tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59102917099652831662024-02-19T04:57:52.278-05:00Behind the Lines: Poetry, War, & PeacemakingFurther thoughts on the cultural labor of poetry and art. Not merely "is it good?," but "what has it accomplished?"...reviews of recent poetry collections; selected poems and art dealing with war/peace/social change; reviews of poetry readings; links to political commentary (particularly on conflicts in the Middle East); youtubed performances of music, demos, and other audio-video nuggets dealing with peaceful change, dissent and resistance.Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.comBlogger1312125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-15271776402800042222023-12-31T10:36:00.004-05:002023-12-31T10:40:52.550-05:00A Year in Review (2023)<br /><br />Though the great song return no more<div>There’s keen delight in what we have:<br />The rattle of pebbles on the shore<br />Under the receding wave.</div><div>--W.B. Yeats</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Last year went down the drain<br />They all do really<br />Why complain<br />Drink a cup of kindness (yet)<br />And say goodbye to our regrets<div>--Scrawl, "11:59: It's January"</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/elB7qGEyIMU" width="320" youtube-src-id="elB7qGEyIMU"></iframe></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>Mostly, I've been heartbroken. Summer firesmoke from Canada as a whole country of trees burned, fall horrors in Israel and genocide in Gaza, ongoing family health nightmares. </div><div><br /></div><div>Still plodded on. Joyful, in the despite. </div><div><br /></div><div>Also--our ongoing peacebuilding program in Ireland, met the Pope in Rome, went to the south of France and walked in Van Gogh's footsteps in Arles. Shared poems and traded words everywhere. </div><div><br /></div><div>Grateful for family, friends, comrades, editors, and readers. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>One book: <a href="https://www.greenlindenpress.com/books/ochre-and-rust"><i>Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky</i> (Green Linden, 2023). </a></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNUbHMglgDDdvENKUMeD638S4bOiPZXqiq0FFO7OfmSpvsXxCMZNETog1wxwMZ81Q60TqH7v57wagTfJcd11gPU9mXwZD6RS9pt0e89CnstVprmzyxH9NSPW6mZGuv6_qZYcZu9GZfxHlTFTcwJToWKOsq8hevYt953Re1nY5JRGvWCYUsqTekx2GXekA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="759" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNUbHMglgDDdvENKUMeD638S4bOiPZXqiq0FFO7OfmSpvsXxCMZNETog1wxwMZ81Q60TqH7v57wagTfJcd11gPU9mXwZD6RS9pt0e89CnstVprmzyxH9NSPW6mZGuv6_qZYcZu9GZfxHlTFTcwJToWKOsq8hevYt953Re1nY5JRGvWCYUsqTekx2GXekA=w263-h400" width="263" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And these pieces published this year (poems, translations, essays, interview):</div><div><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://diodepoetry.com/pmacwpm/">“Poetic Mapping: A Conversation with
Philip Metres by Carol Fadda.” Diode 16.3. Fall 2023. <o:p></o:p></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><a href="http://diodepoetry.com/psurtsev_dimitir/"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“I
drink dusty water,” “A ship hovers…,” “Sonnet,” “Stanzas,” “How dirty and
spongy…” by Dimitri Psurtsev (translation). Diode. 16.3. Fall 2023.</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://lithub.com/why-the-russian-protest-poems-of-sergey-gandlevsky-still-matter-today/">“Why
the Russian Protest Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky Still Matter (A Homeland Made of
Words).” Lit Hub, October 2023.</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://writerschronicle.mydigitalpublication.com/?m=32260&i=806000&p=2&ver=html5">“More
Than Just a Pretty Hat: On Titles.” Writer’s Chronicle. September 2023.</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://conversationsmagazine.org/let-us-be-attentive-how-wondering-leads-to-justice-seeking-ac40b6dd11f4">“Let
Us Be Attentive! How Wondering Leads to Justice-Seeking.” Conversations on
Jesuit Higher Education. Fall 2023.</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-forty-six/issue-forty-six-sergey-gandlevsky-philip-metres/"> “To Y.K.” by Sergey Gandlevsky (translation). Adroit.
46. 4023.</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.schlagmagazine.com/philip-metres/the-forecast-for-cleveland--may-6th--2013">“The
Forecast for Cleveland,” “Thrown,” “Ode to the Uilleann.” Schlag. 6. August
2023. </a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/07/25/928-prayer">“Prayer.” The
Slowdown Show. Minnesota Public Radio. July 2023.</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2097-going-for-broke"> “Disparate Impacts.” Going for Broke: Living
on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country (2023)</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in; vertical-align: baseline;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813182438/what-things-cost/#:~:text=What%20Things%20Cost%3A%20an%20anthology,own%20truth%20of%20today's%20economy."> “Disparate Impacts.” What Things Cost: An
Anthology for the People. Lexington: U of Kentucky Press, 2023.</a></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/art-of-revising-poetry-9781350289253/">“Letters
I Must Wait to Open: Revising ‘Ashberries: Letters.’” The Art of Revising
Poetry: 21 US Poets on their Drafts, Craft, and Process. Ed. Kim Stafford and
Charles Finn. Bloomsbury, 2023.</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://theadroitjournal.org/2023/06/15/poetry-kinship-zach-thomas-and-the-writers-in-residence-program/">“Poetry
Kinship: Zach Thomas and the Writers in Residence Program.” Adroit Journal. 45.
June 2023. <o:p></o:p></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.cincinnatireview.com/samples/the-paradise-of-danez-smiths-summer-somewhere-by-philip-metres/">“The
Paradise of Danez Smith’s ‘Summer, Somewhere.’” Cincinnati Review. Spring 2023.</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 11pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://blogs.uakron.edu/uapress/product/marbles-on-the-floor-how-to-assemble-a-book-of-poems/">“Dreaming
the Total Poem, Assembling the Counterarchive, Writing the Refuge.” <o:p></o:p></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://blogs.uakron.edu/uapress/product/marbles-on-the-floor-how-to-assemble-a-book-of-poems/">Marbles
on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press,
2023).</a></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in; vertical-align: baseline;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://aaww.org/wind-ode/">“Wind/ode.” The Margins. April 2023.</a></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in; vertical-align: baseline;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/21716"> “Qasida for Abdel…” and
“Explanation.” The Journal. 2023.</a></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in; vertical-align: baseline;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/880449/pdf">“Map the Not Answer.” Pleiades.
2023.</a></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in; vertical-align: baseline;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="https://www.thedodgemag.com/dimitripsurtsev1">“I’ve never drunk tea,” “God,
your clouds,” “Like God’s grace,” “How tired…” by Dimitri Psurtsev. Translations. The
Dodge. January 2023. </a></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-27884943949032451022023-12-29T18:08:00.004-05:002023-12-29T18:08:51.569-05:00Fugitive/Refuge (2024) coming soon! <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgcxtJJPE8gHKRPCjNefsrDB2U14g-GDpfkEKRSdQ-OrjquN4F6dkcNIEjByVJnTHTF49PhPHS-eoKCDIdCMxLavnt5LSM4S9anmc3_XO-b-63gHM9unoLy123cHU0dnH6UeJR0K-quBhkfQ0LXpG6JcZJJTdxqj2RcVu6NgMQGc72AM8ID4rYJEbpO0/s618/Fugitive%20Refuge%20cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvgcxtJJPE8gHKRPCjNefsrDB2U14g-GDpfkEKRSdQ-OrjquN4F6dkcNIEjByVJnTHTF49PhPHS-eoKCDIdCMxLavnt5LSM4S9anmc3_XO-b-63gHM9unoLy123cHU0dnH6UeJR0K-quBhkfQ0LXpG6JcZJJTdxqj2RcVu6NgMQGc72AM8ID4rYJEbpO0/s320/Fugitive%20Refuge%20cover.png" width="207" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/fugitive-refuge/">Coming soon! </a><p></p><p>In <i>Fugitive/Refuge</i>, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on ancient poetic traditions and invents new forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and close-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism.<br /><br /><i>Fugitive/Refuge</i> pronounces the urge both to remember the past and to forge new ways of being in language. In one section, Metres meditates on the Arabic greeting “ahlan wa sahlan,” framing these older forms of welcome as generous, embodied ways to respond to the digital alienation and mass migration of postmodern societies. In another section, he dialogues with Dante to inform new ways of understanding ancestral and modern migrations and the injustices that have burdened them. Ultimately, Metres uses movement to create a new place—one to home and dream in—for all those who seek shelter.</p>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-45743429126744200262023-11-24T09:30:00.001-05:002023-11-24T09:30:46.983-05:00Ceasefire Now! <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzTyjAUtl2pNsd1Oi-EIb2Tpc8A0-NDI-SsmfR2jptE_CpSL7y7qJkWl2uoljO81SMOATqHaEnoFYzXBk8iABvFXU46WeIEpjkstcmdtvCApr_Oc9GcuznBJAIGLbIgDvYLPEiMWPkLmIk6d7l4G3nyY5Nlmg3MWsd7rxQxiVffMRmI-pljSgeDbdpdD4/s1280/Cease%20Fire%20Now.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzTyjAUtl2pNsd1Oi-EIb2Tpc8A0-NDI-SsmfR2jptE_CpSL7y7qJkWl2uoljO81SMOATqHaEnoFYzXBk8iABvFXU46WeIEpjkstcmdtvCApr_Oc9GcuznBJAIGLbIgDvYLPEiMWPkLmIk6d7l4G3nyY5Nlmg3MWsd7rxQxiVffMRmI-pljSgeDbdpdD4/s320/Cease%20Fire%20Now.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-61949937194934369792020-12-14T22:39:00.001-05:002020-12-14T22:39:58.435-05:00Home Front Practices: a dialogue with E.J. McAdams and Philip Metres<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 13.65pt; mso-pagination: none;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">HOME
FRONT PRACTICES: <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a
dialogue with E.J. McAdams and Philip Metres<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This
interview took place on a road trip from Woodstock, CT to Hartford, CT on April 24, 2015 to visit
activist and Holy Cross graduate, Chris Doucot, at the Catholic Worker house on
Clark Street. The night before, Metres had given a poetry reading with poet
William Wenthe in honor of poet Robert Cording, who was our mentor when we were
students at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. The topic of the
conversation was focused on Metres’s 2015 book </span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sand Opera</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br />
E. J. McAdams (EJM): <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last night, you
were giving a reading at Holy Cross where you went to college and got started
as a poet. When did you feel like you wrote your first poem and that you were a
poet?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you remember a poem or a verse
that you felt like was the beginning?<br />
<br />
Philip Metres (PM): You know, I just had to give a speech to a high school
assembly, and one of the things that I had to do was make an argument for
English and creative writing as something <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>worthy of study. I wanted to reach them where
they were in their own lives as high school students, because that's where poetry
started for me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">I distinctly remember reading T. S. Eliot's “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in high school when I was a senior in my AP
English class, and wondering how the hell this guy knew how I was thinking
about things. I totally mind-melded with that dramatization of a person sort of
locked in self-consciousness, unable to act: “Do I dare descend the stair?</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Do I dare eat a peach?</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Do I dare disturb the universe?”</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">There was something that really appealed to
me and my sense of confused masculinity. At that age, you're just raging with
hormones. And I was at an all-boys school, and had no way of dealing with this
seethe. Prufrock was this invitation to feeling that I wasn't so alone. In my
aloneness, I wasn't alone.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
<br />
That was something that others had struggled with. And I think I've always
found in literature, these echoes. Sometimes paralleling my experience. Sometimes
very different. But feeling like, in the process of reading, and then writing,
that I was not so much…not alone, not in exile. Prufrock, I think, was this,
really important poem for me. You know there are other moments too….<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: But what about as a writer of poems?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
PM: Yeah, yeah. So I think that like literally after reading that and “The
Waste Land,” and some other things, I just started fancying myself a poet. My
mom had a Masters in English and loved Wordsworth. So, when I would come home
and talk about the stuff I was studying she was totally into it. She was very
supportive, and she loved the romance of the poet as an idea, as a myth. And I
did too. [LAUGH] I mean it was a way that I could identify myself that would
make sense of the very things that made me feel so much an outsider.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
I didn't really know what to do with that so literally I just started writing
madly. I was numbering them when I started—hundreds of poems. Right around the
same time, we went on a vacation and visited the Mayan temple at Chichen Itza and
that totally blew my mind. It made me think of “Ozymandias,” which I had just
read. The sources for me, the one's that first started making me write, were
the classics. I fell head over heels in love with this beautiful girl that my
sister knew. My grandfather died, and then I went to Mexico. So, the great
primal themes—love, death, encountering otherness, travel, whatever. So I was
writing all these poems that were probably terrible, but they were enthused by
language. Once you find this kind of medium it's such a beautifully empowering,
primitive thing—to be able to use language and have language use you. It was a
great organizer of all the chaos that I was feeling inside and outside, not a
simple ordering, but a way of making it into music, the way that music is just
organized sound. In the same way, poems were organizing all sorts of things for
me and giving them sense.<br />
<br />
So your question was when do I feel like I really wrote a poem?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don't know. [LAUGH] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it took years. I mean every time you're
writing a poem, you think this is it—this is the best fucking thing I've ever
written. <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: [LAUGH] <br />
<br />
PM: And I mean if you're doing it right—you know some days it doesn't feel that
way—but if you're in the groove, it's the most beautiful trance. Then, of
course, the heat cools and you have to deal with its gnarly-ness or it's
incompletion or whatever. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">If I were ever to write a selected poems, I think
the first poem would be “Ashberries.”—probably because it took me so goddamn
long to write. And I feel like it says so much…it captures so much that I was
unable to capture. The poem literally took me almost a decade to finish. I
arrived in Russia in 1992 and was absolutely entranced by the place. Immediately
I started working on a bunch of poems, and this was one of them. I had three of
the four sections written within a month of being there. It's an epistolary set
of poems about encountering this strange place, but there was something missing.
Every year, I would bang away on it again and see what could be done. About
eight years later, I realized that the terror of the experience wasn't there. The
third section of “Ashberries,” which was dealing with that terror, finally came
to me and everything came together like iron filings to a magnet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: One of the things that Bill (Wenthe) said last
night that I thought was interesting was that it's really important for a poet
to know another poet who takes their poetry seriously. You talked about how your
mother did that. Who was the first poet to take you seriously?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you even think it's important?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
PM: My first workshop at Holy Cross was with Cyrus Cassells. That was a great
experience for me because I needed to share my work. Poetry was becoming too
much a kind of self-congratulatory act. It is dangerous when you write like
that. A workshop is still a really good way of making sure that you're not just
jerking off. You want a poem to be a conversation, a dialogue. You want it to
be this medium by which we encounter the other in ourselves and the others
outside of ourselves. I distinctly recall and still have all the drafts where
he wrote in red pen that I was being sentimental. Like every one of them has
the word “sentimental” on it. I felt a little burned by his critiques and I
knew that he favored other poets in the class, which hurt my ego. But itwas not
necessarily a bad thing because I saw actually how good the others were, how
they were light years ahead of me. <br />
<br />
But Bob, Bob Cording, obviously. Cording was the one who took—I mean it was the
most beautiful, generous thing—he took my work seriously and took me seriously.
And so what Bill said exactly was my experience. When I think about the poems
that I was giving Bob, it kind of astounds me that he was able—not to just
simply put them in a drawer and say, okay, these aren't very good [LAUGH] you need
to write a lot more and a lot sharper than this, but he didn't, he just said
this is what I think this poem is about, this is what I think it's doing, this
is what I think it needs to do. I'll never forget that great grace that he gave
of just being a listener and taking my work seriously. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: So I want you to talk about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand Opera</i>, which I have seen gestating
over the years. How did you get to the point where you knew <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand Opera</i> was in the right form and
that you were ready to publish it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
it took a while.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">PM: It was definitely stages. People like to
disparage the idea of poetry projects and they say, “Oh, the poem is a thing,” but
I think both ways of exploring poetry are beautiful and important and
necessary. I oscillate between them. I have some big general ideas of something
I'd like to do, and then there's just these individual things that happen, these
individual kind of moments which are poems.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure chronologically what the first stuff I wrote for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand Opera</i> actually is, but I know that <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>working with the Abu Ghraib testimonies of
2007 was the most important start. I was working through the various drafts
that began with testimonies, and then started to work with the Guantanamo Standard
Operating Procedure manual. Finally, I began appropriating the language of the
testimonies of the US military personnel. When all of that started to come
together that was a thing. In a way that is itself a little opera and so that
was the thing I felt most strongly about. So almost every summer, I had a
different thing that I'd start getting obsessed with.<br />
<br />
There were these poems that were told from an Arab-American point of view about
9/11, those are the Home Front poems. I am fascinated by the possibilities of
the dialogic. I always like to see poems having conversations with other poems.
Instead of just having these Home Front poems be on their own, I put them
alongside the testimonies of a guy who was rendered at a black site. It created
a nice friction. By then, I had enough poems that it seemed like something, but
it went through a lot of permutations—I'm embarrassed to say how many drafts. [LAUGH]
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">So after it was accepted, I actually pulled out a
section and put in two other sections. The editor had one comment, just one
comment about the whole book which was that the sequence “Instants” (which I
love and I want to put in another book) seems like an odd man out in the
collection and I wanted to figure out what to do if I took it out. So I just
said okay, I'm going to see what happens if I take it out—the reason it was in
there in the first place is it's a poem meditating on lots of the same issues, on
the optics of domination and our desire to control our <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and the sexual component that's related to
that. It tells the story of Edward Muybridge. So there are many reasons why it
does connect, but because so many of the other poems were so topically
connected, this one just seemed a little off so I took it out. I looked at all
the other stuff that I had written and decided that I wanted to do some things
that hadn't been done in the book. I wanted to have a greater diversity of
points of view and voices and to work with some Iraqi voices that weren't
necessarily about the war. Poems like “The Iraqi Curator’s Power Point” is
really important to me because it's about this guy who loves this artistic
patrimony of Iraq and is devastated by its plunder. There was another poem for
Nawal Nasrallah, who's a friend of (my wife) Amy (Breau) and me, called “A
Toast” that I wrote for her beautiful cooking. <br />
<br />
And there was another poem quoting a poet’s letter to me. She had just read the
book in manuscript, and said she was having a hard time responding to it; she
had a friend at Indiana University who was working for the State Department who
committed suicide. Her letter shows that there are a lot of people affected by
these wars, a lot of people who experience a crisis of conscience. We don't really
know why he did it and …<br />
<br />
EJM: Well, there's a sense of something nefarious.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">PM: Yeah. <br />
<br />
EJM: That he didn't do it. <br />
<br />
PM: Right. <br />
<br />
EJM: Someone did it to him. <br />
<br />
PM: Right, yeah. <br />
<br />
EJM: Going back through what you've talked about today, it seems like you're
often looking for what's missing. Do you think that that's a fair
characterization, not only in terms of what's missing from the book, but a real
sense of which is the voice that's missing? Is this what drew you in general to
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand Opera</i> project?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">PM: Absolutely. You immediately made me smile because
there's something there. I could say a couple of things about that. One is that
I'm very interested in works of art that are dialogical in the Bahktinian sense,
for example, what Tolstoy does in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War and
Peace</i> where you see how all these different characters see things from
these very different points of view. Everyone talks about Dostoyevsky's
dialogism, but I think that Tolstoy is really fascinating too. What has drawn me
to poetry is just listening to voices, listening to the still, small voice as
they call it or Michael Stipe's singing, “Could it be that one small voice
doesn't count in the room?” “Shaking Through” is the song. And when I heard
that, I was like yeah, why does one small voice not count? I had an ambition
that I wanted the book to be bigger than a protest. The arias were able to do
that. I felt like I'm responding to the coherence of this as a work of art, not
simply as a response to the Abu Ghraib torture. And so, I always feel like that
you know a work of art is getting close to being where it needs to be when it
seems way smarter than you are.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: [LAUGH] <br />
<br />
PM: Sometimes I read a poem of mine – like I did last night – and think “Who
the fuck wrote this?” Literally I was reading it but I couldn’t remember
writing it. You know?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I literally don't.
