, what with all the phones being tapped. There are too many idiot literalists out there.

But seriously, as an poetic intervention on the chilling of public speech, Jarnot's "My Terrorist Notebook" and "The United States of America," published in the O Books anthology enough, feel something like Allen Ginsberg's "America" must have felt like for those at the famous reading in Berkeley in 1956, in which we can hear the laughter of recognition and of liberation.

"My Terrorist Notebook"

This is the beginning of my terrorist notebook all terrorism
all the time. I would have had to blow up the World Trade Center
to get anyone's attention when I was a kid. I'm tired of being nice.
Nice is out. I want to live in a cave with Osama and sleep on the floor
of the cave by myself. I want to poke people's eyes out with their
cell phone antennas. Maybe I would feel better if I exercised more.
Pretty soon I will run out of money and that will be the end of my
terrorist activities. We have a situation here, we terrorists, in our caves,
blowing up the rest of the many muddy mouses, swinging by their
mousie tails over the heads of the mousie moms under the muddy
mousie moon, don't move, and watch the mousie moon, you mom of
mouse, now watch the mousie moon.

"The United States of America"

I’m going to ask you to transition into a new theme about
the war. The thing that comes to mind now is the war:
the big war, the little war, the war that’s in my head,
the war around the edges of my ears, the war to kill
the troops, the war to kill the cows, the transitional war,
the bloody war, the not-bloody war, the semi-bloody war,
the figure of the neighborhood with war, running toward
the herds of cattle in the war, not good at war, awash in war,
the war-to-mores, the more and more to war.

*

These poems were published in Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003). Jarnot has a new book out, Night Scenes (2008).

Announcing Jacket 35

The tireless John Tranter and Pam Brown produce another iteration of Jacket. Amazing journal, really thorough reviews, essays, poems. You can find my piece on The Butterfly's Burden by Mahmoud Darwish, as well as a review of To See the Earth, in this one.

Announcing Jacket 35 -- Early 2008

http://jacketmagazine.com/35/index.shtml

Editor: John Tranter - Associate Editor: Pam Brown

========================================
and don't forget to check out Jacket's new RSS feed:

http://jacketmagazine.com/rss/rss.xml

Fresh news items, updated as the whim takes us
========================================

“There are only 10 kinds of computer programmers:
those who know binary and those who don’t.”



======================= Feature: Omar Pérez

Kristin Dykstra: On Omar Pérez, b. Havana, 1964

Cuban poet Omar Pérez in conversation with Kent Johnson, 2007

Kristin Dykstra: Gossiping Cuba: Omar Pérez and the Name of the Father

Omar Pérez: Eight poems from the manuscript «Lingua Franca» translated by Kristin Dykstra

Omar Pérez: Selections from «Heard about the fighting cat?» (Poems 1994–1998), translated by Kristin Dykstra

Omar Pérez and Kristin Dykstra: Germanía / Germaniadified (detranslations), a poem in English and Spanish.

Omar Pérez: Bibliography and Links to English-Language Internet Resources


======================= Feature: Sarajevo

Kent Johnson: The Fountain Where One’s Name Is Changed: Notes from the Sarajevo Poetry Days Conference, May 2007 [25 pages]


======================= Articles: 200 pages

Robert Bond: Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s «The Firewall» [30 pages]

On the Taipei avant-garde: Is This the End of «Poetry Now»? An essay by Steve Bradbury, with seventeen poems and an audio file [17 pages]

John Cunningham: Dance of Words: The poetry of John Newlove [4 pages]

Alan Davies: To Call Them by Their Dead Name (on Emanuel Carnevali) [21 pages]

Lawrence Giffin: Political Topology in Contemporary North American Poetry: Rod Smith’s «Deed» [20 pages]

Rod Smith: «Deed», reviewed by Matthew M. Gagnon [6 pages]

Michael Gottlieb: «Jobs of the Poets» [15 pages]

John Hennessy: Poetry’s Share: Don Share — Established Editor, Emerging Poet [9 pages]

Jason Morris: The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a “New Sincerity” [20 pages]

Nate Pritts: my memory is the history of time: Towards a Theory of Time in Olson [5 pages]

Susan M. Schultz: Dementia Blog (January 2007-December 2006) [15 pages]

Rebecca A Smith: Barry MacSweeney and the Bunting Influence: ‘A key figure in his literary universe’? [32 pages]

Jason Stumpf: Essay: Of Lyric Poetry [2 pages, but very pungent]

======================= Poems

Two Russian Poets, translated by Peter Golub: Eugenia Ritz and Andrei Sen-Senkov

Tom Clark: Seven poems

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Draft 88: X-Posting

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Draft 89: Interrogation

Liam Ferney: Cl

Angela Gardner: Three poems: Now that I am in Madrid and can think / Fade / when I leave the clouds

Barbara Henning: Five stories

Christopher (Kit) Kelen: Four poems after the Tang poet, Meng Jiao

Amy King: Four poems: The Arm of Eden / Where Bullfinches Go to Defy / Two if by Land, I Do / A Martyrdom Should Behave Us All

