Let the People Speak/Reader Feedback

Folks,

I've been doing this blog for just about a year (11 months).
Should I continue?
If you're a regular reader, or a part-timer, let me know what's working for you. Anything that I could be blogging about that I haven't yet?
Comment all of you, if you can, so that I can get my bearings for the future.

Thanks,

Philip Metres

New "Cost of the War" Placards from the Sidewalk Blogger

I love how the Sidewalk Blogger continues her solitary insistence of language into landscape, making visible the war, even in pastoral backdrops. There is no place where the war is not...

Steve Earle's "Jerusalem"

Jerusalem
(Steve Earle)

I woke up this mornin' and none of the news was good
And death machines were rumblin' 'cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothin' anyone could do or say

And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Well maybe I'm only dreamin' and maybe I'm just a fool
But I don't remember learnin' how to hate in Sunday school
But somewhere along the way I strayed and I never looked back again
But I still find some comfort now and then

Then the storm comes rumblin' in
And I can't lay me down
And the drums are drummin' again
And I can't stand the sound

But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem

And there'll be no barricades then
There'll be no wire or walls
And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

On Israel's 60th Birthday/Amichai's "Jerusalem"

On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, I think about the incredible founding of the state against all odds, and also the terrible losses that it meant for Palestinians. I also go back to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, indisputably one of Israel's most important poets. As the celebrations ensue, the fireworks and flags, I think of the complex portrait that Amichai paints in this little poem, "Jerusalem," about what fireworks and flags distract us from.

"Jerusalem"

On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight,
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City,
a kite.
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can't see
because of the wall.

We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they're happy.
To make them think that we're happy.

(by Yehuda Amichai, from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell).

Celebrating Independence, Mourning Nakba: The 60th Anniversary of the Founding of Israel and the Nakba

Invitation to a conference taking place which will involve oral testimony by survivors of the "nakba," or catastrophe, of Palestinian dispossession and exile.

NO TIME TO CELEBRATE
—a campaign that remembers the nakba or ‘catastrophe’ experienced by Palestinians who were forced from their homes in Palestine when the state of Israel was formed 60 years ago.

A panel of Nakba survivors will describe what happened to them and their families.

The Interfaith Council for Peace in the Middle East will hold a press conference and panel discussion concerning the continued and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the denial of rights for Palestinians, including the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslims to their homeland. A panel of Nakba survivors will describe what happened to them and their families.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
1:00-2:30 PM
at River’s Edge, 3430 Rocky River Drive, Cleveland, Ohio

This conference is free and open to the public.

Council President Martha Katz of Youngstown is a founding member of The Coalition for Peace in the Middle East and the Youngstown chapter of Women in Black. Among panelists are Marlene Mourad of Brunswick and Mohammed Ramahi of Youngstown.


“NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba is a campaign organized by anti-Zionist Jews from around the U.S. and Canada to coordinate Jewish protests of Israeli Independence Day celebrations and Jewish participation in commemoration of the Nakba”.

Beat Happening's "Indian Summer" and "Foggy Eyes"

Beat Happening was one of those indie revelations that tore the cover off the production layers and wankery of 1980s rock and pop musics, hearkened back to the punk rock D.I.Y. sensibility, and had this absolutely bracing early summer/late fall longing--was it the open chords, the slapdash drums, the childlike vocals? Listening to "Indian Summer," arguably one of the best nuggets of indie pop ever, I am reminded why I continue to indulge my childish ways in poetry and music.

Jesus May Love the Children, But They Need Permits to Visit Jerusalem

While I do not know all the background to this event, the press release suggests that recent (and new) restrictions on Palestinian movement continue to create obstacles to peaceful people visiting the holy sites. It looks a little bad to restrict the "Jesus Loves the Children" program, doesn't it?

"Israel Blocks Children's Peace March;
Palestinian Christian Children Barred from Jerusalem"

The Israeli Government has imposed a new travel restriction which has prevented Palestinian Christian children from traveling to Jerusalem for this year's annual Children's Journey to Jerusalem, according to Bethlehem office of the event's sponsoring organization, the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF). As a result of the new restriction, the event has been postponed.