I'm like wow, that's a pretty good sentence, a pretty good line.<br />
<br />
EJM: [LAUGH] <br />
<br />
PM: So I'm sure there's always this feeling, and there are ones that you don't
like, but I think that the way the work arrives mysteriously, and if it
continues to be a little mysterious too, I think that that's probably a good
thing. I love that anecdote, in Dean Young’s book of poetics called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Art of Recklessness</i>. He says that he
had a conversation the other day with Robert Hass<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in which Hass said that he still really
doesn't feel like he knows what he's doing. And then Dean Young says, if Robert
Hass says he doesn't know what he's doing, then we need to figure out how to be
better at not knowing what we're doing.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">EJM: [LAUGH] <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">PM: And I think that, to me, that's true. That just
was such a relief. Because I think of Hass as this sort of encyclopedic mind whose
work just seems so deft and magical. <br />
<br />
EJM: One of the things that you said just now is that you didn't see this as a
pure protest. And, what that makes me think is that I know you study both the
tradition of war poetry and the poetry of the resistance to war. You gesture
towards what a poetry of peace might be. In particular, your idea of the home
front feels like something new in poetry, or at least a place for exploration
in our conversation. This past year I read Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad: Or
the Poem of Force,” and your poems are exploring force and forces, and how
they're put on people's bodies but also how they're put on you at home. We, at
home—we're not in the battle. We're not always in the protest. We're at home,
and we're moved. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you've been
thinking about force and the home front?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><br />
<br />
PM: Yeah. Well, that sequence of poems is called “Home Front/Removes.” I wanted
to think about the space in which I found myself, in which we find ourselves, which
is very often distant from the scene of battle. There's a reflex gesture, in
our culture, to celebrate the authenticity of the first person narrative, and
that has meant, in our culture, that the soldier's view is the one that is most
authoritative and exciting, and closest to the action. But in the process of
writing my book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Behind the Lines</i>, I
wanted to create a critical space and see how poets dealt with this, in a
sense, bias. This rejection of the imagination is part of our culture. We are ingrained
with a fear of the imagination. Rukyeser talks about that in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Life of Poetry</i> very eloquently. <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">“Home Front/Removes” is setting alongside each
other the domestic and the global. This domestic experience of 9/11 filtered
through an Arab American point of view, which is basically my point of view. I
just want to say a word about the Removes, though. I was really interested in Mohamed
Bashmilah's story, this Yemeni national who was detained and rendered to black
sites. I was thinking about the way in which the story that he was telling was
weirdly, hauntingly echoing a text that I used to teach in a “Major American Writers”
class: Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, an American settler who got
captured by Native Americans and was taken from place to place. But it's a book
that's a testimony to her keeping the faith amongst these “savages.” And
reading this guy's story, I thought, he's Mary Rowlandson, you know?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We're doing exactly what this narrative is militating
against and so that's why it's called removes. It's also that she, the reason
why I use the word “removes” is that Mary Rowlandson refers to each of her
displacements, as removes, which has a kind of geographic and also theological
register. I was fascinated by that idea. And also, of course, we are removed in
all sorts of ways, so it just seemed like a really interesting kind of binary
with home front. Okay, so back to the home front. <br />
<br />
EJM: One section of your book is called “Home Front/Removes,” but let me throw
out that I think there is an element of the whole book that might be called a
“home front practice.” I know on your blog </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Behind the Lines: Poetry, War,
& Peacemaking</span></i></a></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> you have wrestled
with the question of, what can a poem do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>what can a book do? what can a poet do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And I felt like there was a gesture in the book to almost embody a kind
of home front practice or a way that we could all position ourselves toward the
violence and oppression in our world. Is that fair?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you see the other poems at all fitting
into a kind of home front practice?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
PM: Oh absolutely. The first poem is an invocation. It is a kind of prayer and
then we move right into the arias. But then the next section, it begins with a
poem which is sort of a classic American depiction of the domestic scene in
which a guy is picking up the newspaper outside who sees an image of this
woman, this Iraqi woman mourning in the paper. And I really self-consciously
wanted to move us to that space which is where most of us find ourselves most
of the time: we're encountering war through a newspaper or something online. And
so that was a really explicit attempt to acknowledge my place-ness on the home
front.<br />
<br />
And just as a term, it goes back to that thing that Paul Virilio says which is
that the real war is the endless preparation for war, which he gets actually
from William James, who, in his essay, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Moral Equivalent of War</i> from 1910, which we read in Professor Michael True's
class at Holy Cross, says the exact same thing. James was saying at that time that
we need to think about where the war is starting and where it's permeating. Because
we live in this society where a huge percentage of our taxes is going to not
only defense but security, and then paying down interest on our excessive
expenditures, and, quote unquote, defense and security. We need to think of the
home front as a site of, as a part of, it's a part of battle space, really. I
mean, not just the political battle, but all the ways in which we're constantly
being interpolated into a kind of imperial subjectivity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I listen to NPR, where you can hear multiple sides
of stories and critiques, but the energy and the social force of the project of
so much of journalism has maintained the cold war consensus about how we talk
about what it is that the United States is. We're constantly being immersed in
it. Because I'm interested in the Middle East and have this Saidian critique of
Orientalism, it's so obvious. You start to see the ways in which there's some
kind of little gesture pandering toward these other points-of-view, but
ultimately, it often feels self-congratulatory – “We're interested in you,” you
know?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You representative of all you
other, you know, brown people.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
EJM: So that's interesting. Someone could in a very surface way read your book
like that. Talk a little bit about what you are doing that's undermining that potential
to pander.<br />
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PM: I think that that's the thing that I wrestled with the most, ethically. The
most primitive version of this question is: are you benefiting in some way,
from writing about the suffering of others? And are you positioning yourself as
an authority on speaking about those others? Those are the most important
questions to ask. That's what Spivak was asking in “Can the Subaltern Speak.” She's
saying, you liberals who think that you are representing unrepresented
positions, you think you're giving voice to people but you're doing what she
calls epistemic violence to them. You are not representing them. You are—I
don't think she says benefiting from them, but you're missing the target. You're
not hearing what you need to hear. And what I love about where she's coming
from is this Derridian ethics that's basically saying there's a certain
impossibility to the project of representation. You're constantly either
relying on a transcendent thing, or you're cutting something out. I think
that's a fair criticism of the work. I mean, any time you start representing,
you can be engaging in epistemic violence. It's the question of the frame. <br />
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EJM: When I read your book, epistemic violence is not what's coming across to
me.<br />
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PM: Well, that’s good. <br />
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EJM: Clearly, from what you just said, you wrestled with the questions that
Spivak raised. So how do you think that ethics and framing comes across at the
level of the writing, at the level of language, at the level of the page. How
did you challenge facile readings?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Because it seems very successful. <br />
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PM: [LAUGH] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, one thing is that the book employs what
we would call investigative poetics, or documentary poetic kinds of approaches
which enable you to start thinking about focusing on the dominant, official narrative
that's doing erasure.<br />
<br />
There was this interesting thing, I don't know if it even exists anymore, called
White Studies or Whiteness Studies. The idea there was basically what
African-Americans during the Black Power phase of the Civil Rights movement and
we're saying, why don't you fucking talk to your community instead of trying to
hang out with us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hey, get your own shit
straight. So I think that that's one of the things that's happening. Have you
seen this redneck on YouTube talking about white supremacy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does these little YouTube videos and he's
literally talking to white people about starting to confront the racism. White
supremacy in the dominant culture, and it's just hilarious and awesome. And
it's just an anecdote to say that we need to look at.<br />
<br />
I remember when I was in grad school Barbara Harlow said that instead of
studying literature we should be reading the NAFTA agreement because that is
going to really change everything. This was in the 90's. This piece of
legislation is going to utterly change the lives of millions of people in ways
we don't really know exactly. It's part of globalization: building these
highways, these vertical highways between Canada and Latin America. And we need
to look at it very carefully. That's one approach, you know this is like, Look
at what people are saying, test it out. See what it reveals to us. It's
representing the marginalized voices. You just look at what's out there, and,
take it on its terms like what Zizek said about moving through the fantasy. What
is this really saying about us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
showing that mirror, which is a classic enlightenment idea of what art does. So
that's one way. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">By virtue of some of my relationships and I think working
with the text of those voices was something that in the Abu Ghraib part and the
removes say something about how the art should be changing. It should be
changing you in some way. And I feel like I found reading those things really,
really hard. I saw myself as trying to carry those, the fragments of those
things, rather than trying to show them to others to prove something. It was
like I was just kind of trying to be with those voices that could I have no
geographical access to. And I don't know if that makes any difference at all
but, I, I knew that it was affecting me and I thought that in light of how much
objectification of those bodies was happening that having those voices is, as
part of a retelling, important. <br />
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EJM: This provides a good transition as I want to ask your about the recurring
focus on the eye in sight, the focus on the ear in hearing, and the focus on
the body in sensing and feeling. The problem with being on the home front is
that the things you are bringing forward in the book are happening in the world
but they're hard to feel, right? First they're hard to see – they're missing –
they're removed, but then they're very hard to feel too. You seem to work with
the material in the poems to try to feel, and then to bring that feeling across
to the readers. Please talk about how you see sight and hearing and the
body?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">PM: No. Right, right, right. I'm just thinking
about if you go to the epigraphs that there's St. Paul’s “if the body were an eye,
where would the hearing be.” I'm aware of what Laura Mulvey calls our “scopophilia.”
She describes how we're creatures dominated by our sight biologically and
culturally. Specifically she talks about the male gaze and the cinema, and how
our sight is part of an individual, as well as a cultural-political, optics of organizing,
ordering, control and domination. Obviously I was not saying we should all pluck
out our eyes or anything; however, if we only focus on, for example, the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal, the photos themselves were part of the torture. The fact
that they're taken, and the fact they were disseminated, was part of the abuse
of these men's bodies. And that was all happening on the level of optics. Something
that I've had to learn over and over again in my life is how hard it is to
listen to other people. I am amazed how flawed I am at this. True listening is
really an act of genuine, radical openness and love. Levinas' ethics of the
face to face isnot just about the apprehension of the face, but it's also about
engagement with this person's voice, their stories, their reality. And that's what
I think the book is trying to do. I called it, you know, the sound of my
listening. I was inspired by Harvey Hix who wrote this book called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God Bless</i> in which he took the speeches
of Bush and Bin Laden and worked with them. I got obsessed with his listening,
how he was listening carefully again to what Bush was saying and what Bin Laden
was saying and worked with them and made them into poems. I just thought there
was something really beautiful about it – and he was doing what a good citizen
would do, a good person would do, which was listening to what my president is
saying and asking, “What does this mean exactly?” And this is what our enemy is
saying and what does it mean exactly? One of the observations that he made which
I thought was the most profound was that Bush professed to never listen to what
Bin Laden was saying, but it's clear all of Bin Laden's speeches were directly
related to what Bush had said. How weird that is. I went into poetry to express
my own voice but I've gotten much more interested in what everybody else was
saying. <o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-51714669963824368702020-07-12T13:13:00.002-04:002020-07-12T13:13:54.687-04:00From the Irish Troubles to Trump’s America: Talking Politics and Poetry with Andy Eaton and Philip Metres<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">From the Irish Troubles to Trump’s America:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Talking Politics and Poetry with Andy
Eaton and Philip Metres<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">2017<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Andy Eaton</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">: First of all, I'd like to say thank you
again for agreeing to do this interview. I know that readers here in Belfast
have appreciated <i>Sand Opera</i>, as do I. There are a few areas I'd love to
cover, such as poetic form and invention, religion and faith, poetry in divided
societies, violence, war, and also joy, peace, delight. To start us of, we met
again recently in Belfast where you were visiting with some students. Would you
mind telling us a little bit about how you got started with bringing students
to Northern Ireland, and how these trips have impacted you, your thinking, and
your work?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Philip Metres</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">: I just got back a few weeks ago (June 2017),
having led my fourth student/faculty delegation, and it really never gets old.
I began leading our Ireland Peacebuilding program at John Carroll University in
2011, when fellow faculty of our Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program
started talking about the desire to restart the program, which had begun in
2004. That first iteration, students and faculty spent a month in Belfast and
around Ireland studying the Troubles and the peace process; they met with
Martin McGuinness, Ian Paisley, John Hume, Gerry Adams, Father Alec Reid, and
many other luminaries and leaders of Northern Ireland. But faculty energy had
turned elsewhere, and for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, I agreed to
step forward and lead the program. Because of the intrepid and becalming encouragement
of our on-the-ground coordinator, Belfast native and anthropologist Raymond
Lennon, I took a leap of faith and led a small group in 2011. Where, indeed,
can you meet with former paramilitaries and victims, political leaders and
peacebuilders, all of whom willing to share their overlapping and
often-contradictory stories, in a place where peace and reconciliation have
been the dominant narrative for the past two decades?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I'd been studying
war-making and peace-making since I was an undergraduate, radicalized by the
Persian Gulf War, the devastation of Iraq, and the ongoing occupation of
Palestine. I'd taken part in advocating for many lost causes, working for peace
and justice at the center of empire, so the opportunity to study a
fairly-successful conflict transformation was enticing indeed. Once I arrived,
I became utterly smitten with Ireland, and have been teaching Irish literature
and film ever since. Many years ago, I met Shakir Mustafa, who was completing
his Ph.D. at Indiana University when I was there. I'd met very few Iraqis, and
this was the 1990s. I asked him what he was studying. “Irish literature,” he said.
I thought it was odd. Irish literature?! Since then, of course, I see how an
Iraqi shares a lot in common with an Irishman, given the legacy of the British
Empire. But that meeting always stuck with me. In my cynical youth, I thought
of Ireland as a rather quaint place, but not of much interest. Was I wrong!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I love your
question and feel unable to answer it fully, to plumb its deepest dimension,
because I'm very much still trying to work out what it means to me. This time,
a full six years after my first visit, I've finally decided to write about it,
and have begun drafting some essays. The fact is that it's very difficult to
write about a program that one is leading; I feel a deep responsibility both to
the program and to the people with whom we have strong relationships. Many of
our program contributors share incredibly difficult stories of their lives with
us--particularly those who have lost loved ones in the Troubles. Trying to
write something that reflects my own experience, and yet doesn't exploit the
suffering of people like Alan McBride of WAVE Trauma Centre, whose wife was
killed in the so-called Shankill bomb in 1993--that's the challenge. I've
noticed that it's very easy for me, in this context, to start writing a
triumphalist narrative about peacemaking, but the truth is that the story of
the place is far more complicated than that. All dominant narratives elide
stories that don't fit in, and if we're interested in telling the truth, we
need to mark those elisions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Still, when I
meet people like the Reverend Bill Shaw of 174 Trust, I experience nothing
short of radical hope. This is what he said toward the end of our last meeting:
“That’s what this space is about. People coming for a concert or coming for a
cup of coffee. To make new friends. When we’re in this space, the labels that
we carry, like the suitcases, they don’t matter. The fact that I’m a Protestant
and you’re a Catholic, or you’re a Muslim or an atheist. Those things do not
matter. We make peace in this world when we recognize ourselves in each other.
It doesn’t matter how much hatred that our groups have for each other. When we
meet at that level, and we recognize something of each other in each other,
then we’re changed. We’re never the same. It doesn’t mean that we love each
other, or that can spread that love, but we’re changed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">What first
brought you to Belfast, and how have your impressions of it evolved over your
years there?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Andy Eaton</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">: I can imagine that your role in leading
the program does raise difficulties in writing about your time in Belfast, as
you say. But I think those kinds of difficulties are probably worth moving
through or around when the work is going well. I think Belfast is a place that
will benefit from a lot of different people looking at it, myriad voices
speaking in and to its legacy. This opinion is based on the reality that
Belfast is actually an incredibly diverse city, and the lack of cross-cultural
communication is not only between two sides of one argument. I guess I'm sort
of hooking up what you are saying here with an answer to your question. When I
first came here it was to visit some friends who I had just met in Scotland. I
had nowhere to be for the holiday break from grad school, so they brought me
over, housed me, fed me, and I was part of the family. I'm still friends with
these people, and my experience was largely positive. But it sort of gave me an
initial single-layer experience of the area; one community, one cultural set,
so to speak. Later, I met my wife through these same friends, and she and I
started dating for a couple years after I was back in America, and then eventually
I moved here so we could be in the same place. I was able to work on a PhD at
the same time, so it was sort of a blend of personal and professional
motivations which brought me here. That was in 2011, and since then my
impression have changed dramatically. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I don't know,
first hand, how it is in the States at the minute, but I lived in the Midwest
and in or near Evangelical fundamentalism long enough that what seems to be
happening now makes a lot of sense. I heard Shane McCrae in an interview on Commonplace
recently say that he realised he had equated liberalism with morality, that he
thought someone who identified as liberal was also moral, and that he was
surprised to realise this about himself. I could really relate to that, as I'm
sure others could, but in particular regarding Belfast. There's a traditional
binary, "what side are you on" conversation, but that's a hard one
for outsiders, which I think is why a lot of people from elsewhere find it
difficult to settle into the culture here. However, there is also a
conversation for "outsiders" which sees that side-based conversation
as somehow not where it's at, and you have to just transcend it. I think I held
that view for a long time without knowing it until recently; like there were
these over-simplified value-based soundbites that I could get my head around
based on my views, but it never helped me really listen to or see people from
here. Last year I got to meet Carolyn Forche, and she sort of called me out on
being shy and encouraged me to embrace my ignorance about the history and ask
more questions. I think I still have some nervousness about saying where I live
if I'm in one part of town, or whatever, but I find that my being American
means that I can say, "Oh, tell me about that" or ask questions. With
a taxi driver, for instance. But once they learn that I've been here for five
or six years, there's a sense that I should know more than I do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">So I guess my
impressions have gone from being basic to becoming more complicated. There is a
culture of silence and suggestion here which I find always new, exciting and
confusing, since I tend toward expression or long conversations. There's a way
of speaking which is indirect, nuanced, and clever, and I find I'm always two
steps behind it. But I'm enjoying it all the same. The evolution of my
impressions, I hope, is toward patience and empathy, but sometimes you realise
you have a utopian view and an agenda and need to set that aside for the
conversation that's in front of you. I guess that's not a final stage of
relating to a place, but it's where I'm probably at at the minute. I like what
you've said from Reverend Bill Shaw. Maybe it is a matter of recognising
ourselves in others; I just wouldn't want that to mean that what we don't yet
recognise loses its importance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">What do you
think? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if I can add other
question(s): Now that America is six months or so into its current
administration, have you found the vocabulary or the language around heated
issues changing? And sort of related, in what ways are you finding that artists
and writers are responding; are we in any way in a moment similar to the
Vietnam protests (I only mean within the artistic community)? I've heard W.S.
Merwin mention that he was telling Robert Bly that if anyone wanted to know
what he thought, they could ask him, and it probably wouldn't be a surprise,
but he wasn't going to stand up in the street and proclaim a message because
people would stop listening. Does that kind of anecdote have any currency to
our current moment of "resistance"?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Philip Metres</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">: Andy, your point about looking out for
“what we don’t yet recognize” feels like a definition both for poetry and for
peacebuilding. Marking the boundaries of the unspoken, the unnoticed, and
either coaxing them into the light or acknowledging where one can’t (yet?) go.