John Kinsella: Four poems: Graphology 676 (December 2007) / Graphology 688 / Graphology 698 / Graphology 699: Baudelaire

Ron Koertge: Three ghazals: Around the bush; Drinks; Gizmo

Federico Garcia Lorca: Two poems, translated by Gilbert Wesley Purdy: Gacela del Amor Imprevisto, and Casida de los Ramos

Gregory O’Brien: Wet Jacket Arm

Peter Robinson: Two poems: Graffiti Service / At the Institute

Tracy Ryan: Watching Brel

Lisa Samuels: Three poems: This bus kneels on request; Art’s fire sale; True likeness

Mitch Sisskind: Like A Monkey

William Stobb: Four poems: In a Mountain Pasture; Some Purple; Release; In/and

Matthew Tierney: Two poems: Batt & Roll; Perpetual Motion Machine

Kirsten Tranter: en route

Roger Van Voorhees: The Red Rolodex

Ouyang Yu: Two poems, translated by John Kinsella


======================= Interviews: 175 pages

Paris, 1968: Structuralism and linguistics: Émile Benveniste in conversation with Pierre Daix, 1968, translated by Matt Reeck [18 pages]

‘Come to Think of It, the Imagination’:
British poet Roy Fisher in Conversation with John Kerrigan [30 pages]

US poets Robert Grenier and Charles Bernstein: A Conversation, illustrated [76 pages]

Cuban poet José Kozer in conversation with Nicolás Mansito III, 28 December 2007 [17 pages]

Inventing Bablyon: Dmitry Kuzmin in conversation with Peter Golub on contemporary movements in Russian poetry [12 pages]

British poet Peter Riley in conversation with Todd Nathan Thorpe [21 pages]


======================= Reviews

Various authors: «The Grand Piano Project : Part 4:» San Francisco, 1975–80, reviewed by James Sherry

Fictitions: reviewed by Micaela Morrissette: Jesse Ball: «Samedi the Deafness»; Jenny Erpenbeck: «The Book of Words»; Daniel Grandbois: «Unlucky Lucky Days»; Joyelle McSweeney: «Flet»; Yannick Murphy: «Signed, Mata Hari»; Cees Nooteboom: «Lost Paradise»; Alice Sebold: «The Almost Moon»; T.H. White: «The Goshawk»; all reviewed by Micaela Morrissette

Rae Armantrout: «Next Life», reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling

Michael Ayres: «Kinetic» reviewed by Alistair Noon

Rachel Tzvia Back: «On Ruins and Return» reviewed by Andrew Mossin

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: «Torques: Drafts 58—76», reviewed by Patrick F. Durgin

Stephen Burt: «Parallel Play: Poems», reviewed by Michael Aiken

Mahmoud Darwish: «The Butterfly’s Burden», reviewed by Philip Metres

Angela Gardner: «Parts of Speech», reviewed by Pam Brown

Johannes Göransson: «A New Quarantine Will Take My Place», reviewed by Sean Kilpatrick

Noah Eli Gordon: «A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow», reviewed by Andrew Grace

Arpine Konyalian Grenier: «Part, Part Euphrates», reviewed by Celia Lisset Alvarez

Anthony Hawley: »The Concerto Form», reviewed by Andrew Rippeon

Cath Kenneally: «Ci Vediamo», reviewed by Michael Aiken

Jennifer L. Knox: «Drunk By Noon», reviewed by John Findura

Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump: «Morphology», reviewed by John Mercuri Dooley

Lewis MacAdams: «The River: Books One, Two, and Three», reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan

Duncan McNaughton: «Bounce», a note by Robert Grenier

Paul Metcalf: «Collected Works», reviewed by David McCooey.

Philip Metres: «To See the Earth», reviewed by Christopher Kempf

Stephen Paul Miller: «Being with a Bullet» reviewed by Thomas Fink

Maggie Nelson: «Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions», reviewed by Andrew Epstein

«OCHO» # 14, guest ed. Nick Piombino, reviewed by Nicholas Manning

«OCHO» # 15, ed. Francisco Aragón, reviewed by Craig Santos Perez

George Oppen: «Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers» Edited and with an Introduction by Stephen Cope; reviewed by Michael Heller: “Towards the Incomplete Work: A Note on Oppen’s «Daybooks»”

Ted Pelton: «Malcolm & Jack: and other famous American criminals», reviewed by Matthew Hotham

Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, Eds., «American Poets in the Twenty-first Century: The New Poetics», reviewed by Andrew Browne

Sarah Riggs: «Waterwork», and «chain of minuscule decisions in the form of a feeling», reviewed by Tim Wright

Adrienne Rich: «Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth», reviewed by Jill M. Neziri

Peter Robinson: «The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001—2006» reviewed by Ben Hickman

Leonard Schwartz: «Ear and Ethos», reviewed by Christine Pagnoulle

Louis Zukofsky

Mark Scroggins: «The Poem of A Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy», reviewed by Nicholas Manning

Jeffrey Side: «Carrier of The Seed» reviewed by Pam Brown

Dale Smith: «Susquehanna», reviewed by David Hadbawnik

Jordan Stempleman: «Facings», reviewed by Adam Fieled

Keston Sutherland: «Hot White Andy», reviewed by John Wilkinson: Mandarin Ducks and Chee-chee Chokes