This year, for the first time, the Israeli Government surprised the organizers of the event by announcing that the children, ages 13 and under, would require permits to enter the Holy City. With great effort, HCEF managed to submit applications for the permits three weeks before the scheduled date of the event on May 2, but on April 30 Israeli authorities told HCEF that there was not enough time to consider the applications.

In each of the last three Easter seasons, the Foundation has sponsored trips to Jerusalem for close to one thousand Christian school children from around 35 cities and towns in the Holy Land. This program, part of HCEF's "Jesus Loves the Children" program, has allowed children ages 13 and under to see, and worship, at the most important Christian shrines in Jerusalem, including the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This year about 850 children had registered for the event.

For most of the children, these trips are the first that they have been able to make to Jerusalem, even though most of them live not far from that city. The children have been kept away from the Christian sites by Israeli military roadblocks and military checkpoints, as well as by the inability of their parents and teachers to obtain travel documents from the Israeli authorities.

Protesting the refusal of the Israeli Government to permit this year's long- planned Children's Journey to Jerusalem, HCEF President Rateb Rabie stressed the peaceable, spiritual nature of the event. "These trips teach a message of love and peace, and they have taken place three times without any kind of incident," he said. "The visits of the children to the holy places have never presented any kind of threat to the security of Israel or to public order."

"These trips are important and exciting experiences for all of the children, who are otherwise virtual prisoners in their own towns," Mr. Rabie said. "It is unconscionable that the Israeli authorities are now preventing even young Palestinian Christian children from traveling a few kilometers within their own country to visit religious sites of paramount importance to them."

For additional information, please contact:

Karen Gainor
Executive Assistant
Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation
Kgainor@hcef.org ; 301 951-9400 ext 219

Vincent on O'Keefe's Whitman, and Thinking of O'Hara

As part of my course called "Self and Society in Modern American Poetry" this coming fall, I'll be teaching, among others, Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems. In a recent email post, Stephen Vincent reflected on a performance of Whitman's "Song," and wondered if and how O'Hara might be seen as a descendant of Whitman:

In association with making a recent "haptic" drawing, I listened to John O'Keefe's wonderful recent performance adaptation of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. It was a presentation last summer here at the Marsh in San Francisco, filmed by William Farley, and just released on as DVD, (Go to www.farleyfilm.com for an exerpt and ordering details). O'Keefe's voices achieves a robust, sensual and ecstatic relationship with the original text and brings, at least, his sense of the man, quite to life. A real delight

I am naive to much critical work on Whitman. However, listening to the poet's spirited sense of intimacy of eye and ear for the streets of his Manhattan (folks et al), it's impossible not to make connections with Frank O'Hara's work on that island approximately a hundred years later. I cannot imaging that O'Hara was not imbued by this work.

O'Keefe's Whitman, as demonstrated in the excerpt, is robust, but perhaps a bit more unhinged than I imagined our bard. Yet I've always found section 15 fascinating in its catalogue, because the sheer excess of images almost always induces a sense of blockage, boredom, and confusion. What O'Keefe does is blow through that textual flow, like a mad plow through an anarchic snow...

Billy Bragg's "The Price of Oil" and "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie"

Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry Anthology

Here's a recent review of Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, the recent anthology edited by Hayan Charara which brings together some of the elders with the up-and-comers of Arab American background. As an aperitif to grading, I'm taking little swigs of this anthology. More on this later, but in the meantime, go ahead and get yourself a little copy, eh?

Book review: Arab Americans write with wit and sorrow

Web Posted: 04/24/2008 05:55 PM CDT

Robert Bonazzi
Special to the Express-News

Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry
Hayan Charara, editor

University of Arkansas Press, Hardcover $59.95, Paper $24.95


Voices are inclined to speak, and these powerful poets of Arab descent speak eloquently in this major anthology just published. They do not sing as one monolithic chorus but as 39 diverse soloists, and their sophisticated texts do not merely establish the latest ethnic minority literature or the next phase of multiculturalism. Rather, these gifted poets, including San Antonio resident-poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Marian Haddad and Assef Al-Jundi, are creating some of our nation's strongest and most passionate contemporary poetry.