Thanks for that amendment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">The election
itself revealed just how little real dialogue across the ideological divide has
been happening; the fact that I and other progressives (and the mainstream media)
were stunned by the results is suggestive of a great divide in American
society, where left and right have almost seceded from each other (yes, that
term may well apply in the metaphorical sense here). The recent shooting of
Representative Scalise is yet another reminder that civil discourse and robust
debate have deteriorated even further. As much as I’ve had a lover’s quarrel
with the United States (its empire, its arrogance, its oligarchic tendencies),
the Constitution and its bedrock principles founded in the rule of law are
worth defending. I’m as guilty as anyone in avoiding conversations with people
with whom I disagree. I’ve been calling my representatives more than ever,
however, on a host of issues that are important to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Actually, I do
have to say, in light of your comment about seeing some haunting parallels
between Northern Ireland and the American Midwest, that the election of Trump
and the talk about those “left behind” by globalization echoed hauntingly for
me the conversations around loyalism in Northern Ireland. In some respects,
weirdly, loyalists and the American redneck nation (for lack of a better term)
have a lot in common, in terms of being once-proud members of a
socially-conservative working class (sometimes even both Scots-Irish, by the
way) that had some ethnic privileges (relative to their black or Catholic
neighbors), but who experienced the loss of status during the globalization
that began mid-century, when heavy industry gradually migrated to the
developing world. They feel that the world has left them behind, and their
culture is under siege. They are part of a backlash against globalization,
particularly in the developed world (see also Brexit). That’s been the strange
thing about the post-Cold War era; globalization’s foes have been scattered.
Only Islamic radicalism has really posed anything like a coherent, globalized
resistance—and its version is not exactly progressive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Your question
about “resistance” for artists is one that I spent 200 pages answering in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Behind the Lines: War Resistance on the
American Homefront</i> (2007). However, since it’s been a decade, and the very
term “resistance” has in some sense been coopted by the Democratic Party, I do
have to say that I’ve felt ambivalence by the sudden memefication of a term
that has a complex meaning in the context of colonial and postcolonial
struggle. I’ve just completed a book of essays on poetry called <i>The Sound of
Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance</i>, to capture that sense that we
need to about more than resistance. In the introduction, I write “In light of
the flurry of poetry activity cohering around the term “resistance”—every other
journal was devoting an issue to it, and anthologies published, Writers Resist
readings and events—we need, more than ever, to consider possibilities and
limits of resistance. After twenty-five years of thinking and practicing a
poetics of resistance, I found myself oddly resistant to all this sudden talk
of resistance. After all, there was plenty to resist during the Obama
Administration—drone strikes abroad, police killings of black people on the
streets, Bashar al-Assad’s massacre of civilians in Syria, bankers and
predatory capitalists running amok around the globe, ongoing accrual of
executive power, the buildup of a shadow security state—but these phenomena did
not garner much resistance. And also: how will we last for years on resistance
alone, if we have built for ourselves a refuge?” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I think what
Merwin was addressing is that poets have a calling that moves beyond
resistance—as important as political resistance is. I’ve been thinking about
poetry also as refuge, as a space that enables the empathic imagination to
dilate. To repeat myself: poets need to be engaged in the political arena
because they are citizens and human beings, and sometimes that will change how
they write. But to write a “political poem” to fulfill some idea of civic duty
seems misguided, and a misunderstanding of where truly sustaining poems come
from.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Andy, what’s your
take on that question? Do you feel far from American political discussion? I
imagine that there must be something similar around the Brexit discussions in
Northern Ireland.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Andy Eaton</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">: I really appreciate your language of
“truly sustaining.” Sometimes it is perhaps too easy to act though we
know we already know what the world is, who we are, and how to be here; at
other times, it seems clear that our posture to the world is one of unknowing,
of discovery and even wonder—on bad days, horror and shock and outrage. A
poetry that is “truly sustaining” seems, for me, tied to the later posture. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">It’s been several
months since we last corresponded, and the American political discussion(s)
seem like a dominant export now. It’s everywhere, or at least there is more of
it. I think the recent land grab from the Bears Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monuments has just made me feel sick and pushed
things over a line I didn’t expect to cross or know was there. I was already
astonished and scared and sad but felt like there was hope and resistance. On
Tuesday, when the news reached me, I just lay still where I was. It’s so easy
to be melodramatic; I was tired from travelling, I was alone. But it just
seemed like one more wake-up call, if anyone needed another one, that this is
not what a country is for. We or someone is getting something wrong. If we’re
fallen, I think it’s a good idea to try not to fall further. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">So where poetry
comes in, seems clearly on the side of living well, looking outward, which
begins with looking inward, and I see that as the place of a practice of
poetry. At least that’s what makes sense to me now. How that manifests for each
poet, I think will ultimately depend on their personality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I think what
you’re saying about having an agenda for a poem (as I take what you’ve said
here) as key. I’m teaching at a university in England, and while my students
are great, a lot of them say they have an idea for a piece or say they are
struggling with their work, but there’s nothing there yet; they’re trying to
know what to write before they write it. Maybe that works for some folks, and
there’s definitely something to drafting in your head first, but that’s not
really what they mean. They mean if they have a good idea for a story or a
poem, they can sit down and write it. I try to encourage them to listen and to
pay attention and to grow a vision of themselves, of others and the world. I
think that’s something truly sustaining that poetry helps with. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">As far as Brexit
and Northern Ireland goes, I feel conflicted in vocalising a position, partly
because I know I don’t understand it all, and partly because it just seems
ridiculous. I was in England this week, and my students told me they knew
nothing about Northern Ireland. They don’t know the history. They had not even
heard of The Troubles. I was totally shocked. They could not identify Seamus
Heaney when his picture was on the overhead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">When I’m shocked,
I try to take stock. And I realised it goes both ways. They’re all from
different areas of England, and I know so little about the places where they
are from. However, even though I might want to be fair, there’s not been
anything really like the struggles in NI elsewhere in the UK recently. This
plus anecdotal experiences—I’ve flown to England from Belfast and been asked if
I had adjusted to the time difference (there is none); and I have definitely
been in conversation with English people who refer to Northern Ireland as a
“different” country, not in the way they would as Wales or Scotland. English
people come to Belfast and call it “Ireland”. If someone from the South calls
the North “Ireland”, then it’s one kind of statement, and if someone from
Britain calls it the same, well it’s a totally other thing. And this I can’t
help but interpret through my Americanness. It’s the same country. It’s not the
same country. It’s a complicated thing. In full disclosure, the number of
people I hear saying “I’m Northern Irish”, and this is a clarifying and
sensible thing for them, is increasing. If you come from a divided society,
sometimes you get on by making your own identity. I see this as something that
Americans have understood on an individual level, and the more it’s something
we can share, the better we will be. I think. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">I’m not sure how
clear I’ve been, and I know I’ll need to edit this down, especially so I don’t
sound like I’m hating on the English! But I wanted to give you my honest
answers to your questions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">If we can shift
back to poetry more directly, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand
Opera</i>, you have several invented forms or shapes. We spoke about this
briefly this summer, but I’m thinking of the poem “Cell/(ph)one (A simultaneity
in four voices)” as well as the vellum pages, and how readers might be
interested in learning how these shapes came about. Equally, while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sand Opera</i> foregrounds erasure, the book
also makes particular use of brackets, parenthesis, and other typographical
choices. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">It’s clear that your
poems are guided by sound, but can you tell us something about your
relationship to the page, to the discovery, creation or invention of forms and
shapes of poems? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Philip Metres:
</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">We live in a moment where
there is almost no limit to what one can do on a page, so why not play in that
field? Of course, the danger always with experimentation is that one is merely
engaging in gimmickry. I like to work the tension between the idea of the poem
as an object of sound, and the poem as a visual work, meant to be read on the
page. For a number of years, I got infatuated with performance and sound
poetry. I was through with difficult and hermetically sealed page poems that
required endless textual analysis; I wanted embodiment, feeling, lyricism.
Then, suddenly, a fellow writer made me pivot when he said that poetry on the
page contains all possible performances of itself. That sense of generativity
seemed sweetly beautiful to me. This mute thing that could contain so much
music. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Sound means more
to me as a poet than ever, particularly since I started writing prose. I love
the crazy music of words even more than I did when I began writing, and felt a
fever to express and tell stories. I want my poems to be architectures of
sound. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">So I want both: I
want poems that convey the sensuousness of spoken language, loved on the tongue
and in the mouth, and I want poems to live utterly happily on the page. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Andy Eaton: </span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Who are some bands, musical artists, or
composers who are important to you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Philip Metres:
</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">How much time do you
have? I have a hunch that what one of the vectors that led me to poetry was pop
music. Like every kid, I listened to Top 40 and classical rock, but the first
concert I saw was Peter Gabriel, thanks to heavy radio play of “Shock the
Monkey” in 1982. As crazy as it sounds, listening to Gabriel and others opened
a door not only to arty music and intriguing lyrics, but also to the world.
From his music, I first learned about Stanley Milgram’s creepy social
experiments about submission to authority (“We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s
37”), Apartheid South Africa (“Biko”), and got introduced to Amnesty
International and the whole concept of human rights. His range of songs (from
the goof erotica of “Sledgehammer” to the transcendentally grown-up love song
“In Your Eyes,” from “Biko” to “Don’t Give Up,” from his amazing soundtrack to
“The Passion” to his croaking cover of “The Book of Love” ), his primal
weirdness, his political sensibility, the fact that he was of Lebanese
descent—all of it captivated me. I could name a dozen others, but it’s fun to
go back and think again about Peter Gabriel. Also: Bruce Springsteen, Bob
Dylan, R.E.M., the Replacements, Husker Du, the Minutemen, Fugazi, and the
whole indie rokk scene of the early 1990s. Later, Guided by Voices. I’ve
written memoir essays on Fugazi, Bob Dylan, and the Replacements, and I have
one to write about Guided by Voices. Songs that inspire me as a writer: “Eight
Miles High” by Husker Du (a blistering, primal cover), “Hum Allah Hum Allah Hum
Allah” by Pharoah Sanders (wait for that solo around minute nine), and “A Love
Supreme” by John Coltrane. Each of these are journeys of the soul, through the
dark night, and each comes out on the other side. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-17888359553066808782020-05-21T12:00:00.001-04:002020-05-21T12:00:12.844-04:00"Kafr Yar/Babi Qasim": Remembering Babi Yar and Kafr Qassim<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Kafr Yar / Babi Qasim" from <i>Shrapnel Maps </i>braids the testimony of survivors from two hideous massacres, at Babi Yar and Kafr Qasim. I was struck by the weird parallelism between these two survivors, who hid beneath the dead, or inside the arms of the dead, to survive. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">May we remember what we knew and did not know, and live to tell others so that this may not happen again. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thanks to </span><a class="_2u0z" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1296836125&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARArG7sD359mjylTH6HpAtvpuwGBQl1yBC7q7d73oRTU0UcfkseV9N0Lvjh3Oe4spWDGKnulZIM5mCVT%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/nahida.gordon?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARArG7sD359mjylTH6HpAtvpuwGBQl1yBC7q7d73oRTU0UcfkseV9N0Lvjh3Oe4spWDGKnulZIM5mCVT" style="background-color: white; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre-wrap;" title="Nahida H Gordon">Nahida H Gordon</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s sister, Samia Halaby, an internationally-known artist, for allowing us to use her work for this video.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gphXUaYlZqY" width="560"></iframe></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfG0xgJC2rUIxM1-IzmQoxNH_0tDUyaOohvf-oHWOt5N-HrLNTiF51-SwRO2qMmidhM4q3ktOH6tnG9hkGaXqNq71zlgYNn4PRui0K6ZuD74XBGC-8HJb8qAwWaZsVfaQl-4iE6SCxruY/s1600/Kufr+Yar+Babi+Qassem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="680" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfG0xgJC2rUIxM1-IzmQoxNH_0tDUyaOohvf-oHWOt5N-HrLNTiF51-SwRO2qMmidhM4q3ktOH6tnG9hkGaXqNq71zlgYNn4PRui0K6ZuD74XBGC-8HJb8qAwWaZsVfaQl-4iE6SCxruY/s320/Kufr+Yar+Babi+Qassem.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-83070415554060541772020-05-15T08:09:00.000-04:002020-05-15T08:09:01.184-04:00On Nakba Day, Learn about Palestinians <div style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Today is the day Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe. To understand the pain that my post caused yesterday, you have to go back to November 1947-1948/9, after the UN Partition Plan was announced, a plan that the Arab League and Palestinians rejected as unjust. What happened during the Nakba led to the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, into a massive diaspora of refugees whose fates still hang in a purgatorial balance. Though there <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">may be some debate (cf. Plan Dalet) among historians about the level of planning that went into this process, the cataclysm that ensued has never been adequately acknowledged. It must be acknowledged.</span></div>
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One cannot understand the Palestinian narrative without understanding this elemental trauma. About 400 villages were destroyed in what became Israel, many of them bulldozed, with forests planted over them. In other places, the houses built by Palestinians remain, lived in by Israelis. Most estimate that 4-5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live around the world. Among them are some of my dearest friends and comrades.</div>
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They have written unforgettable stories and poems and painted beautiful art and have created a culture that is distinct and diverse. I invite you to read the classics like Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said, Emile Habiby, and many others, but also to meet on the page and in life <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100001694019838&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARB0A2Wl6P1WWK91GbuZlXcpwDADv7rPwarGF71ps_msjGKuDilKe77uKsxnyvIUO4liiNgkN__m-ybX%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001694019838&__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARB0A2Wl6P1WWK91GbuZlXcpwDADv7rPwarGF71ps_msjGKuDilKe77uKsxnyvIUO4liiNgkN__m-ybX&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Sahar Khalifeh">Sahar Khalifeh</a>, Ghassan Zaqtan, Raja Shehadeh, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100023889528984&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARBbpon5exLKSw4m75j3v6WQVxwUJyupWN9SjM-ul0ysdK79pdhMLslrD82p7WuBW0PQFnFFju8b84Gp%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/naomishihab.nye.52?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARBbpon5exLKSw4m75j3v6WQVxwUJyupWN9SjM-ul0ysdK79pdhMLslrD82p7WuBW0PQFnFFju8b84Gp&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Naomi Shihab Nye">Naomi Shihab Nye</a>, Fady Joudah, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=729848802&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARC2cNkciMkrZM8P9wPf8RaS3RxPt3QgoHzwwHZP6bC73_wQyI7yKd_zBxxGxqotNT7QJwPM0LSI9XBL%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/deema.shehabi?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARC2cNkciMkrZM8P9wPf8RaS3RxPt3QgoHzwwHZP6bC73_wQyI7yKd_zBxxGxqotNT7QJwPM0LSI9XBL&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Deema Shehabi">Deema Shehabi</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=905710424&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARAAGwmsbeKqwn_ARVVKU0_xnMJQUFZK5DGto7WPngP2Dx1JVcpJ1C9fTifbeRFW-f8GGuspIE9viukN%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/jacir?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARAAGwmsbeKqwn_ARVVKU0_xnMJQUFZK5DGto7WPngP2Dx1JVcpJ1C9fTifbeRFW-f8GGuspIE9viukN&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Annemarie Jacir">Annemarie Jacir</a>, Susan Abulhawa, Nathalie Handal, Suheir Hammad, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=729460431&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARAHlVRzY2wYbdEzb6pA7nEW8lLqwvd8Q0wghrOcTnFjfNb_IcaR0V-YvcwK4EfRopbiq52aVkWzmYDk%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/susan.muaddidarraj?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARAHlVRzY2wYbdEzb6pA7nEW8lLqwvd8Q0wghrOcTnFjfNb_IcaR0V-YvcwK4EfRopbiq52aVkWzmYDk&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Susan Muaddi Darraj">Susan Muaddi Darraj</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=529815601&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARDSdsVehQqvJy3Vlvt4wnDdqOw2Da7rk6DCEds3cXbDxI4KIQmWze2nCt4v_atDDojeGLt8YD6GgYeh%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/hala.alyan?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARDSdsVehQqvJy3Vlvt4wnDdqOw2Da7rk6DCEds3cXbDxI4KIQmWze2nCt4v_atDDojeGLt8YD6GgYeh&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Hala Alyan">Hala Alyan</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=549221698&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARAMuG_ijfPRpnSZVG5l8Jmi74C554UZ7um9xCvWUg-bkjcAJglaHsrmuq_7XXxjgFES5zskK5wxJmfl%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/lena.khalaf.tuffaha?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARAMuG_ijfPRpnSZVG5l8Jmi74C554UZ7um9xCvWUg-bkjcAJglaHsrmuq_7XXxjgFES5zskK5wxJmfl&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Lena Khalaf Tuffaha">Lena Khalaf Tuffaha</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1037885777&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARCw_21TK8XbylBrF6RvT84xCwEZ7oSHqrM1fQGt_4kinBn4FdP3M0wvup-8FvbnUz6WblcxXd6UQMe4%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/sahar.mustafah?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARCw_21TK8XbylBrF6RvT84xCwEZ7oSHqrM1fQGt_4kinBn4FdP3M0wvup-8FvbnUz6WblcxXd6UQMe4&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Sahar Mustafah">Sahar Mustafah</a>, Adania Shibli, <a aria-describedby="u_26_1" aria-owns="js_r1" class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100004038072521&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARB4_j0UfEh0tr_BkH3Szo8B3vnRFFOPWHhMvnak5-pSuX-e4hhejVwB5D4OifAYHHo_P2zzQlpoW9Dp%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004038072521&__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARB4_j0UfEh0tr_BkH3Szo8B3vnRFFOPWHhMvnak5-pSuX-e4hhejVwB5D4OifAYHHo_P2zzQlpoW9Dp&fref=mentions" id="js_r3" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" title="Remi Kanazi">Remi Kanazi</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=521466473&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARC85aZCbs2tL5f4yk3C2YfLNGmNX_2h1BWB5X0B_gb-EI7ZjLQQtNZQwO15m75bCZEtCs8mt7gSKzyB%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/nyla.matuk?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARC85aZCbs2tL5f4yk3C2YfLNGmNX_2h1BWB5X0B_gb-EI7ZjLQQtNZQwO15m75bCZEtCs8mt7gSKzyB&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Nyla Matuk">Nyla Matuk</a>, and recently astonishing debut writers like <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1074345994&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARAO-zgIIOlWrpCSbX2sKH7CWI9fkxJGnXn67p8Z8LiHEW4bc9a4UP5OqMRGVa3vxzKsS2fMEtCugDXh%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/george.abraham.777?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARAO-zgIIOlWrpCSbX2sKH7CWI9fkxJGnXn67p8Z8LiHEW4bc9a4UP5OqMRGVa3vxzKsS2fMEtCugDXh&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="George Abraham">George Abraham</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1398780975&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARBp5-HW6iJvOzM2GmlC0GMrewkYxNda31RbNawS7ArlRQe7Vx6Gkn_fXZ18d1gHPLCrHOzTjrdBiSoc%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/zaina.alsous?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARBp5-HW6iJvOzM2GmlC0GMrewkYxNda31RbNawS7ArlRQe7Vx6Gkn_fXZ18d1gHPLCrHOzTjrdBiSoc&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Zaina Alsous">Zaina Alsous</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1505393&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARBRd7ZyBfwe1l2QGukwGDTTTOkTny1GXOPoT4V3JpQiXrU5rxZX9KtyoZVo2sdQy-iTCqli-tay2oz6%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/zaina.arafat.54?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARBRd7ZyBfwe1l2QGukwGDTTTOkTny1GXOPoT4V3JpQiXrU5rxZX9KtyoZVo2sdQy-iTCqli-tay2oz6&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Zaina Arafat">Zaina Arafat</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1047484596&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARCRA4Wl-taG2fUWjIRoOL2d-XIQ1NxsUj2qzxuGcDHlrYqTy1t7ucbUaYkZR28yenNp2UwwT6NXubTf%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/tariqLuthun?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARCRA4Wl-taG2fUWjIRoOL2d-XIQ1NxsUj2qzxuGcDHlrYqTy1t7ucbUaYkZR28yenNp2UwwT6NXubTf&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Tariq Luthun">Tariq Luthun</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100034773200965&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARBYO_A_eoM2IvbKngxwWBBe2HWTVAcXIXgYHVgwWCqHiyzMymZXMDUKGCXK6suHGSKBEwQAOH7gUSxH%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/ahmad.almallah.5283?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARBYO_A_eoM2IvbKngxwWBBe2HWTVAcXIXgYHVgwWCqHiyzMymZXMDUKGCXK6suHGSKBEwQAOH7gUSxH&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Ahmad Almallah">Ahmad Almallah</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1336368294&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARDS_se_pP-4WhxZmy6DDELfB2DXiS5f1ee5VYxksgspjBZP74_ZOOCMIhbTm-1YU4sE7FakDeSUIiLC%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/noor.hindi.16?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARDS_se_pP-4WhxZmy6DDELfB2DXiS5f1ee5VYxksgspjBZP74_ZOOCMIhbTm-1YU4sE7FakDeSUIiLC&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Noor Hindi">Noor Hindi</a>, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100003025966938&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARBGAMylZAW0Jjj-D_8WUXzH_D7t1aSaF1k_oOdtlrCnBcTI8GT5tNVkW_GrLsH90Yf11B4XKY7nnsPR%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/mosab.abutoha?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARBGAMylZAW0Jjj-D_8WUXzH_D7t1aSaF1k_oOdtlrCnBcTI8GT5tNVkW_GrLsH90Yf11B4XKY7nnsPR&fref=mentions" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Mosab Mostafa">Mosab Mostafa</a>, and the many other writers and artists that I have yet to read and meet.</div>
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I hope that I have done a measure of justice to the Palestinian story in Shrapnel Maps--but more than that, I hope that it will contribute to their stories being seen and beheld, that we can have real conversations about what a just peace could look like, and that each of us will ask how we are connected to their fates, and what role we might play in that. In many respects, the Nakba continues.</div>
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There is an event at 2pm,<a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAudOGrpj4sHtLsr0NL6xWEmkOKdRiP99P-?emci=b07e257f-c693-ea11-86e9-00155d03b5dd&emdi=02bcd284-5094-ea11-86e9-00155d03b5dd&ceid=333428&fbclid=IwAR0vC7gn-LXHrBgFZGwwlzi95VQtp3B5mWeX5ZZ-Xflk6KRODkmwTx_V7VU">https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAudOGrpj4sHtLsr0NL6xWEmkOKdRiP99P-?emci=b07e257f-c693-ea11-86e9-00155d03b5dd&emdi=02bcd284-5094-ea11-86e9-00155d03b5dd&ceid=333428&fbclid=IwAR0vC7gn-LXHrBgFZGwwlzi95VQtp3B5mWeX5ZZ-Xflk6KRODkmwTx_V7VU</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">and another in the evening featuring some of these writers, that highlights Palestinian writers, and I encourage you to learn more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's a poem from Shrapnel Maps that deals with this: </span></div>