Eileen Tabios: «I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved», reviewed by Anny Ballardini


======================= The Dusie Kollektiv Chapbook Series

Susana Gardner: Preface: Some of the Spineless

Nicole Mauro: Introduction:

Samar Abulhassan: Farah

Jules Boykoff: from The Slow Motion Underneath

Eli Queen and Jessica Bozek: correspondence

Joseph Cooper: «Memory/Incision»,
or as it is now called, «Touch Me»

Michelle Detorie: Selection from
Dusie chap «Bellum Letters»

Susana Gardner:: «EBB PORT»

Giles Goodland:Page 32 (poem 1931) line 15: insert double line space after the word ‘soup’: delete semi-colon

Jared Hayes: CaGeD

Anne Heide: An Instant of Flight

Jen Hofer: going going

Paul Klinger: Occasion in the Mosaic Distance

Carrie Hunter: Kine(sta)sis

Alana Madison: Two poems

Marci Nelligan: From «Specimen»

Kaia Sand: «tiny arctic ice»

Kathrin U. Schaeppi: «A Frog Jumps In»

Dusie Kollektiv Contributors, 2007

Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On"/Family Fractures

Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" is the perfect confluence of Motown R&B/soul with the heightened political awareness of the late 1960s. It's all the more poignant that the familial address of the song is suggestive of a different notion of the American socius than was playing out in the streets of Watts, Detroit, Chicago, and other American cities. When, some years later, Gaye was murdered by his father for intervening on another abuse of his mother, this song gathered another layer--how domestic violence, economic violence and international violence are manifestations of a similar breakdown.

"What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby

Two Interviews: Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara

Here are links to two interviews of Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, two Arab American poets whose work in 2008 has brought a new visibility to Arab American poetry.
Fady's interview is on the Poetry Foundation blog. Here's one snippet:

QUESTION: I heard the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott say, when asked about great American poets, something to the effect that an imperial power can't produce great art. Any response to that, and can an oppressed country or people produce great[er] poetry? And perhaps a related question, do you, as the son of Palestinian refugees, feel a responsibility to write political poetry? Do people expect you to be a Palestinian and political poet rather than just a poet who is Palestinian and political? Do you like that or mind that? Could you say something about the role of poetry in Palestinian culture/society as opposed to its role in the U.S.? In 10 words or less? (Kidding!) (You can have 20…)

FADY JOUDAH: In his Mural (2000), his book-long poem, Darwish says: “There’s no nation smaller than its poem.” And “The earth is a festival of losers, and we’re among them.” Something here echoes what Walcott said, perhaps: there is only poetry of defeat, no poetry (at least not one that’s worth it) of victory, at least in the contemporary world, beyond the archaic anthropologic heroism of Greeks and Trojans, tribes and Kings.

I don’t know what “political” poetry is, unless it is “bad” poetry, propagandist or apologist for injustice. Other than that, it is not “political,” rather it is dignified, humanizing. I don’t feel a “responsibility” to write political poems, I feel a compulsion to address that line where the universal is the personal and the personal, the universal. Being Palestinian almost becomes another’s question of me, and certainly not mine of myself. That question is in many ways one of power, of rewriting “the other.” Thus, what is called “political” poetry, for me, is to humanize the other without stripping them from the right to speak their narrative, or imposing on them my narcissistic projections as righteous poet.

Hayan's is with Iconia here. And a snippet:

MW: There is a long, deep tradition of Arab poetry, much of it religious. To what extent does the younger generation of Arab American poets see itself as heir to that longer tradition, rather than innovating something wholly new?

HC: There are some expressions of what might be termed “religious” poetry among Arab American poets, but I’m not sure how closely it resembles the religious tradition you’re referring to. Someone with a skilled ear, however, will hear some of the rhythms of Islamic poetry in the poems of Arab American poets. Or, there another person might see semblances in the ways that a poet celebrates this or that.

As far being “heirs” to a longer tradition, my guess is that most poets have a sense of both — being heirs, and being innovators. We have what came before us, as guides, as models, even as ways of thinking and creating to reject or turn our backs on; but whatever we do as poets, we always have those traditions to be influenced by. At the same time, we are always living in a “new” moment, and we can’t but help, I think, to create new ways of seeing the world, and expressing ourselves — maybe not “wholly new” but definitely not the same old, same old.

"Gray Matters"/Writing Beyond What We Know

Here's a little piece from Cleveland Magazine, called "Gray Matters," which highlights some of my work on documentary poetry. Documentary poetry, as concept and practice, is something that I keep returning to, partly because I've always been interested both in narrative voicings and in multivocality. The notion that invites us to include other voices in our work, other stories, has been one that relieves me from the monologic pressures of the lyric impulse, where the self is emperor and the fiefdom is La Mancha of the mind (yes, I'm reading Don Quixote right now). Thanks to Andy Netzel for his interest in the project and the book. n.b. The poem quoted is actually called, "Stopping By Krispy Kreme."