These Arab Americans are esteemed professors, lawyers, translators, editors; people doing business and community work; parents raising families and corresponding with relatives from their countries of origin. They are not having an identity crisis or mapping an Arab diaspora or replaying the Arabian Nights. They are thoughtful and humane, just like most of us.

Yes, there are political poems here from fresh perspectives, but none are screeds that promote propaganda. In fact, they argue against lies convincingly, often with satirical wit. Where there is anger there is also compassion; where there is social criticism, there is never didacticism. They remind us that stereotypes and prejudice, war and genocide are overcome only by bridges of dialogue and not by walls of separation. Yet like all poets, they write also of nature and love, of languages and ideas, of spirituality and attitude.

The first line of "Inclined to Speak" (in Elmaz Abinader's "Living with Opposition") brings us to the edge of openings: "Someone has told you, It's an attitude problem. /I hear this, say something like, I wonder whose." Indeed, since attitudes are first formed by culture rather than experience. This powerful poem — about her father, a gentle man who "is tired of being foreign, of trying /so hard just to breathe, to get a little light /of his own." — is one of many beautiful odes and elegies for family elders who emigrated here or remained home. What could be more American — or universal — than that?

Haddad observes her father in a hospital as "he smacks his lips, rolls /his tongue inside, Agua, /He says, though he is /not Mexican, Agua, /a language he has learned /in America, and he, Arabic. /Three languages roll deftly /on this dry tongue."

Al-Jundi mentions his father (a Syrian poet) taking him to Amman and Beirut — by taxi! — in quest of a student visa when the U.S. Embassy in Damascus was closed after the Six-Day War.

Nye writes of breaking off the hands of "mother's praying statue /when I was four — /how she tearfully repaired them, /but the hairline cracks /in the wrists /were all she said /she could see — /the unannounced blur /of something passing /out of a life."

Just as 9-11 was a defining moment for all, it was particularly painful for Arab Americans, whom many called the enemy within. As U.S.-born Saladin Ahmad writes: "In a word, brother, it is dangerous," especially after Bush's "war on terror" was concocted. Samuel Hazo writes about it directly: "Nightmares of impact crushed us. /We slept like the doomed or drowned, /then woke to oratory, vigils, /valor, journalists declaring war /and, snapping from aerials or poles, the furious clamor of flags." History reminds us that every civilization has blood on its hands and no government has been innocent of murder.

Yet the lyric impulse emerges, even in tragedy. Kazim Ali, in a musical turn, hears: "The violin's empty stomach resonates /Music is a scar unraveling itself in strings." Sinan Antoon of Baghdad says "the Tigris and Euphrates /are two strings /in death's lute /and we are songs /or fingers strumming." D.H. Melhem listens to the "Broadway Music" of a homeless trio who are not Arabs, with her fine-tuned ear of empathy.

Presented in alphabetical order with impressive work by each poet, there are 160 texts in more than 300 pages. There are powerful narratives by Sharif S. Elmusa, Hedy Habra, Sam Hamod, Lawrence Joseph, Mohja Kahf, Pauline Kaldas, Jack Marshall, Khaled Mattawa and Philip Metres and lovely lyrics from Alise Alousi, Nuar Alsadir, Lisa Suhair Majaj and Gregory Orfalea.

Hayan Charara has made shrewd editorial choices and also contributes a masterful language excursion in his long poem ("Usage"). His thoughtful introduction discusses the poetic, political and social dimensions, as well as the thematic and personal issues that Arab American poets confront in their lives and work.

The University of Arkansas Press deserves kudos for publishing this groundbreaking anthology at a time when deeper understanding of our diversity is most crucial. This marvelous gathering of sensibilities will challenge and excite open-minded readers with significant new poetry.