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-39348180003675978562020-05-13T12:34:00.000-04:002020-05-13T12:34:32.420-04:00Returning to Jaffa, thinking of Nahida Halaby Gordon<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Today I wanted to lift up the story of Nahida Halaby Gordon, born in Jerusalem, raised in Jafa/Jaffa until age 9, when her family fled in 1948, becoming Palestinian refugees. At the time, Jaffa was the third-most populous city in Palestine. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every year, Nahida comes to my course, Israeli and Palestinian Literatures, to share her personal testimony. Seventy years have not lessened the pain when she speaks of her final days in Jaffa, before her family—and other Palestinian families—fled in 1948. Nahida discovered the Haganah flyer in her father’s papers after his death. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Read the poems, the Haganah flyer, and the Tel Aviv municipal archive note from <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shrapnel-Maps-Philip-Metres/dp/1556595638">Shrapnel Maps</a></i>. What do they tell us, and why do they matter?</span><br />
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<span id="goog_450446712"></span><span id="goog_450446713"></span><br />Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-71056583296323513942020-05-06T17:25:00.003-04:002020-05-06T17:28:57.239-04:00On Rain and Embers: A Conversation between Philip Metres and Ali Nuri<i>I'm delighted to introduce poet Ali Nuri, an Iraqi American who fled Iraq when he was just seven years old, in 1994, in the post-Gulf War violence and punishment meted out by the regime of Saddam Hussein. His family's long journey of exile brought them from refugee camps to the United States, where they made a new life. His first book of poems offers a window into the challenges and wonders of a life lived on two continents, in two tongues. Poems from the book are interspersed through the interview below. For more information about Ali Nuri, please visit <a href="https://ali-nuri.com/">his website</a>. </i><br />
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><b id="docs-internal-guid-9b55a0f4-7fff-a013-4439-c9060e761876">On <i>Rain and Embers</i>: A Conversation between Philip Metres and Ali Nuri</b><br />
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Philip Metres (PM): Ali, I just finished <i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Rain and Embers</span></i><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2019). The book really seems to be a memoir- in-verse exploring the inner life of a refugee--from someone struggling with displacement and loss, to longing for love and home. I’m wondering if you might share a little about your journey into poetry. Did you get any encouragement from your teachers along the way? </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Ali Nuri (AN): Though I spoke Arabic (the southern Iraqi dialect) growing up, I was really a child without language. I remember my first teacher in the camps who beat me for not being able to read the Quran; I tried to memorize it to stop the punishment, but they caught on quickly. The teachers after that didn't expect much from me, especially my English teachers. My family was granted asylum in 1994, when I was 7 years old. I was immediately placed in second grade, but unfortunately, the public schools I attend from that age on were and still are in poor condition. ESL classes were useless to me—as was most education—due to dyslexia. Despite having good intentions, my teachers were overworked, underpaid, and lacked the resources to run a class of regular students efficiently. I remember one telling me that it was okay to be an average student because it's not as if I was going to be a writer one day. Language has always fascinated me, though—probably because of the alienating experiences I've had with it and not in spite of them.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">PM: Ali, what memories do you carry with you about your time as a refugee? What do you hope that you won’t forget, and what do you wish you could forget but can’t? What do you think Americans should know about refugee experience that they might not? </span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">AN: Beyond the visual memories of surviving in the most inhospitable place on Earth, the overwhelming feeling I recall having was fear. As a child refugee, it was difficult to process the events that had led to my exile as much as what was happening right in front of me. One day I had been sitting under the shade of the fig trees on my grandmother’s small farm; the next, my family was walking silently across the desert with guns often pointed in our direction, en route to an enclosed encampment full of ragged tents where necessities like water and food were rationed under armed guard who were not afraid to “maintain order” using brute force. I hope to not forget the sense of community we somehow salvaged there, how people could still stand up for one another and protest mistreatment by the guards even when they had nothing left to gain and everything left to lose. </span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I wish I could forget the violence exerted on us, the humiliation, the intimidation, the intolerance. There was so much of it, more than I could ever possibly fathom, even now. How can a child understand that, let alone a stoic adult? You see the violence right in front of you, but it remains unprocessable, swelling like a tumor in your brain that can never be excised but only conceded to. You just internalize that fear and operate on survival mode. Your hierarchy of needs is dismantled for you from the outside, and the inside is so barricaded that your own needs become irrelevant. You are alien to yourself. One day, you leave the cage, but you are still an alien in a different land where you are told that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable to you. In practice, you come to find that such rights are flexible and those in power continue to hold all control, a mere degree or two removed from the tyranny you’ve always known. </span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">That sums up my experience of being a refugee and its lasting effects, and I think every American should be made aware of that. Refugees do not seek refuge from a stable, secure life; we are escaping horrors the American people cannot imagine and seek to live peaceably, extolling the same foundational virtues about the elusive, sacred freedom that every human being deserves. Despite the surface-level differences, at our most unshakable core, we desire the same beautiful, happy, fulfilled world.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">PM: Did you take creative writing courses in high school or college? Why did you choose poetry as opposed to some other literary genre?</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">AN: No, I’ve never taken creative writing classes, but I jumped at the opportunity to take a basic poetry analysis course in college as part of my general education requirements. In high school, my teachers had low expectations of students; one spent an entire year just covering material on <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>. Despite the lackluster way in which I was introduced to the written language, I had a certain insatiable curiosity about its power—a power to express with complete abandon, to disarm, to draw out our monstrosities and most vulnerable dimensions and realize they are one and the
same. </span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">What first drew me towards poetry was that it felt alien like me. People often comment to me that they feel alienated by poetry rather than intrigued when presented with someone else’s mind puzzle, but that initial alienation was what pulled me into its orbit. I have this perilous need to deconstruct and decrypt language, to find the patterns and strip them bare, discretely categorizing all of that particulate matter while appreciating its psychological innards. Occasionally that effort proves fruitless, but sometimes I read someone else’s poem and it feels like the words are my very own skin
reaching to embrace my body from a page. Most forms of writing (especially novels and short stories) focus solely on structure, character, plot, pacing; while some liberties can be taken, the results are often rigid and formulaic. Most play it safe. </span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Poetry, to me, has a degree of sensuality that shouldn’t be overlooked, taking a no holds barred approach in its expression. It incorporates all of those ingredients found elsewhere in literature without the same social and emotional constraints; there’s room to be abstract, to circumvent form within form. There was an element of limitlessness that drew me in. Words and their negative spaces hold an immense weight, and with poetry, it’s entirely about the words themselves—the way they sound, their arrangement, their utility, their tone. Brevity, when done well, contains an entire world
unto itself. A single phrase can carry an almost repulsive danger and a swift softness. Nothing is more rewarding than chipping away at that impossible mind block to find the poem buried in its impossible grains.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">PM: Were you happy with how the book was received? </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">AN: When it was just about writing and putting my thoughts to paper, I was satisfied. I thought I was fulfilling a life purpose, one that had been calling to me like a siren from the depths for years, one I had ignored over and over again to “become” the person society urged me to become. </span><br />
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">In the background, there were always words waiting to be written while I was busying myself with trying to become a more acceptable adult. After the poems were finally written and assembled, I became obsessive about perfecting the basic components of a collection—at one point, I spent 3 weeks locked in one of my rooms with a printer from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. going over font sizes and shapes, comparing every single letter, until I found the one I wanted to use. For me, it was important that the cover matched the writing and conveyed the message I wanted it to convey. In the end, the book was received reasonably well and garnered more attention than my inner critic had been expecting, but that level of perfectionism can become a double-edged sword, leading to constant overthinking and second-guessing. It’s crucial to remind myself that no work is ever truly finished; mistakes are always made in retrospect, but the only way to move is forward. Recognizing the things we would do differently is a sign of growth and dynamic maturity.</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-43391593533679323902016-03-27T10:13:00.001-04:002016-03-27T10:19:59.294-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Thank You<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Easter<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">On the first
day of the week,<br />
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,<br />
while it was still dark,<br />
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.<br />
So she ran and went to Simon Peter<br />
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,<br />
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,<br />
and we don’t know where they put him.”<br />
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.<br />
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter<br />
and arrived at the tomb first;<br />
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.<br />
When Simon Peter arrived after him,<br />
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,<br />
and the cloth that had covered his head,<br />
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.<br />
Then the other disciple also went in,<br />
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,<br />
and he saw and believed.<br />
</span></i><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"> --John 20<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="display: none; font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Top of Form<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">May the stones
be rolled away. May the prisoners be freed. May the tombs be emptied. May the
wars end. May the wounds be healed. May we believe. May we have mercy on
ourselves and others. May mourning become morning. May we turn to the Light. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Hi Philip,<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Since I
first started reading your book I have had Matt 6: 22-23 in my head, “The eye
is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be
full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will
be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is
that darkness!” Over the years I have talked about this passage with a few
friends. It has struck me that the person in the passage thinks he is
seeing light but it is really darkness. He thinks his “light” is good,
but it is really evil. I can’t help but feel that this is somewhat true
for those perpetrating such horrible acts upon fellow humans as described in
your book. They thought they were doing good. They thought that they
were seeing light. Oh, that just makes the darkness more dark. This
has been heavy on me until this week when I realized that we are about to
remember and celebrate the ultimate example of this. On that darkest of
days, those who took Jesus’ life, thought they were doing good by their
actions. But thanks be to God that he was able to overcome and turn that
ultimate darkness into light. Thanks for taking the time and persevering
through the painful task of creating this wonderful book. It is a piece of
restoration. It is helping to turn that darkness into light.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Pax,<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Steve Conner<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Thank you to
everyone who participated in this Lenten Journey, as contributors and readers,
both the below participants and Maureen Doallas, who was writing her own poems
in response to these poems, and sharing all of it widely.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Participants<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">1.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Luke Hankins &
“Compline” (2/10/16)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">2.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Hilary Plum &
“Illumination” (2/11)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">3.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Peter Molin &
“Lane McCotter” (2/12)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">4.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Paul Lauritzen
& “In the name” (2/13)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">5.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Tyrone Williams
& “The Blues of Javal” and “In the beginning” (2/14)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">6.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Timothy Liu &
“The Blues of Javal Davis” (2/15)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">7.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Hayan Charara &
“next day,” (“Animals”) (2/16)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">8.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Joe Hoover &
Peter Molin & “The Blues of Charles Graner” (2/17)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">9.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Shakir Mustafa
& “his name is G” (2/18)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">10.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Susan Averna &
“the third day” (2/19)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">11.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Wafaa Bilal &
“Handling the Koran”(2/20)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">12.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Raymond Lennon
& “The Blues of Ken Davis” (2/21)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">13.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Marwa Helal &
Peter Molin & “The Blues of Lynddie England” (2/22)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">14.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Christopher
Allen-Doucot & “now I am what I saw” (2/23)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">15.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Huda Al-Marashi
& “Muslim Burial” (2/24)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">16.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Roy Scranton &
“Joe Darby” (2/25) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">17.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Danny Caine & Marwa
Helal & final page of “abu ghraib arias” (2/26)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">18.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Solmaz Sharif &
“Woman Mourning Son,” (“Drone”) (2/27)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">19.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Layla Azmi Goushey
& Sarah Browning & “Recipe from the Abbasid” (2/28)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">20.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Nawal Nasrallah
& “Recipe from the Abbasid” (2/29)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">21.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Nawal Nasrallah
& Zeina Hashem Beck & “A Toast” (3/1)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">22.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Mary Austin Speaker
& Joe Hall & “Home Sweet Home” (3/2)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">23.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Pamela Hart &
“The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint” (3/3)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">24.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">David Roderick
& “Black Site Q” (3/4)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">25.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Dunya Mikhail &
Salih Altoma & “Asymmetries” (“Bag of Bones”) (3/5)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">26.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Naomi Shihab Nye
& “Salaam Epigrams,” (“Gate A-4”) (3/6)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">27.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Charles Ellenbogen
& “War Stories” (3/7)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">28.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Philip Metres &
“when the bombs fell,” (prose pieces) (3/8)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">29.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Danny Caine &
“In the cell of else” (3/9)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">30.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Amy Breau & “I
had no names” (3/10) (prose piece)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">31.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Craig Santos Perez
on “She asks, is that man crying” (“from understory”) (3/11)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">32.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Fady Joudah &
“what does it mean” (“Mimesis”) (3/12)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">33.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Jeff Gundy
& Dante Di Stefano & “When I Was
a Child” (3/13)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">34.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Marwa Helal &
Angele Ellis & “Black Site (Exhibit I).” (3/14)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">35.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Philip Metres &
“Love Potion #42” (3/15)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">36.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Kim Stafford & Saddam’s
Fingerprints (3/16)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">37.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Philip Metres &
“Etruscan Cista Handle” (3/17)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">38.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Paige Webb & Performance
Videos of “Cell/(ph)one” (3/18)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">39.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Nomi Stone &
“what consequence is a body” (3/19)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">40.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Deema K. Shehabi
& “in the wake of” (3/20)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">41.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Becca J.R. Lachman
& “I was planning an essay on imagery” (3/21)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">42.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Chris Kempf &
“You look at me” (3/22)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">43.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Hayan Charara &
“As if” (“Usage”) (3/23)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">44.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Josie Setzler &
“On the flight overseas” (3/24)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">45.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">William Kelley
Woolfitt & “so I could pass the time (3/25) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">46.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Priscilla
Wathington & Harvey Hix & “Compline” (3/26) </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-29014501059480797902016-03-26T07:00:00.000-04:002016-03-26T09:13:13.337-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 46: “Let There Be Light”: Compline, + Priscilla Wathington and Harvey Hix<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 46: “Let There Be Light”: Compline, + Priscilla Wathington
and Harvey Hix<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the
beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,<br />
the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss,<br />
while a mighty wind swept over the waters.<br />
<br />
Then God said,<br />
“Let there be light,” and there was light.<br />
God saw how good the light was.<br />
God then separated the light from the darkness.<br />
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”<br />
Thus evening came, and morning followed—the first day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">On Holy
Saturday, we live between Crucifixion and Resurrection, past and future, full
of uncertainty and hope. George Steiner once called our modern existence as one
of Holy Saturday: </span> <span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">“We know of that Good Friday which
Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of
it as well – the pain, the failure of love, the solitude which are our history
and our private fate. We know also about
Sunday. To the Christian that day
signifies an intimation of resurrection of a justice and a love that has
conquered death. If we are
non-Christians, we know of that Sunday in analogous terms – the day of
liberation from inhumanity and servitude…. Ours is the long day’s journey of
the Saturday. Between suffering,
aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand, and the dream of liberation, of
rebirth on the other.”<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember when
Amy was about to give birth for the first time, we read somewhere that “you
can’t give birth with your head.” I’ve been thinking about my resistances to
religion, to the life of faith, trying to remind myself that I can’t give birth
with my head. How Guy Picciotto of Rites of Spring once sang: “I said I bled/I
tried to have the heart/through the head.” And how Kahlil Gibran once wrote: “Faith is
an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of
thinking.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m thinking of
light, feeling the light. Just as our days tilt toward the sun, each day growing
in strength, the pulsing of life all around us strengthens—the suddenness of
greens and birdsong, life, life, life. Despite all the literal and figurative
nights we endure, the violence and war and torture and despair and
heart-brokenness, there is this pulsing, this turning toward the light,
seed-hopeful. We dream of being broken open into what we are meant to become.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">I’m thinking of
what my Iraqi and Afghani friends have endured at the hands of our empire. Of Shakir,
Nawal, Salih, Dunya, Huda, Sinan, Wafaa, Zohra. I’m thinking of those who
remain in Guantanamo. Of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. I’m thinking of all the victims
of war and hatred, of black sites and drone strikes, of cluster bombs and
depleted uranium, of prison cells and prison camps, and, closer to home, of
racial oppression and sexual violence, of all our hurting hurting others. And
the torment we visit upon ourselves. I’m thinking of all of us who find no
reason to get up in the morning and nonetheless still get up in the morning,
who wake with the light because there is something in us that lives in the
light. There is something sleeping in us that rises with the day.</span></span></span><br />
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</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Thanks to
Priscilla Wathington and Harvey Hix for their dialogues with “Compline.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">“And We Are Witnesses Of It” by Priscilla
Wathington<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> -a meditation on “Compline,” from <i>Sand
Opera<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">That
the tomb be opened, glass removed from
the observatory’s blood-shot eye, that<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">we who stood muzzled while a saw hunted its
own dust would<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">await
a breathing into the dust’s nostrils, a
bay of bones conferred <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">a new leather to contain the <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">blessed man, pulp of<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">hope remade by its own bloom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">My fleeced lips unfit to drink this
suffering garden of<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">God to look into the dusk of olives for the<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">open
unwrapped body of God<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">the
prison guards rolled back like a
stone <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">spine
leavened. Remake the cotton <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">binding into garments, forgive us<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">our
lumbering<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">sight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">On
Easter in Palestine, I used to hear my friends and family members exchange this
call-and-response greeting in Arabic: “Christ has risen / Truly risen / And we
are witnesses of it.” Philip Metres’s poem, “Compline” is the final thought in
a sober volume about the multitude of ways we have failed to approach each
other as equal creations. It traces our failure of vision and how wed we are to
a “spine” way of thinking. The poem acknowledges that this dark day has already
been lived by many with long echoes that will spread beyond them and into the
night. Despite this, “Compline” blesses its readers with a reminder and
invocation: “That we await a blessed hope.”
<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">--Priscilla
Wathington is a consulting editor to the children’s human rights group, Defense
for Children International - Palestine. Her poems have recently appeared in
Spark and Echo Arts, Sukoon, Mizna and The Normal School. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Echoes” by H.L. Hix<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">My God, my God,
open the spine binding our sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">My God, my God,
open the spine binding my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their God,
their God, open the spine binding my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their God,
their God, break the spine binding my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their God,
their God, break the bonds binding my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their God,
their God, break the bonds binding my hearing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their God,
their God, break the bonds chafing my hearing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Our God, our
God, break the bonds chafing my hearing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Our God, our
God, break my bonds, repair my hearing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Our God, our
God, break my bonds, restore my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Any God, any
God, break my bonds, restore my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">All Gods, all
Gods, break their bonds, restore my sight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">--<i>H.L. Hix
is a poet and the author of numerous books, most recently </i>American Anger<i>
(2016).</i></span><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-14844937880473654652016-03-25T08:55:00.001-04:002016-03-25T09:00:43.660-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 45: Mercy Mercy Each: Black Site (Exhibit Q) and William Kelley Woolfitt<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 45: Mercy Mercy Each: Black Site (Exhibit Q) and William Kelley Woolfitt<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Father,
into your hands I commend my spirit.</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">For all my
foes I am an object of reproach,<br />
a laughingstock to my neighbors, and a dread to my friends;<br />
they who see me abroad flee from me.<br />
I am forgotten like the unremembered dead;<br />
I am like a dish that is broken.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;"> --Psalm 31<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Last night was
the beginning of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Easter, beginning with Holy
Thursday, when the priest bends to his knees to wash the feet of his
parishioners. In Rome, <a href="http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/03/24/pope_francis_at_chrism_mass_full_text_of_homily/1217718">Pope
Francis spoke about God’s infinite mercy.</a> In his words:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Mercy
restores everything; it restores dignity to each person. This is why effusive
gratitude is the proper response: we have to go the party, to put on our best
clothes, to cast off the rancour of the elder brother, to rejoice and give
thanks… Only in this way, participating fully in such rejoicing, is it possible
to think straight, to ask for forgiveness, and see more clearly how to make up
for the evil we have committed…. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">We remind
ourselves that there are countless masses of people who are poor, uneducated,
prisoners, who find themselves in such situations because others oppress them.
But we too remember that each of us knows the extent to which we too are often
blind, lacking the radiant light of faith, not because we do not have the
Gospel close at hand, but because of an excess of complicated theology. We feel
that our soul thirsts for spirituality, not for a lack of Living Water which we
only sip from, but because of an excessive “bubbly” spirituality, a “light”
spirituality. We feel ourselves also trapped, not so much by insurmountable
stone walls or steel enclosures that affect many peoples, but rather by a
digital, virtual worldliness that is opened and closed by a simple click.
We are oppressed, not by threats and pressures, like so many poor people, but
by the allure of a thousand commercial advertisements which we cannot shrug off
to walk ahead, freely, along paths that lead us to love of our brothers and
sisters, to the Lord’s flock, to the sheep who wait for the voice of their
shepherds.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">(I’ve been
struck, reading Scripture during this Lenten season, how much of the Gospel writing
has precursors in the Hebrew Scripture, particularly in the Psalms and Isaiah.
Either Jesus consciously echoed such voices during his life, or the writers of
the Gospels wrote him as the fulfillment of longings within Hebrew Scripture,
or both.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">Today is Good Friday, the day that commemorates Jesus’s crucifixion. W</span>hat
we have today is a person suffering the most cruel torture, torture unto death.
Torture at the hands of those who felt Jesus was dangerous, a risk to security
and the social orders. Like Mohamed Farag Bashmilah, rendered into black sites
and tortured there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Thanks to
William Kelley Woolfitt for his contribution and response to “Black Site
(Exhibit Q).” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia5PSm20emBrDi-rkA8QjpFEc0Klls1ob4P4o3FcKHJKqQmag_bYWPiE8nGng3K7By4KolEIo-fYEknj1q_QCVjxKEyL5OtB7tUMbCVV-oMgY7bX-WQ8VaEPruMNsO3CW1XsDKinlOerI/s1600/Black+Site+Q+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia5PSm20emBrDi-rkA8QjpFEc0Klls1ob4P4o3FcKHJKqQmag_bYWPiE8nGng3K7By4KolEIo-fYEknj1q_QCVjxKEyL5OtB7tUMbCVV-oMgY7bX-WQ8VaEPruMNsO3CW1XsDKinlOerI/s320/Black+Site+Q+%25281%2529.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"> "</span><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">so I could pass the
time…” </span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">response by William Kelley Woolfitt</span></b></span></div>
</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Two Digital Watches<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Not for long,
he marks the hours with a prayer chart, a watch with a map of the world. <i>I did not have information I needed</i>, he
says. Guards take the watch, tape outside the glass another watch, its straps
cut away. Time drags, he doesn’t look at the face. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Water<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">When given
plastic bottles with the labels stripped, filled from a large drum, he washes
his head and feet for prayer, drinks what might be tainted, impure, he cannot
know. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">No Mat<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Best efforts</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">, he says. He kneels, lowers himself,
touches his flat palms and forehead to the gray floor, the covering, the dirt. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Chain<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Fastened to an
iron bolt, the chain lets him reach the bucket-toilet, freights his body, he
can raise his right hand no higher than his waist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">The Sound of Waves<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">The speakers
blast music, then pause, and he listens for the call of a far mosque—then a
recorded ocean, seagulls, waves breaking a shore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">William
Woolfitt is the author of the poetry collections </span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Beauty Strip<i> (Texas Review Press,
2014) and </i>Charles of the Desert<i> (Paraclete Press, 2016). He edits </i></span><a href="https://chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Speaking of Marvels</span></i></a><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">(chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com</span></i></a><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">), a gathering of interviews with
chapbook and novella authors. His poems and stories have appeared in </span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Blackbird, Image, Tin House, Threepenny
Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Epoch,<i> and other journals.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-84728271050124073912016-03-24T10:15:00.002-04:002016-03-24T10:15:48.051-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 44: My Feet (Flying While Arab) + Josie Setzler<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 44: My Feet (Flying While Arab) + Josie Setzler<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">He came to
Simon Peter, who said to him,<br />
“Master, are you going to wash my feet?”<br />
Jesus answered and said to him,<br />
“What I am doing, you do not understand now,<br />
but you will understand later.”<br />
Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.”<br />
Jesus answered him,<br />
“Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”<br />
Simon Peter said to him,<br />
“Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> --John 13<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I find the
synchronicities between daily Scripture and the poems uncanny; both John and my
poem have to do with exposing one’s (dirty) feet! Here, Simon Peter first
refuses to have Jesus wash his feet. After all, he calls Jesus his Master, and
looks up to him with a certain kind of awe. It’s hard to know whether he is
shocked and horrified that Jesus might bend to clean his feet, or whether he secretly
wants him to do it—after all, he asks the question. But then when Jesus says
that he must, or else there is no future between them, Simon Peter offers up not
only his feet, but his hands and head. His whole body, his whole self. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the poem
below, my taking off my shoes—in the days after the Richard Reid failed
shoe-bombing episode in 2002—became an occasion for a woman to suspect me of
terrorism. FWA: Flying While Arab. I’ve thought about that incident often over
the years, and how I failed to answer her paranoid gaze. The poem became a way
of answering. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9mv-ZWI8kKydBoFqfRm0jZGkaATC1rCE0_5Or8n0zLWKYWCqE0oIq1EgKKwE3js8VXs9pXs6c9CXuXXsX7Zq8vh94mRMzZ2DKR_6vbBLSmmOYWzDaTTRH-a2Az4TQoW5VNCAZ0jSo-o8/s1600/on+the+flight+overseas.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9mv-ZWI8kKydBoFqfRm0jZGkaATC1rCE0_5Or8n0zLWKYWCqE0oIq1EgKKwE3js8VXs9pXs6c9CXuXXsX7Zq8vh94mRMzZ2DKR_6vbBLSmmOYWzDaTTRH-a2Az4TQoW5VNCAZ0jSo-o8/s640/on+the+flight+overseas.png" width="358" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Thanks to Josie
Setzler for her commentary!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“The poem with the sticky eyes” by Josie
Setzler<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Her gaze widened and neck craned as I
(her eyes) slowly removed (her eyes) my shoes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">As I read
Metres’s poem, I could feel the woman’s eyes sticking to him, just as they
stuck to the words in this sentence. It was all I remembered of the poem at
first reading. This was the poem with the sticky eyes. I could feel them on my
own body as well, even though as a white woman of Dutch ancestry, I knew that
Americans weren’t thinking of me when they repeated Homeland Security’s
warning: “See something, say something.”
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sometimes I’m afraid I’m carrying a
bomb.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Yet it is the
eyes themselves that are the weapon. Penetrating this man’s very sense of
himself, they violate him. Violate…violence…eyes as bombs. The word violate
comes from the Latin <i>violare</i>, “to
treat with violence, outrage, dishonor.” <i>Violare</i>
is thought to be an irregular derivative of <i>vis</i>,
“strength, force, power, energy.” And
now I recall that I am white and those eyes are my eyes. I move through my days
in a mostly white bubble and am barely aware of how I am protected by the ‘vis’
of my whiteness. Maybe my eyes have done a darting, shifting thing when I have
been taken by surprise by someone who looks different from me. Why do my eyes do that? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Later, visiting a Quaker meeting, I sat
among scattered chairs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Funny that the
poet should mention the scattered chairs. Maybe it’s a relief that they are not
all lined up, focused, like the sight on a gun. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">On the shores of breathing, all eyes
shut I waded. Silence our rudder, silence our harbor.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Silence is
another relief. And now we read that the diffused space of silence acts as a
rudder. A rudder gives direction, yet silence’s power to direct is different
from the power of those fiercely focused eyes. Identity finds safe harbor when
silence gives it precious space. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m still
puzzling over the poem’s transition from those violating eyes to this Quaker
meeting. I have trusted silence myself for some years now, trying to stay
faithful to a centering prayer practice. Earlier it was Zen. My Zen teacher
used to recommend that we keep our eyes half open, cast down and softly focused
on a spot on the floor in front of us. He asked us to gentle our gaze. Gentling
my gaze is never easy--in any part of my day. I need help. Poetry conspires
with the silence to gentle not only my eyes, but my heart and mind as well. I am deeply grateful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The lamp of the body is the eye. It
follows that if your eye is clear, your whole body will be filled with light. </span></span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">--Mt 6: 22</span><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
</span></b>
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-63487729193580719152016-03-23T09:30:00.002-04:002016-03-23T09:30:15.626-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 43: What Have We Done With Us? + Yahia Lababidi and Hayan Charara<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 43: What
Have We Done With Us? + Yahia Lababidi and Hayan Charara<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lord, in your great love, answer me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
For your sake I bear insult,<br />
and shame covers my face.<br />
I have become an outcast to my brothers,<br />
a stranger to my mother’s sons,<br />
because zeal for your house consumes me,<br />
and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-size: large;">--Psalm 69<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;"><span style="font-size: large;">From “Homefront/Removes” (<i>Sand Opera</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">) (<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">As if, somehow, I were responsible. <i>Patriotism is a feeling</i>, the student
wrote, <i>that is rotted deep inside every one
of us, and it’s hard</i> <i>to let something
such as your country go to shame</i>. The photos of hijackers in the newspaper
looked like a Warhol of our family album (the women oddly absent), portraits
bleared in displaced layers of ink. Who fed you, who changed you, who memorized
your hands, who breathed you in? The ex-editor of <i>Life</i> lays down the <i>old rule
of thumb </i>in journalism:<i> one person
dead in your paper’s hometown equals five dead the next town over equals fifty
dead in the next state or 5,000 dead in China</i>. The homeland is late blue, and
tastes of metal, like blood in the mouth. My cousins my demons my plotting and foiled
selves, what have you done, what have we done with us?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Breath”
by Yahia Lababidi<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Beneath
the intricate network of noise<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">there’s
a still more persistent tapestry<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">woven
of whispers, murmurs and chants<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s
the heaving breath of the very earth<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">carrying
along the prayer of all things:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">trees,
ants, stones, creeks and mountains, alike<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">All
giving silent thanks and remembrance<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">each
moment, as a tug on a rosary bead<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">while
we hurry past, heedless of the mysteries<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">And,
yet, every secret wants to be told<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">every
shy creature to approach and trust us<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">if
we patiently listen, with all our senses.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;">--Yahia Lababidi, Egyptian-American,
is the author of 6 books of poetry and prose. “Breath” can be found in his
latest collection, </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;">Balancing Acts: New
& Selected Poems<i>(1993-2015) available for pre-order here: <a href="http://www.press53.com/Yahia_Lababidi.html" target="_blank">http://www.press53.com/Yahia_Lababidi.html</a><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-latin;">“Usage” by Hayan Charara</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">An</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> assumption, <i>a</i> pejorative,
<i>an</i> honest language, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">an</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> honorable death. In grade school, I refused to <i>accept</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the mayor’s
handshake; he smiled at everyone <i>except</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">people with
names like mine. I was born here. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I didn’t have
to <i>adopt</i> America, but I <i>adapted</i> to it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">You understand:
a man must be <i>averse</i> to opinions <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">that have <i>adverse</i> impacts on whether he lives <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or dies.
“Before taking any <i>advice</i>, know the
language <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of those who
seek to <i>advise</i> you.” Certain words <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">affected</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel
jockey. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">What was the <i>effect?</i> While I <i>already</i> muttered <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">under my
breath, I did so even more. I am not <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">altogether</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> sure we can <i>all together</i> come. Everything <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">was not <i>all right. </i>Everything is not <i>all right</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Imagine poetry
without <i>allusions</i> to Shakespeare, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Greek
mythology, the Bible; or <i>allusions</i>
without <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the adjectives
“fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“right,”
“left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Language
written or translated into a single tongue <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">gives the <i>illusion</i> of tradition. <i>A lot</i> of people murder <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">language—<i>a lot</i> fully aware. <i>Among</i> all the dead, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">choose <i>between</i> “us” and “them.” <i>Among</i> all the names <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">for the
dead—mother, father, brother, sister, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">husband, wife,
child, friend, colleague, neighbor, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">teacher,
student, stranger—choose <i>between</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“citizen” and
“terrorist.” And poet? <i>Immoral</i>, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">yes, but never <i>amoral? </i>Large<i> amounts</i>, the number <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">between 75 and
90 percent of the estimated <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">150 million to
1 billion—civilians—killed during wars, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">over all of
recorded human history. <i>Anxious</i> is
“worried” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or
“apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Young, I
learned <i>anyone</i> born here could become
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">President.
Older, I can point to <i>any one</i> of a
hundred <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">reasons why
this is a lie. <i>Anyway</i>, I don’t want
to be <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">President, not
of a country, or club, not here or there, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">not <i>anywhere</i>. He said, “I turned the car
around <i>because</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">it began
raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">an <i>as</i> here could mean “because” or “when”;
it makes <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">no
difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">knew what would
come next; it matters little <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">when the heart
rate in less than a second jumps from <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">70 to 200 beats
per minute. What they did <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to my
grandfather was <i>awful—</i>its
wretchedness, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">awe-inspiring;
its cruelty, terrible; it was <i>awfully</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">hard to forget.
Just after 8:46AM, I wondered <i>awhile</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">what
would happen next. At 9:03AM, I knew <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">there
was going to be trouble for <i>a while </i>to
come. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">When
in her grief the woman said, “We’re going <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to
hurt them <i>bad,”</i> she meant to say,
“We’re going <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to
hurt them <i>badly.”</i> For seventeen days,
during <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">air
strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot <i>beside</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a
kerosene lamp in the basement of his house. <i>Besides</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a
few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he
had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">none
of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he
died. <i>Besides</i>, he was eighty-two
years old. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I
<i>can</i> write what I please. I don’t need
to ask, <i>May</i> I? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Like
a song: men with <i>capital</i> meet in the <i>Capitol</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in
the nation’s <i>capital</i>. Any
disagreements, <i>censored; <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">those
making them—poets, dissenters, activists— <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">censured</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">. The aftermath, approximately 655,000 <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">people
killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">A
Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of
Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Maryland);
School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">(Baghdad,
Iraq); in cooperation with the Center <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">for
International Studies, Massachusetts Institute <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of
Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
figure just <i>cited—</i>655,000
dead—resulted from <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a
household survey conducted at actual <i>sites</i>,
in Iraq, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">not
the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or
someone’s imagination. Of <i>course</i>,
language has been <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">corrupted.
Look, the President, who speaks <i>coarsely</i>,
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">says,
“We must stay the <i>course.”</i> The
problem with <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Let
your <i>conscience</i> be your guide” is you
must first <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">be
aware, <i>conscious</i>, of the fact that a
moral principle <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">is
a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ‘em <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">out
of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">is
<i>conscious</i> of his <i>conscience</i> at work. Am I fully <i>conscious</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of
how I arrived at this? The <i>continual</i>
dissemination <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of
similar images and ideas. The <i>continual</i>
aired footage <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of
planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to
the streets, dust, screams, a <i>continuous</i>
reel of destruction, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">fear,
as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a
day, every day, any time. For a while, I <i>couldn’t</i>
<i>care less</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">about
war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">just
like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I
<i>couldn’t care less</i> why anyone would
want it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In
1982, any one of those boys <i>could have</i>
been me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Now,
it’s any one of those dead men could be me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
Secretary of State offered such <i>counsel</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to
the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Security
<i>Council</i> nodded in favor of war. <i>Criterion</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">easily
becomes <i>criteria</i>. Even easier: to no
longer <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">require either. The <i>data</i>
turned out false. The doctrine <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">both speak English, our languages are so <i>different from</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">each other, yours might as well be Greek to me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">When the black man in the park asked, “Are you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Someone <i>don’t</i>
like you very much,” I understood <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">perfectly what he meant. The President alluded <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to the Crusades because of (not <i>due to</i>) a lack <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">worried it might offend the Middle East; <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">it never occurred to him the offense taken was <i>due to</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You are <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">either</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> with us or with the terrorists” (September
20, 2001). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“You’re <i>either</i>
with us or against us” (November 6, 2001). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to the problem of terrorists in ur midst—he meant <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder, did he know <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">neighbors, passers-by, New Yorkers, Americans; <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Jews, Buddhists,
Atheists; did he realize he was <i>eliciting</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Among those who did not find the remark at all <i>illicit</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the governor, members of the House, the Senate, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the President of the United States. <i>Emigrate</i> is better <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">than <i>immigrate</i>.
Proof: no such thing as illegal <i>emigration</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Further proof: <i>emigration
</i>is never an election issue. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I heard <i>enthusiastic</i>
speeches. They hate our freedoms, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">our way of life, our this, that, and the other, <i>and so on</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">(not <i>etc).</i> Not <i>everyone</i> agreed <i>every one</i> not “with us” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">was “against us.” Detroit was <i>farther</i> from home <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">than my father
ever imagined. He convinced himself <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">soon after
arriving here he had ventured <i>further</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">than he should
have. <i>Fewer</i> people live in his
hometown<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">than when he
left, in 1966. The number, even <i>less</i>,
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">following
thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">First</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> (not <i>firstly</i>) my
father spoke Arabic; <i>second</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">(not <i>secondly</i>) he spoke broken English; <i>third</i> (not <i>thirdly</i>) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he spoke Arabic
at home and English at work; <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">fourth</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> (not <i>fourthly</i>)
he refused to speak English <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">anymore. Not
every poem is <i>good</i>. Not every poem <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">does <i>well.</i> Not every poem is <i>well, </i>either. Nor does <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">every poem do <i>good.</i> “To grow the economy” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">is more than
jargon. Can a democracy <i>grow</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">without
violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to<i>
grow</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">tomatoes this
year, despite what was done. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Several men,
civilian workers, identified as enemies, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">were <i>hanged</i> on a bridge, bodies torched,
corpses <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">swaying in the
breeze. Photographs of the dead <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">were <i>hung</i> with care. I can <i>hardly</i> describe what is <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">going on. Day
after day, he told <i>himself</i>, “I am <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">an American. I
eat apple pie. I watch baseball.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I speak
American English. I read American poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I was born in
Detroit, a city as American as it gets. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I vote. I work.
I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I make mortgage
payments. I am not hungry. I worry <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">less than the
rest of the world. I could stand to lose <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a few pounds. I
eat several types of cuisine <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">on a regular
basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I have central
air-conditioning. I will never starve <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to death or
experience famine. I will never die <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of malaria. I
can say whatever the fuck I please.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Even words
succumbed; <i>hopefully</i> turned into <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a kind of joke;
<i>hopeful, </i>a slur. <i>However</i>, I use the words, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">but less, with
more care. The President <i>implied</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">compassion; but
<i>inferred</i> otherwise. This is not <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">meant to be <i>ingenious</i>. Nor is it <i>ingenuous.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The more he got
<i>into</i> it, the more he saw poetry, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">like language,
was <i>in</i> a constant state of becoming. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Regardless</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">, or because of this, he welcomed the
misuse <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of language.
Language is <i>its</i> own worst enemy—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">it’s</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> the snake devouring <i>its</i>
own tail. They thought <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of us not <i>kind of</i> or <i>sort of</i> but as <i>somewhat </i>American.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Lie:</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or place
something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">like <i>lead</i>; its use—uranium shells—<i>led</i> to birth defects. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">When in his
anger the man said, “We’re going <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to <i>teach</i> them a lesson,” I wonder what he
thought <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">they would <i>learn</i>. In a war, a soldier is <i>less likely</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to die than a
civilian. He looks <i>like</i> he hates our
freedoms. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">You don’t know
them <i>like</i> I do. He looks<i> as </i>if he hates <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">our freedoms.
You don’t know them <i>as</i> I do. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">When in his
sorrow my father said, “Everybody <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">loose</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It <i>may be</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">poets should
fight wars. <i>Maybe</i> then, metaphors—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">not bodies, not
hillsides, not hospitals, not schools—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">will explode. I
<i>might have</i> watched the popular sitcom
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">if not for my
family—they were under attack, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">they <i>might have</i> died. Others <i>may have</i> been laughing <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">at jokes while
bodies were being torn apart. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I could not
risk that kind of laughter. Of all the <i>media
</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">covering war,
which <i>medium</i> best abolishes the
truth?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I deceive <i>myself</i>. I will deceive you <i>myself.</i> In the Bronx, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I <i>passed</i> as Puerto Rican. I <i>passed</i> as Greek in Queens, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">also Brazilian,
Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">good-looking
American movie actor. As Iranian <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in Manhattan.
At the mall in New Jersey, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the sales clerk
guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">was born, my
hometown, I always <i>pass</i> as Arab. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I may look like
the men in the great paintings <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of the Near
East but their lives, their ways, I assure you, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">are in the <i>past.</i> <i>Plus, </i>except in those paintings, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or at the movies,
I never saw Arabs with multiple wives, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or who rode
camels, lived in silk tents, drank from <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">desert wells; <i>moreover</i>, it’s time to move <i>past</i> that. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Did language<i> precede</i> violence? Can violence <i>proceed</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">without
language? It broke my father’s heart <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to talk about
the <i>principle</i> of equal justice. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The news aired
several <i>quotations</i> from the airline <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">passengers, one
of whom was a middle-aged man <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">with children,
who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">on board.” He
used the word “them” though only one, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">an Arab, was on
the plane. Being from Detroit, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I couldn’t help
but think of Rosa Parks. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Then I got
angry. I said to the TV, to no one <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in particular,
“If you don’t feel safe, then you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">get off the
goddamn plane.” You can <i>quote</i> me <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">on that. I was <i>really </i>angry—not <i>real</i> angry, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">but <i>really</i> angry. The <i>reason?</i> A poet asked me <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">why I didn’t
write poems about Muslim and Arab <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">violence
against others, and I said I did. And then <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he said he
meant violence against Americans and Israelis, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">respectively</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">, and I said I did, and before I could <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">go on he
interrupted to ask why I didn’t write <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">poems about
mothers who sent their sons and daughters <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">on suicide
missions. As if, as if, as if. I <i>respectfully</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">decline to
answer any more questions. Write your own <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">goddamn poem!
Does this poem gratify the physical senses? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Does it use <i>sensuous</i> language? It certainly does not<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">attempt to
gratify those senses associated with <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">sexual
pleasure. In this way, it may not be a <i>sensual
</i>poem. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">However, men
have been known to experience <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">sexual gratification
in situations involving power, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">especially over
women, other men, life, and language. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">My father said,
“No matter how angry they make you, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">be polite. If they stay long, ask them to <i>sit</i>. Otherwise, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">they will try to <i>set</i>
you straight.” When in his <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">frustration he said, <i>“Should
of,</i> could of, would of,” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the problem further.” Because (not <i>since</i>) the terrorists <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">than ever before. This is <i>supposed to</i> be a poem; <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">it is <i>supposed to</i>
be in a conversation with you. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Be<i> sure and </i>participate.
“No language is more violent <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">than</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> another,” he said. <i>Then </i>he laughed, and said, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Except the one you use.”
Do conflicts of interest <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">exist when governments award wartime contracts <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to companies<i> that </i>have
close ties to government officials? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton,<i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">which</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> is headquartered in Houston, Texas, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">near Bush International Airport. Would they benefit <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">themselves</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> by declaring war? Please send <i>those</i> men <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">back home. My
grandfather lay <i>there</i> unconscious. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">For days, <i>there</i> was no water, no medicine, nothing
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to eat. The
soldiers left <i>their</i> footprints at the
doorstep. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">His sons and
daughters, <i>they’re</i> now grieving him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Try not <i>to</i> make <i>too</i> much of it” was the advice given <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">after <i>two</i> Homeland Security agents visited my
house, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">not once, not
twice, but three times. I’m <i>waiting for</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">my right mind.
The language is a long <i>ways</i> from
here. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">After the bombs
fell, I called every night to find out <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">whether</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> my father was alive or dead. He always
asked, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“How’s the <i>weather</i> there?” Soon enough, he assured
me, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">things would
return to normal, <i>that</i> (not<i> where</i>) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a ceasefire was
on the way. <i>Although</i> (not <i>while</i>) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I spoke English
with my father, he replied in Arabic. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Then I
wondered, <i>who’s</i> to decide <i>whose</i> language it is <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">anyway—you, me?
<i>your</i> mother, father, books, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">perspective,
sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">customs,
energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">dog, cat,
sister, brother, daughter, family, <i>you</i>,
poems, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">nights,
thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">breaks,
memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">sex, funerals,
metaphors, histories, names, tongues, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">syntax, coffee,
smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">fingers, skin, <i>you, your,</i> <i>you’re </i>here, there, the sky, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the rain, the
past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">--Hayan Charara, from
<i>Something Sinister</i>. Go buy it!</span></span>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-47422270797703672252016-03-22T10:38:00.004-04:002016-03-22T10:42:35.219-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 42: May We Be Arrows of Light and Breath + Christopher Kempf<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 42: May We Be Arrows of Light and Breath +
Christopher Kempf<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Hear me, O islands,</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><br />
<span style="background: white;">listen, O distant peoples.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">The LORD called me from birth,</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">He made of me a sharp-edged sword</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">and concealed me in the shadow of his arm.</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">He made me a polished arrow,</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">in his quiver he hid me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> --Isaiah
49<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">On a day that Brussels is beset by suicide attacks, I’d planned to share
what I think of as my 9/11 poem: “you look at me / looking at you.” May all of
us hold each other in the light, though we also hold so much dark, hold each
other—not just the Belgians, but the Congolese, not just the French but the
Algerians, not just the Americans but the Afghanis and Iraqis and Syrians and Mexicans
and Guatemalans and Colombians and Nicaraguans, all people—all made in the image
of Love. May our arrows be of light, of love.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX5Yba6-rhijQK6JWDSKPFQmR3PLc_OzI8JrwjRj22j60x9Keds4JSWjFpPyU3VWIVt_6GQokqfnuL9pmaG3y9dLqtzx7R7u1wEcJEUw_wVO6Vof8YpXJRzZhC6PMhOroW2I-wyRRd06I/s1600/You+look+at+me.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX5Yba6-rhijQK6JWDSKPFQmR3PLc_OzI8JrwjRj22j60x9Keds4JSWjFpPyU3VWIVt_6GQokqfnuL9pmaG3y9dLqtzx7R7u1wEcJEUw_wVO6Vof8YpXJRzZhC6PMhOroW2I-wyRRd06I/s640/You+look+at+me.PNG" width="356" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">“You look at me / looking at you” commentary by Christopher Kempf<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">A picture is a sum of destructions</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Simple, of
course, to understand Picasso’s statement in light of his most famous works—<i>Les Demoiselles d’Avignon</i>, <i>Nude Descending a Staircase</i>, <i>Guernica</i>. These are violent paintings,
we know, the destruction Picasso speaks of not merely, as he intended the
statement, a matter of process—of removing paint rather than adding it—but a
matter, too, of form and perspective, of cutting and partitioning and twisting
and deforming and destroying the artist’s subject in the name of seeing anew. In
the name, that is, of art.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">More
difficult—the <i>is</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">A picture <i>is</i> a sum of destructions. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Not that a
picture <i>represents</i>, say, the bombing
of a Basque village by German and Italian warplanes, but that it <i>is</i> that.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Or is part of
that.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Or is the sum
of that. Is made possible by that. Is birthed from that. That a picture is the
sum of whole back-histories of violence and exploitation and oppression that
are neither held of from nor delimited by the picture’s frame. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">That a
picture—any picture—is a form of privilege. That a poem is.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">That it <i>is</i> a form of violence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I am writing
this under the generous employ of a University which invented the atom bomb and
whose economists, in the 1970s, sustained and legitimized the brutal,
neo-liberalist dictatorships of South America. “The [Chilean] secret police
would dispose of some victims by dropping them into the ocean from helicopters
‘after first cutting their stomach open with a knife to keep the bodies from
floating.’” I am grateful for my
paycheck<i>.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I is a sum of
destructions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“You look at me
/ looking at you.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">This—how we
might see ourselves and our art. As from the outside. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">That our art
might better recognize itself as nested, <i>matryoshka</i>-like,
within systems of oppression from which it is inextricable. From which it
benefits. “A kind of seeding, this seeing.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Baudelaire—“hypocrite
reader.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Luke—“cast
first the beam out of thine own eye.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Aye.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Christopher
Kempf is the author of </span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Late
in the Empire of Men<i>, which won the Levis Prize from Four Way Books and is
forthcoming in March 2017. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, he is
currently a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago.
For an example of Kempf’s work, see </i></span><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/114456/call-duty-modern-warfare-poem-christopher-kempf" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">https://newrepublic.com/article/114456/call-duty-modern-warfare-poem-christopher-kempf</span></a><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span>
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-84362192386853052212016-03-22T09:53:00.000-04:002016-03-22T09:53:12.833-04:00Pictures at an Exhibition giveaway! 5 free and signed copies over at Goodreads<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZaAk4KMTxMWsIhENfaFDpIEDV9y_S8va7CCHiykwiwsdZFR4ftepXju93S6w3NHI8LsOwbuKGFXkRhc65Z8JNRPQYHJdyAXshmIed2ujqPWpY9fePUYoJxUtsU9j6zNjRj1DdpVdLMfI/s1600/Metres+final+cover_rev.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZaAk4KMTxMWsIhENfaFDpIEDV9y_S8va7CCHiykwiwsdZFR4ftepXju93S6w3NHI8LsOwbuKGFXkRhc65Z8JNRPQYHJdyAXshmIed2ujqPWpY9fePUYoJxUtsU9j6zNjRj1DdpVdLMfI/s320/Metres+final+cover_rev.jpg" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com" target="_new">Goodreads</a> Book Giveaway
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28543436"><img alt="Pictures at an Exhibition by Philip Metres" title="Pictures at an Exhibition by Philip Metres" width="100" src="https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png" /></a>
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<h3 style="margin: 0; padding: 0; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal;">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28543436">Pictures at an Exhibition</a>
</h3>
<h4 style="margin: 0 0 10px; padding: 0; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">
by <a style="text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/159705.Philip_Metres">Philip Metres</a>
</h4>
<div class="giveaway_details">
<p>
Giveaway ends April 14, 2016.
</p>
<p>
See the <a style="text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/179508">giveaway details</a>
at Goodreads.
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</div><script src="https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/widget/179508" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-61968859745333249232016-03-21T09:38:00.001-04:002016-03-21T09:38:58.910-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 41: Art as Detox, 9/11 + Becca Lachman<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 41: Art as Detox, 9/11 + Becca Lachman<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">So Moses
prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses,<br />
“Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,<br />
and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.”<br />
Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole,<br />
and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent<br />
looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> --Numbers<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">What if art is
a detoxifier? “Anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze
serpent, he lived.” That making an image of the thing is a homeopathy for the
thing’s sting?</span></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6KMZhMksFj9KDc6jj_Fu_7JpCdBQsMYvqOUa0qPRF1fLQr8j0rRhuU890_7se-SO5FInU5LCqx077i6cEOaAdxuoL_jGY24S3lNHT0POcjnTu_aZec9sOU5qnyFLDCzkO-tDLS_9uWc/s1600/I+was+planning.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6KMZhMksFj9KDc6jj_Fu_7JpCdBQsMYvqOUa0qPRF1fLQr8j0rRhuU890_7se-SO5FInU5LCqx077i6cEOaAdxuoL_jGY24S3lNHT0POcjnTu_aZec9sOU5qnyFLDCzkO-tDLS_9uWc/s640/I+was+planning.PNG" width="356" /></a></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Where were
you that day?...” by Becca J.R. Lachman<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s a different story that surfaces, depending on the generation. But
it usually refers to an act of violence that changes everything. What we hear
less often on repeat are the many-layered ways we choose to live after.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">For my family, this question might shake loose stories about the night
my great-aunt was strangled to death; the morning a cousin’s body was found
weeks after an overdose; or the post-9-11 morning my parents decided to do
humanitarian work in Liberia after its 14-year civil war.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">When I reflect on “I was planning my lesson on imagery,” I can’t help
but invite the self I was in 2001 to sit alongside me. She is 20, an
impassioned, pacifist music student about to fly to gritty Leeds, England for a
year to serve as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar. She has never
had a friend who does not look like her, or who practices a different religion.
Her main assignment abroad: to talk to at least 25 groups about “being an
American.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I also invite my writing teacher-self, born almost a decade later, to
join us. She is about to start 10+ years of graduate work and adjuncting. It
will take her five years after she first reads it to introduce </span><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180106" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“The Colonel”</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> into a
workshop of mostly white, middle-class undergrads, partly because she’s begun
to see too much of herself in the poem’s speaker: a person of privilege and
power, dropping in on what war can really mean, then getting to leave.
Or—worse—who chooses <i>not</i> to enter the story of violence, even
at the edges, or to come home to tell it in her own voice. Most of the students
she’ll shepherd hold 9-11 as their first collective memory of national
importance. They have always been living in the War on Terror, don’t know
another backdrop to the story.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">And yet, my faith practice tells me that the cornerstone of my living
is built on reconciliation and radical community, modeled by a troublesome
rebel who was ultimately put to death because of his teachings on love and
inclusion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">Reconciliation often takes burning something away, many tries at
forgiveness and empathy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">I study the shape of this poem, how the perfect window is missing a
tiny piece, how the bent spines of the parentheses are turned away from each
other. I think of cornerstones. I think of nonconformity, and the ways that
peace-making can wear us down and build us up, again and again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">When reconciliation feels like a whisper next to our politics and
headlines and I am numbed down into in-action, I remember individuals--of all
belief systems--who believe that another world is possible: the members
of </span><a href="http://www.cpt.org/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Christian
Peacemaker Teams,</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> </span><a href="http://www.combatpaper.org/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Combat Paper Project</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> artists, the community at </span><a href="http://www.corrymeela.org/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Corrymeela</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> in N.
Ireland. The list is long.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">In Lent more than other seasons, I am still an exchange student in a
strange land, trying to make sense of how my versions of “America” and
“Christian” are so different from what much of the world assumes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Where were
you that day?...<br />
<br />
What is your story--what is its springboard?<br />
<br />
And how have you chosen to live since?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.becca-jr-lachman.com/" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Becca
J.R. Lachman</span></i></a><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> is a Mennonite writer, auntie, and
public library employee living in Athens, Ohio. Her poetry collections are </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The Apple
Speaks</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> and </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Other Acreage</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">, and she is the editor
of </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford</span></span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">. </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-2202900037402802592016-03-20T17:45:00.003-04:002016-03-20T17:45:26.770-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 40: A Word That Will Rouse Us + Deema Shehabi<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 40: A Word That Will Rouse Us + Deema Shehabi<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The Lord GOD
has given me<br />
a well-trained tongue,<br />
that I might know how to speak to the weary<br />
a word that will rouse them.<br />
Morning after morning<br />
he opens my ear that I may hear;<br />
and I have not rebelled,<br />
have not turned back.<br />
I gave my back to those who beat me,<br />
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;<br />
my face I did not shield<br />
from buffets and spitting.<br />
<br />
The Lord GOD is my help,<br />
therefore I am not disgraced;<br />
I have set my face like flint,<br />
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">--Isaiah 50: 4-7<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Today’s opening
reading is among the scriptural passages I cherish most, so much so that I accidentally
memorized the opening. Years ago, when I came upon it in my adult mind, it seemed
to be a sort of vocational invitation, a compass to navigate the unmarked path
of being a writer. To speak a word to the weary a word that would rouse them.
Yes, I thought, writing it down in my notebook, a sort of mantra for what
writing might do. It came up unbidden during the Hunt interview with Jeremy
Zipple and Joe Hoover, and my secret faith life suddenly became visible: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIQYYBoIItI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIQYYBoIItI</a>.
In the Lenten season, this reading is paired up with the Palm Sunday reading of
Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem, riding an ass and greeted by people who
lay palm fronds on the road before him—thus inviting the connection of Isaiah’s
prophetic vision of someone who maintains faith despite being beaten to Jesus’s
own crucifixion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">During this
Lent, I’ve been wrestling with Scripture alongside the poems of <i>Sand Opera</i>,
aided along the way by other poets and writers and people of faith as we have
journeyed together through these gray and cold months. I’m so grateful that,
despite your silence, that you have been with me. Whoever you are: thank you. On
the face of it, it was a crazy and uncool thing to do, to try to bring together
two ways of being, two ways of trying to understand this life—the life of faith
and the life of writing—and to lay bare my resistances to the life of faith
while I let my own writing hibernate. I have my doubts—about everything—but I’m
grateful to be part of a community of writers and a community of faith (not
just the Catholic Church, in all its battered splendor, but our home parish, St.
Dominic Church in Shaker Heights). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Today’s poem
concerns the strange politics of identity during the post-9/11 moment, when I
came awake as an Arab American. My father always instilled in us a sense of
pride and belonging to the peoples of the Middle East, yet we live in a country
that has been at war with Arabs just about as long as I’ve been alive. So when
9/11 happened, I was having that double-consciousness of which W.E.B. DuBois wrote
so eloquently. Alongside this poem is a poem by Deema K. Shehabi, a Palestinian
American poet who lives in the Bay Area, and measures her own proximity and
distance to where her family came from (her grandfather was once the mayor of
Gaza!). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">From “Homefront/Removes” (from <i>Sand
Opera</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">) (<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 1.0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.1in; margin-right: 1.1in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In the wake of. I don’t even speak the
language. In glances and glares. <i>My son,</i>
y<i>ou are Arab, be proud of it</i>, my Dad
would say. I awaken. I avoid pulling up beside flagged trucks. Of ire I sing,
mirror. Who turns to see me, the invisible now visible. Who lives in a want ad
for a criminal act. <i>Fits the ethnicity,
if you know what I mean</i>, my colleague said. Myself as numb stranger. <i>My son, you are Arab, be proud of it</i>. I count turned heads, raised eyebrows at the
faculty meeting, when two Muslims are introduced as visiting professors in
physics. What does it matter where numbers come from? B’s father is still
missing. Whose face, he’d joke, he never knew, seeing it was always behind a
home movie camera. <i>My son</i>, I caught
myself saying to no one who exists, <i>I am
air</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.1in; margin-right: 1.1in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Gate of
Freedom” by Deema K. Shehabi<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">(for
Palestinian hunger striker, Samer Issawi)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Lovers of
asparagus, alive <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">as
hummingbirds, place their nostrils <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">over a low
cloud, wet of air.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s the year
of green hills<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in California
that early spring; <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the evening is
blue-split between the first<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">snow on the
mountain top,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">and a computer
screen, where news of a man<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">whose body is
eating itself, scythes <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> the long-stemmed breaths in the room. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Do not weep if
my heart fails,” he writes. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“I am your
son.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Gate of Love<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Son I have.
Your hands bulge<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">with pear tree
blossoms.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">You are bellow
and sweat,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">hunger and
bread. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I part the fog
to find you<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">through a grimy
crowd of kids.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Before you give
in to the affection<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">that soils you
in public,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I’ll promise
you a truce.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Gate of the Sun<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Bristling down
the chemical-<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">scraped hall
uttering <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">assalamu
alaikums to the young <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">patients from
the UAE, their heads sagging <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to the side,
their bodies a shrine <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to tumors,
husks of overgrown cells,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the chemo
fountain. One boy<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">stares through
a sieve <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of darkness,
hewn around dark-gray clouds.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> Gate of Peace<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“I have so many
sons withering,”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> I whisper to the Chinese elm, as news <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of the man
whose body is eating itself,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">disputes with
the bresola on crisp baguette<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">that I’m eating
in a garden<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">among the
flung-out<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">blue jays and
limping Daddy long legs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">No hymns left;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">only a small
neck <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the sun gnarls
through. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">First appeared:
Academy of American Poets website, Poem-A-Day (March 10, 2013).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Deema K.
Shehabi is the author of </span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">Thirteen
Departures from the Moon<i>, co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of </i>Al-Mutanabbi
Street Starts Here<i>, and co-author with Marilyn Hacker of </i></span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">Diaspo/Renga</span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">. </i></span></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-74015959865722446102016-03-19T15:37:00.004-04:002016-03-19T15:37:36.467-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 39: What Consequence is a Body + Nomi Stone<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 39: What Consequence is a Body + Nomi
Stone<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">If you ever got lost as a child, you might remember that rising terror
as the reality of your separation finally began to sink in. Everything known
was lost, and you were utterly alone. Maybe you didn’t cry until you finally saw your
mom or dad, because you knew it was finally alright. You were home in their
arms. Years later, how strange to feel a similar pang when my little children
would disappear from my sight, and I’d suddenly wonder in fear if I’d ever see
them again. Were they abducted? Would they run across the street? The mind goes
to crazy places.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the second chapter of Luke, a twelve year old Jesus fails to leave
with the family caravan and stays in Jerusalem. When they finally figure it
out, his parents were “astonished,” and his mother says, upon seeing him, “why
have you done this to us?” In short, she’s angry as hell. He’s already leaving
them, as all children do when they grow up. A long goodbye.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">But some people do disappear, not of their own volition. Today’s poem
concerns Yemeni citizen Mohamed Bashmilah’s arrest and “rendition” into secret “black
site” prisons. His family must have been terrified for him, wondering where he
was, perhaps even more terrified than he was. Never charged with a crime, he’s
one of the “collateral damage” of the War on Terror. Even his case against the airline,
Jeppesen, that was complicit in the rendition, was dropped due to national
security. Thanks to Nomi Stone, for her contributing further background to this
crazy story in her commentary. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">From “Homefront/Removes”
(</span><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Sand
Opera</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">)(<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.1in; margin-right: 1.1in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">What consequence is a body. And if the
eye were a lamp. In the beginning, there
was a certain darkness, an uncertain darkness after. I’m trying to piece
together something resembling the sea, in the frail moments before squall. For
passengers to safely reach the stable osmotic. In the sudden wake, how to see
the difference between “or” & “and”—on which matters of matter & spirit
hang. If the eye. If a body a body none/theless loved by anons &
disappeared. If a body separate & how. MOHAMED v. JEPPESEN, Inc. For
passengers to safely. <i>Jeppesen:
Transforming the Way</i> <i>the World Moves</i>.
If I the see, sea again. What consequence is a body a body nonetheless. If the
light in me is gone. Thus I the Doctor with Disfigured. Thus I, Scribe of Black
Hives. If my body full of darkness. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">“What
Consequence is a Body” by Nomi Stone<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Scribe of
Black Hives</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, loosen the sting into the air. In extraordinary renditions, the
prisoners’ bodies are chained to the floor of the plane and subdued with
sedatives. Each body, taken for an al-Qa’ida suspect, is plucked out of its
life and disappeared. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is a company called Jeppesen, which “help[s] aviation
professionals worldwide reach their destinations safely and efficiently.”
“Quality,” the company says “is everyone’s responsibility.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">The New
Yorker </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">described how Khaled al-Masri, a German car salesman, was mistaken for
an al-Qa’ida operative. After a Jeppesen plane sent him across the sea into a
black site, the American flight crew flew to a resort in Majorca. The island is
bright and hot and studded with caves both above and beneath the sea. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">In 2007, the ACLU sued Jeppesen on behalf of five plaintiffs who had
been disappeared and then tortured in black sites across the ocean. Under these
very waves, there are interconnected passages, cavities you can’t even imagine.
And there are bodies — can you believe this — without consequence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">These are the nicknames for these crafts that hold bodies without
consequence: ghost plane; spook flight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">The lawsuit was dismissed, as it was feared that the case would bring
information to light that could endanger security. In 2010, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit again dismissed the case. The ACLU filed for
appeal with the Supreme Court. In May 2011, the Supreme Court dismissed the
case. Summer was coming again, and the sun was harsh and dry over the white
buildings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">--Nomi Stone </span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">is the author
of the poetry collection <i>Stranger’s Notebook</i>. Her poems appear or are
forthcoming in <i>Best American Poetry 2016</i>, <i>Poetry Northwest</i>, <i>Drunken
Boat</i>, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on <i>Kill Class</i>, a
collection of poems based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in war games
across America. <b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
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Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-23624342496720304152016-03-18T15:42:00.002-04:002016-03-18T15:42:20.788-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 38: “Cell/(ph)one (A simultaneity in four voices)”<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;">Sand
Opera Lenten Journey Day 38: </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">“Cell/(ph)one
(A simultaneity in four voices)” <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The Jews
picked up rocks to stone Jesus.<br />
Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from my Father.<br />
For which of these are you trying to stone me?”<br />
The Jews answered him,<br />
“We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.<br />
You, a man, are making yourself God.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">To which he
replied, but I am God. Or something like that. (Actually, he replies that the
law says that you are gods, quoting Psalms 82:6.) The Jesus of John’s Gospel seems
far more divine than human, and I’m annoyed by him as a character, as if he
were an extra from an Ayn Rand novel. I keep expecting him to shoot lasers out
of his eyes or something. The point is: Jesus’s humanity is not easy to see in <i>John</i>,
in all his proclamations of his divinity. He’s harder to hug here than in the
synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). So he’s harder for me to see. The
question may well be, how can we see people as God sees them (or, if the God
language isn’t your thing, as they might be seen by loving eyes) not as we want
to see them? And similarly, how can we hear the voices of others with the ears
of Love? Today’s poem is the chorale poem, “Cell/(ph)one” as well as Paige Webb’s commentary
on the text performance.
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ITmJYhyYIKw" width="420"></iframe>
<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“Cell/(ph)one
(A simultaneity in four voices)” commentary by Paige Webb<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
instructions say: “Read line breaks as slight pauses, space breaks as
silences.” But silence is emphatically impossible during this poem’s
performance. When one reader pauses between stanzas, other voices overwhelm the
absence. The listener’s focus splits, unable to discern any one for long. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In a video
performance on Youtube, the camera faces the shadowed backs of the reader’s
heads. It seems appropriate, the facelessness. In that recording, “[Breaking
Convo]” is the loudest voice; what he says, the most insignificant (“Huh?”).
It’s a conversation broken by distraction, a distraction itself.
Dilililiililillililiililli. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Hidden
somewhere in there, a prisoner at Guantanamo relays a message to his wife—a
fragment of real intimacy swallowed by cacophony. I replay the video, listening
for his voice. All I can pick out is “That I love her.” What can break through
the static, and how far do we need to lean in to hear? One factor is context,
that we live in this particular time, in this particular country, and not
another. The question is how we participate, how we listen.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">This is (still)
the era of Trump’s campaign for more power, with his reductive phrases and
their racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic subtext; with his supporters’
violent acts and threats on Muslims, Hispanics, and African Americans; with his
manipulation of fear and anxiety that in turn has raised my anxiety and
confusion about this moment in history, after all that has happened. On my
route home, the flash of a new billboard: “We, Muslim Americans condemn
terrorism!” Black letters thrown against a white background, beside an image of
the American flag. All that its existence implies, the individual experiences
that led to that statement. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">On another
highway in St. Louis, protesters blocked traffic this past August, on the
anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. An SUV drove through the crowd. Below the
news story someone posted: “Agreed. Do not fuck with the evening commute.” The
protest was against a constant, an aim to break it by a shift in
attention—“Ferguson is everywhere” the yellow roadblocks said—a shift away from
the small want to get home now, from the radio, the sound of the kids’ T.V. in
the back, the cellphone in one hand, the other on the wheel. I watch that SUV
drive through again: Dilililiililillililiililli.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In Claudia
Rankine’s <i>Don’t Let Me Be Lonely</i>, the
image of a T.V. in static mode recurs, while the phrase “this is the most
miserable in my life” punctuates throughout. Static, loneliness, and what
breaks through. Under [Cell/phone]: “You are wanted. You are not / alone.”
That’s the promise of digital communication—its sheen of connection without the
messiness of actual intimacy. [Cell/phone] ends the performance alone with
compulsive repetition of “I have to take this call.” I imagine it read to the
beat of someone reaching for his phone, driven by the human need (anxiety) to
feel valued, wanted. This is the need books like <i>Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products </i>exploit. I say this as
a person who owns a smartphone. Who checks it too often. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Another
instruction: “cut [the poem] into four columns for four readers.” Divide the
page; don’t let your hands touch the same text; speak over, rather than to, one
another. In the video, the four readers haven’t cut the poem—and of course not,
it’s a beautiful book. Regardless, the visual of each holding up <i>Sand Opera</i> with a hand or two somehow
feels like a quiet defiance to the noise that overwhelms a single voice, that
pushes out empathy with an individual’s speech, that kind of intimacy. That’s
what Philip Metres offers in <i>Sand Opera</i>—a
break in the static, a shift in attention, a space through which we can lean in
and listen. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">“That I love
her.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Paige Webb is an MFA candidate at Washington University,
St. Louis. She serves as an instructor for The Kenyon Review Young Writers
Workshop and is an editor of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></i><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">February<i>. </i></span></span><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-20677400837188902102016-03-17T11:29:00.002-04:002016-03-17T11:30:20.589-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 37: Etruscan Cista Handle<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand
Opera Lenten Journey Day 37: Etruscan Cista Handle<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I spent part of
the morning listening to Woody Guthrie songs with my daughter Leila, who spied
a poster of him in my office. We listened to “Pretty Boy Floyd,” the Dylan
cover, which tells the story of a generous Robin Hood outlaw. My favorite lines
end the song: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Yes, as
through this world I've wandered<br />
I've seen lots of funny men;<br />
Some will rob you with a six-gun,<br />
And some with a fountain pen.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Today’s poem is
inspired by one of my favorite pieces in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the
handle of a cista from the Etruscan period, a small box or casket that often
contained something precious.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAcMS3gglEyKevRFzDFaxmX46kTWS73cPCQGEZoKrC_jCeTa24yF51L1C8IE37hyphenhyphensLxijoIMD3FdrqVML_iwGQdAW1QcqCWXovqRKnWYqQ7EDpqxumpm1QnuQ4PtF6tbp3XEL4wzjDPSM/s1600/Etruscan+Cista+Handle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAcMS3gglEyKevRFzDFaxmX46kTWS73cPCQGEZoKrC_jCeTa24yF51L1C8IE37hyphenhyphensLxijoIMD3FdrqVML_iwGQdAW1QcqCWXovqRKnWYqQ7EDpqxumpm1QnuQ4PtF6tbp3XEL4wzjDPSM/s320/Etruscan+Cista+Handle.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Etruscan
Cista Handle (from <i>Sand Opera</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">How peaceful he
looks, the gates of his face<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">now shut for
good, facing the ground. His body’s <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">hoisted
horizontal, his arms embrace <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the air, his
penis a slack finger of gravity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Two winged
soldier-angels must stoop, stagger<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to cradle his
naked inhuman weight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Their heads
torqued, as if listening to the lead<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of the body,
they bear it in bent tender shoulders,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in the balked
leaning and strain of their gait, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">and struggle
against falling. Their maker is dead. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">And still the
war continues, though it takes <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">other names. Sarpedon
bronzed not breathing, the angels <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">bronze
stumbling, all burned into a single handle.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">To open the
jewelry box, you have to grasp the corpse.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"> </span></b>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-3820718923055463152016-03-16T13:18:00.000-04:002016-03-16T13:53:47.841-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 36: Otherings, Saddam’s Fingerprints, and Kim Stafford<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand
Opera Lenten Journey Day 36: Otherings, Saddam’s Fingerprints, and Kim Stafford<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In
today’s Gospel, from John 7:1-2, there is this: “Jesus moved about within
Galilee; he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him.” It’s
amazing how this Gospel seems to fail to recognize that <i>Jesus is a Jew</i>. All
those people in the Gospel were Jews. In light of what happened at a <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/12/catholic-memorial-students-chant-anti-semitic-taunts-newton-basketball-game/SYNt0ozzZm84DiRoSmMRMM/story.html">basketball
game in Massachusetts last week</a>, when some Catholic Memorial high school
boys chanted “You killed Jesus,” it’s high time to recognize again not only the
<a href="http://www.shc.edu/theolibrary/resources/Timeline.htm">history of
anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church</a>, but that the Scripture itself
contains the seeds of this othering. Of course, it’s been fifty years since the
Church, during its Second Vatican Council, finally stated that this was false
teaching and that “<span style="background: white;">The Jews should not be
presented as repudiated or cursed by God... The Church decries hatred,
persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and
by anyone.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It pains me to read these moments in Christian Scripture that
lay the groundwork for this hatred. How can a text that is supposed to be
sacred, to be wise, to be Godly, be so fundamentally flawed, so goddamned
human? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">And, if I’m honest with myself, it also pains me to read
Hebrew Scriptures for similarly <i>othering</i> reasons. When we read Hebrew
Scripture that references “Israel,” the scripture invites us to think of Israel
as a beloved community, the community of faithful, the people of the Covenant.
But I often find myself thinking about the modern state of Israel. While
some call it a safe haven or the national liberation manifestation of the
Jewish people, I think about my <a href="http://imeu.org/article/quick-facts-the-palestinian-nakba">Palestinian
brothers and sisters whose generations of families were dispossessed (and
continue to be dispossessed) in its wake</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">My question becomes: who is getting disappeared, silenced,
and left out, whenever a narrative is being established, however holy or
righteous or truthful that narrative seems?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today’s “poem” from <i>Sand Opera</i> is not a poem at all,
but an image of Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints, alongside Kim Stafford’s
thought-provoking poem about the image. I’m reminded about how, in U.S. media, <i>the
figure of Saddam</i>—a nasty dictator in every respect, who used chemical
weapons against the Kurds to quell their uprising—came to disappear every other
Iraqi. No one wanted to talk about the 22 million Iraqis, they wanted to talk
about Saddam. <a href="http://fair.org/extra/gulf-war-coverage/">The New Republic doctored his mustache on the cover of the magazineto make him look like Hitler. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of Iraqi peopledied as a result of the bombing and sanctions.</a> This is a bit from a poem I
wrote, called “Quick Quiz”:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0in;" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">From 1991-2001, how many Iraqis
died due to the effects of economic sanctions?<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
</ol>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">a)<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">3,000.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">b)<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">5,000/month.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">c)<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Saddam Insane.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">d)<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Guy walks into a bar and sees Bush, Cheney and Powell sitting
at a table in the corner. Goes up to them and asks what they’re doing. Cheney
says, we’re planning to bomb Iraq to the Stone Age and they slit the throat of
a bicycle repairman. Guy says, why you going to do that to the bike repairman? Cheney
turns to Bush and says, I told you they don’t care about the Iraqi people.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">e)<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-stretch: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Gulf War syndrome.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The weird irony of history is that, given what ISIS has done,
many Iraqis long for the days of Saddam. I’ve had a number of conversations
with Iraqis who say, as bad as he was, at least he wasn’t ISIS. One of them,
Ali, came to me at the end of a reading and thanked me for it, and followed up
on my comment about Saddam by saying that, yes, he was a very cruel tyrant, but
that after the so-called “liberation of Iraq,” his father had been assassinated
for trying to get involved in politics. He would have preferred Saddam’s cruel
order to the mayhem of the failed state of Iraq.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m in no position to say anything about the internal
politics of Iraq. However, as a citizen of this (imperial) country, I can say
that the narratives that we have imposed on others have erased many other narratives,
and many voices, many fingerprints along the way. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The wind is blowing hard outside, the trees are bending from the
force of it, the windows rattling.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">How can we lean in and hear the voices, touch the
fingerprints, of those our good intentions have blotted out?<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV2vUqxrgdUp0vLStFH7r60uY2o7mRD4tFbdkTx5ArzoU7mD7FLFTDwezeMe_fTdc1oY2RDUdswsDoxyxnJ6g2vml1MbBX8PJ1eF0WD1iT_zbrU5xeXDETPiAoT1VKjLBgG2CGLXZ0WeE/s1600/Saddam+fingerprints+300+dpi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV2vUqxrgdUp0vLStFH7r60uY2o7mRD4tFbdkTx5ArzoU7mD7FLFTDwezeMe_fTdc1oY2RDUdswsDoxyxnJ6g2vml1MbBX8PJ1eF0WD1iT_zbrU5xeXDETPiAoT1VKjLBgG2CGLXZ0WeE/s320/Saddam+fingerprints+300+dpi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"> “Saddam’s
Fingerprints” by Kim Stafford<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Remember the
Quran some scribe completed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">using the blood
of Saddam to demonstrate the great one’s <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">deep devotion,
those crimson pages displayed in a room<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">obedient pilgrims
circled, reading, wondering,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">amazed,
horrified, transfigured by the dark<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">dream of life
in those times before the great change—<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Saddam, whose
name meant the Powerful Confronter,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the Beautiful
One Who Causes Collisions, later<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">hiding in his
hole under dust trying to remember<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">which way was
east, which destiny was to be<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">his own, the
blood that fled from heart to fingers<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">circling yet
inside his country constricted<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to one man, one
body, one fugitive<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">orphaned by
history from his plans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Remember the
Quran writ in blood<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">of a war that
could not be staunched, war<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">that finally
pressed his fingers, inked,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to the grid
some nameless survivor held<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">before him on
the shaky table brought<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">for this
purpose to his cell before<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the rope was
tied as a necklace<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">for the Confronter
diminished<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">to this sack of
blood inert<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">in the end that
could not<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">be the end of
the Quran,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">or the war, or
the circling<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">confrontation
we are<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">living still. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Kim Stafford
is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis &
Clark College, and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including </span></span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My
Brother Disappeared<i>.</i></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-82737034036966289952016-03-15T09:56:00.006-04:002016-03-15T10:07:22.049-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 35: If I speak in human and angelic tongues (Love Potion #42)<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 35: If I speak in human and angelic tongues (Love Potion #42)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">If I speak
in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a
clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all
mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do
not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my
body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing…. At present
I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope,
love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">--</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians 1:13<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">In our dialogue
for Los Angeles Review of Books, Fady Joudah wrote, “<i>Sand Opera</i> is
ultimately a book about love, its loss and recapture, and the struggle in
between. Many will completely misread it as another political book of poems, in
that reductive, ready-made sense of ‘political’ which is reserved for certain
themes but mostly for certain ethnicities. So part of that misreading is due to
the book’s subject matter or its Abu Ghraib arias, and also because it is
written by an Arab American.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I wrote back: “I
love the fact that you read <i>Sand Opera</i> as a book about love.
The longer I worked on the book, the more I felt compelled to move past the
dark forces that instigated its beginnings, forces that threatened to overwhelm
it and me. Love, as much as I can understand it, thrives in an atmosphere of care
for the self and other — the self of the other and the other of the self —
through openness, listening, and dialogue.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">How do we move
into the mystery of love, its delights and terrors? Last night, Kiese Laymon
shared the first chapter of his forthcoming memoir, <i>Heavy</i>, and spoke of
the relationship between sexual violence and racial terror; you could hear
a pin drop in that room as he explored the hardest things in his own life, in the life of his grandmother. How
hard it is to love ourselves, how hard it is to love others. How hard it is to
be vulnerable and open. Don’t we have to deal with our inner abysses even as we
trust-fall into the abyss of love?<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">This is for Amy Breau.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Love Potion
#42 (from <i>Sand Opera</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Before you, I
slept on a bayonet. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Bided my time
in clothing. Neither experience <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">nor innocence
kept me <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">from bleeding. Before
you, I held <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">an invisible sign:
<i>please touch this abyss. <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">How pleasing to
have you sieve me<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">through your lungs,
leave me essential <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">dregs and
seeds. Since there’s no place <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">a grain of sand
cannot hide, deserts<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">and strands now
travel the world<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">with us, in
shoes. Let me kind you in two <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">tongues. <i>Habibti</i>, two decades ago, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">we fell off a
cliff, each holding a wing,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: garamond, serif; font-size: large;">each holding a
hand, and have yet to land.</span>Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-14871001935248810542016-03-14T14:32:00.001-04:002016-03-14T14:32:20.260-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 34: Saying to the Prisoners: Come out! (Black Site I) + Marwa Helal and Angele Ellis<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 34: Saying to the Prisoners: Come out! (Black Site I) +
Marwa Helal and Angele Ellis<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: large;">Saying
to the prisoners: Come out!<br />
To those in darkness: Show yourselves!<br />
Along the ways they shall find pasture,<br />
on every bare height shall their pastures be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: large;"> --Isaiah 49<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsLr2EQqlipbasJtFCuPMynpCKu06QzhKO_e-m9JfTbVzL26rXfzBvZwqUZlaEDVLszwuQ2d9uh7Kp9gkav7U7pB33zqd61XjLKhfA-BcLaDbZfG_Es_To7loMMeahGOLJooC4vMEA34Q/s1600/Black+Site+I.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsLr2EQqlipbasJtFCuPMynpCKu06QzhKO_e-m9JfTbVzL26rXfzBvZwqUZlaEDVLszwuQ2d9uh7Kp9gkav7U7pB33zqd61XjLKhfA-BcLaDbZfG_Es_To7loMMeahGOLJooC4vMEA34Q/s320/Black+Site+I.JPG" width="240" /></a></span></b></div>
<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Black
Site (Exhibit I)” by Marwa Helal<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: large;">dreamwork
<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">poems do the
work journalism can't and dreams do the work only dreams can do. i dreamed a
dream within this poem: the fly wishes for the prisoner's freedom at the exact
moment the prisoner sees the fly and wishes for its freedom. imagining it
slipping underneath the door. in waking, i skim the headlines. one reads: </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/guantanamo-detainee-refuses-release-offer.html?_r=2"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">guantanamo detainee refuses offer of
release after 14 years in prison</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">.
the one who wrote it, his name is "</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/guantanamo-detainee-refuses-release-offer.html?_r=2"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">savage</span></a><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">." which is real? and which is dream?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">the unlikely is
likely in reality and in dreaming. journalism is the work of those who are
sleeping. poetry is the work of dreaming and dreams do the work of awaking. we
each arrive in the same dream with slight variations: a boy dreams the fly goes
unnoticed and his mother dreams of swatting it splat on the door, it crumples
in another's hand but the fly is now free as the prisoner is awakening in his
sleep. <i>shhh</i>. the prisoner has become
a poet and you've walked into the unacknowledged legislator's dream.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">--Marwa
Helal's poetry has appeared in </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Day
One<i> and </i>The Offing<i>. Her other writing has been published
in </i>Poets & Writers, American Book Review, Entropy Magazine<i>,
and elsewhere. More at: </i></span><i><a href="http://marshelal.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">marshelal.com</span></a></i><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"> or </span><a href="http://twitter.com/marwahelal" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">@marwahelal</span></a></i><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><br clear="all" style="page-break-before: always;" />
</span></i>
</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Scene II: Another part of the island. /
On “Black Site: Exhibit I” by Angele Ellis<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Finger a page
of vegetable vellum, tender as the hide of a stillborn calf. Every cell points
towards Mecca. <i>Be not afeard; the isle is
full of noises</i>… Open, sesame: near the floor, at the ceiling. Close the
opaque camera eye, the slop bucket that is a perfect circle, a silent scream. …<i>Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments…</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Open the chain
near that thin rectangle of mattress, invisible manacle tethering an ankle,
unmarked collar prisoning a fungible neck. Open air between steel bars. Open
moon and sun over relentless artificial light …<i>Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices</i>… Open nine steps
paced by seven. Open black boxes, black ops, and blackened names, unlabeled
containers of sacred ashes, unmapped territories of rendition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Welcome o
thousand-eyed fly, panopticon of mind over mind, a single pair of vellum wings
and searching tongue. …<i>That if I then had
waked after a long sleep</i>… Joy in this smallest thrumming heart, unsought
companion captured and released with hands transparent as a fasting saint’s. …<i>The clouds methought would open and show
riches</i>… Liberate the space bar and the meter, and then leave so you may
live …<i>when I waked, / I cried to dream
again</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Angele Ellis
is author of </span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Arab on
Radar<i> (Six Gallery Press) and </i>Spared<i> (A Main Street Rag Editors’
Choice Chapbook). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in over fifty
publications and ten anthologies; she is a contributing editor to </i>Al Jadid
Magazine<i>. She lives in Pittsburgh. </i>Note: Lines in italics are spoken by
Caliban in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Act 3, Scene 2.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5910291709965283166.post-80855069448179585892016-03-13T10:42:00.001-04:002016-03-13T10:43:08.182-04:00Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 33: Isaiah’s Making It New, When I Was a Child, + Jeff Gundy and Dante Di Stefano<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Sand Opera
Lenten Journey Day 33: Isaiah’s Making It New, When I Was a Child, + Jeff Gundy
and Dante Di Stefano<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Remember not
the events of the past,<br />
the things of long ago consider not;<br />
see, I am doing something new!<br />
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?<br />
In the desert I make a way,<br />
in the wasteland, rivers.<br />
Wild beasts honor me,<br />
jackals and ostriches,<br />
for I put water in the desert<br />
and rivers in the wasteland<br />
for my chosen people to drink,<br />
the people whom I formed for myself,<br />
that they might announce my praise.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">--Isaiah 43<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I love the fact
that Isaiah predates Ezra Pound’s dictum “MAKE IT NEW!” by over two millennia. (Poets,
stop fetishizing the modernists.) Isaiah’s call for a clearing away of the
past, a new start, is as radical as it was two thousand plus years ago. We know
that beginnings are difficult—they’re difficult personally, socially,
politically, and historically. As our Father Tom Fanta said, we like to “hold
people in their sin,” to fix them by what they have done or been in the past,
not letting them do something new, become something new. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">In the poem below,
I recount a moment when my Dad and I were playing a computer game (“The Mother
of All Tank Battles”), a ridiculously primitive game that re-enacted the
Persian Gulf War, a war I bitterly protested, a war that killed thousands of
people in Iraq and was represented like a video game on American television. My
father himself is a devout man, who attends both a Melkite Catholic Church and
a Roman Catholic Church, and does Centering Prayer (a kind of silent
meditation) with my mom at least a couple times a day, so the fact that he made
fun of St. Paul was all the more delightful to me. When he read the poem, he
wasn’t pleased with the line; it seemed a little unfair and slightly
blasphemous. Perhaps I fixed him in that moment wrongly. I have great respect
for him and for his military service. It’s because of him that I’ve never
wanted to demonize soldiers, even though I knew I could never serve in the
military. I respect my father more, though, for what he and Mom did when the
Vietnam War was over—which was to sponsor a Vietnamese refugee family, to help
them resettle in the United States. The Nguyens became part of our family. Over
the years, my Dad has come to say that the two most important things he did
during the war were to teach English at a Vietnamese orphanage for girls and to
sponsor that family. <i>In the desert we make our way.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Thanks to Jeff
Gundy and Dante di Stefano for their beautiful contributions today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">, I Said to My Dad <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Saint Paul was a jackass</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">, my father muttered, <br />
keystroking his tank into position in <i>The
Mother <br />
<br />
of All Tank Battles</i>. I turned back to the screen,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">maneuvering
pixilated tanks. Each arrow key <br />
<br />
altered trajectory, each cursor tap a tank blast. Fast- <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">forward two
decades: in a cubicle outside Vegas, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Jonah joysticks
his Predator above Afghanistan, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">drone jockey
hovering above a house on computer screen.<br />
<br />
He knows someone’s inside. Is it his target? Who else<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">inside—cooking,
crawling—will not outrun his digital will?<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">He is cross
hairs and shaking frame. Stone implosion.<br />
He watches the collapse replay on-screen, then <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">heads home.
Pizza. Diaper rash. Removes a thumb<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">from his
toddler’s sleeping mouth. Again, no sleep…. Our game’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">quaintly
obsolete. On mailboxes around our neighborhood, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">our beagle
would sign his line of piss, which said: it’s good <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">to be alive and
eating meat. He was adding to the map <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">our eyes can’t
see, nor throats can speak. Our shield and our help <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">at Great Lakes
Naval Base, my father imagined permutations <br />
of disaster. We were Region Five. Coordinates run, <br />
<br />
scenarios conceived, New Madrid fault lines, the possible <br />
flood of Des Plaines, a tornado’s blinding spiral<br />
<br />
rolling its dozer across the plain. No preparing for it, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">just to pick up
what remained. If a nuclear bomb hit <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Chicago, the
epicenter <i>here</i>, he’d draw concentric
circles <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">radiating, a
pebble disturbing the mirror of a lake. Each circle <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">meant a slower
death. Between us and them, the Wall<br />
was a mirror reflecting us and nothing beyond. The whole <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">world was what
the mirror hung upon. He showed me how<br />
to hold a blade, how to watch my reflection for every nick, how<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">to cut my face
without bleeding. I bled. I hooked my glasses<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">over teenaged
ears. Outside, the blur of lawn became grass, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">each blade stabbing
upward to light. I thought I knew<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">we see</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"> <i>as through a glass,
darkly</i>…. My frames have narrowed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">to lenses
eye-sized. My myopia grows. To see <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">what’s
happening, I open a laptop, lean into the screen: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">“Whe</span></i></b><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">n
I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child, </span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">I Said to My Dad” by Jeff Gundy<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">My firstborn
son was under two when he discovered he could turn around his red plastic golf
club to make it resemble a gun. “Bang, bang!” he yelled, a first sign that pure
pacifism is not easily maintained in this impure world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">This poem
reminds us how enmeshed our lives are in violence, real, simulated, and
imagined, and how seductive simulated warfare is even for those of us with
lofty ideals about nonviolence, personal and public. From the pixilated tanks
of the computer game Metres remembers playing with his father, to the drone
operator near Vegas who rains down literal death on people thousands of miles
away, to the myriad fears and defense mechanisms that modern life seems to
require, the poem is unsparing—of its speaker and of us all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">The world is
not a gentle place. The beagle marks its territory with piss. We mark our
borders and build our weapons and make our plans: “If a nuclear bomb hit /
Chicago . . .” A father can show a son “how / to cut [his] face without
bleeding,” but the son will bleed anyway. The world has always come to us
mediated, by parents, by our senses, by its very blooming, buzzing existence.
So—what do we do? “Open a laptop, lean into the screen” to “see what’s
happening.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">And then what?
That’s the real question. This poem, as a small part of the <i>Sand Opera </i>project, is an act of
recognition within a larger act of resistance. It won’t save the world. It may
be only a gesture, but sometimes the right gesture can cause a turning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I’m myopic too,
helpless without my glasses, and like Metres, like most of us, I get much of my
information by gazing at screens. Day by day, I make my own small gestures
toward justice and peace, then spend most of my time in labor or distraction. I
don’t play video games, but I soak in those movies full of gunfire and
explosions and the myth of redemptive violence even as I mutter about their
ideology. I was glad my sons decided to play soccer, but I still watch
football. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Today my son
and his wife are raising their own bright, rowdy, rambunctious child, trying to
direct his endless energy into peaceable channels. They have steady work in a
safe town, so it’s merely exhausting, and accompanied by many golden moments.
They know how lucky they are, and they do what they can. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I am troubled,
by all that’s wrong in the world, by how many steps remain between us and
justice, by my own weakness. If I am not quite defeated, it’s because of poems
like this one, because of people like Phil, like a thousand others, who are not
asleep and not resigned. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">--Jeff
Gundy’s latest books are </span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Abandoned
Homeland<i> (Bottom Dog, 2015) and </i>Somewhere Near Defiance<i> (Anhinga,
2014), which won the Ohio Poet of the Year award. Recent work is in </i>Georgia
Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Christian Century, <i>and </i>Image<i>. He
teaches at Bluffton University and spent a recent sabbatical at LCC
International University in Klaipeda, Lithuania.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">“When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child,</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"> I Said to My Dad” by Dante Di Stefano<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">We enter this
poem in the middle of a conversation. Between the poem’s title and its first
line a space opens as wide and as narrow as the space between any father and
son. This is the space in which Abraham beholds Isaac, the blade levitating in
his hand. This is the space we call “home front” in a nation endlessly
implicated in violence, domestically and overseas. This is a parable of faith
in a digital age, an age where the horrors of warfare are pixelated into
entertainment and actual warfare is translated into the language of Playstation
with carnage unfolding in real time. The son quotes the wisdom of I Corinthians
1:13. The father mutters against Saint Paul as he plays a videogame. The poem
fast forwards two decades. The son, Jonah, has become a father, dutifully
operating a Predator drone to make his daily bread, bombing the Afghan
countryside by day and changing diapers by night. Jonah lives inside the belly
of a leviathan whose ribcage maintains the logic of strip malls and flashing
cursors. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">The poem ends
with a colon: opening on a black page, but the poem never ends; it remains
lodged forever between a redacted torture report, detailing a father and son
being brutalized together, and a blueprint for the torture chamber itself. I
admit that I barely bat an eye when I read a headline about the newest drone
strike in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq... To ignore any elsewhere. To disown
sorrow. This is a great sin, an American sin. Living with this poem, which
lives within <i>Sand Opera</i>, I question
what it means to be a father, to be a son, in a cultural landscape that
privileges empathetic inattention and fosters self-involvement. What does
“love” mean now? What about “home?” When we utter the word “home,” do we
experience the first failure of homecoming? The razors our fathers wielded
cannot prepare us for the cuts no styptic can staunch. Thinking of those
wounds, Søren Kierkegaard comes to mind: “A poet is not an apostle; he drives
out devils only by the power of the devil.” To see what’s happening, I open a
laptop, lean into the screen:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">If I Did Not Understand the Glory and
Suffering of the Human Heart I Would Not Speak Before Its Holiness<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">after Saint Theresa of Avila<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">When I close my
eyes I see my father,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">dying. I dab
his head with a washcloth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">His open mouth
jaws a gurgled amen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">His eyes emote
hosannas of breakage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I wish my eyes
could blink a drone strike back <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">into tactical
non-being; the dead<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">ghost down the
road in a wedding convoy,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">and I wonder
how I might turn away <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">from a deep
sorrow that is not my own. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">When I fall
asleep I don’t dream stairwells.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">In me, a school
of salmon swims upstream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">In me, a fish
leaps against the headboard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Dear Lord, I
fear paradise diffuses, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">in a sharp
gust, like dandelion puff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">Set the tinder
of old phrases burning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I’m waiting to
pull the bee from the rose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I call the door
ajar in me a grace.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I want to be as
flagrant as the wind<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">that cuts
December Wednesdays in half.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">I hear notes
that build a more merciful <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">God, some days,
and other days I just let<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">the bear in my
belly swing from my hips<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">and I paw out
my animal blessings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">And my animal
blessings paw out me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: large;">This
poem originally appeared in <i>The
Dialogist.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">--Dante Di Stefano</span></b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">'s poetry collection, </span><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Love
is a Stone Endlessly in Flight</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His essays
and poetry have appeared in </span><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">The Writer's Chronicle</span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, </span><i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";">Shenandoah,
Brilliant Corners</span></i></span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: large;">, and elsewhere. He lives in Endwell, New
York. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Philip Metreshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05449159681282927289noreply@blogger.com2