Mahmoud Darwish, Voice of the Palestinian People, Rest in Peace

We've lost a great poet, a poet whose work spoke not only to the Palestinian people (though he is considered the greatest Palestinian poet), but to all of us. Mahmoud Darwish, rest in peace. He once said that history laughs at both victim and aggressor; it is a rueful joke that he never received the Nobel Prize, nor--more importantly--saw his country in freedom. In dispossession, exile, statelessness, oppression, Darwish became a poet who could, at the end of his life, write, "my throne is margin."

Here are some resources on Darwish's life, work, and passing.

I have defeated you, death
All the beautiful arts have defeated you
The songs of Mesopotamia, the obelisks of Egypt, the carved tombs of the pharaohs on the altar have defeated you, and you are vanquished.

This is from the Reuters article:

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry his fellow Palestinians embraced as the voice of their suffering, died on Saturday after heart surgery in Texas.

President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning to honour the 67-year-old writer who, a close friend said, never came round from a major operation two days earlier.

"The passing of our great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the lover of Palestine, the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project, and the brilliant national leader, will leave a great gap in our political, cultural and national lives," Abbas said.

"Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts," he added. "Mahmoud, may God help us for your loss."

The death of a man whose life and words were tightly bound up in a struggle for a Palestinian national rebirth that seems little closer now than when his first work was published in 1960 immediately triggered a wider outpouring of popular emotion.

I recently reviewed a translation of Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden for Jacket Magazine:

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of poet Mahmoud Darwish to Palestinian culture and national aspirations, not to mention to Arab and world poetry; at the very least, we might think of him as the poet laureate of Palestine for the past forty years, and in perpetuity. Born in Birwe in 1942 and exiled to Lebanon in 1948 during the war (when Birwe was wiped off the map), Darwish’s family returned to Israel as internal refugees, called “present-absent aliens.” Over the course of the next sixty years, he has lived all over the world, participated in the political and cultural life of Palestine as an exile, and then finally was able to come back, post-Oslo Accords, to live in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1996.

His early work, in now famous poems such as the blistering “Identity Card” and the bitter-sweet elegy “My Mother,” Darwish embodied what Ghassan Kanafani and Barbara Harlow have termed “resistance poetry” — explicitly political writing conceived as a force for mobilizing resistance, and acting as a repository of national consciousness. Yet the range of his work — from the stark social realism of “Identity Card” to the visionary mode of “We Travel Like Other People” — makes him both a figure of Palestinian persistence and proof that Palestinian life is not reducible to victimization and loss.

The Butterfly’s Burden — a collection of his most recent books translated by Fady Joudah into a supple and lush English — The Stranger’s Bed (1998), A State of Siege (2002), and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003) — aptly represents the range of Darwish’s mature style. From the courtly and ecstatic love lyrics of The Stranger’s Bed, to the diaristic and penetrating political poem of A State of Siege, to the colloquial meditations on mortality, history, and the future in Don’t Apologize, The Butterfly’s Burden bears witness to the generous breadth of Darwish’s poetic and cultural achievement.

Here is a blog posting of mine about his poem, "Identity Card."

And from Ha'aretz.

Thoughts on the Poet Laureateship and Charles Simic's Tenure

I recently read an interview with Charles Simic, the outgoing Poet Laureate, and it was probably the first thing I'd read or heard of his tenure. After one year, the 70-year-old Simic decided to step down:

Simic, who succeeded Donald Hall, another New Hampshire poet, said the job required far more work than he expected. He traveled so much, attended to so many duties and performed at so many events that he went the entire year without writing a new poem.

Especially for a prolific poet like Simic, this is a serious flaw in a job, no matter how much fame and money come with it. The poet laureate is paid $35,000 and has a modest travel budget, but he or she is also in demand for paid readings.

"One year is enough," said Simic. "Washington is too far, and the travel these days is no fun."

I happen to like Charles Simic's work, and he seems to be a charming fellow. Once at a reading in a classroom at Indiana University, Simic pointed to an obscure mathematical equation still scrawled on the board behind him, and said, "that should pretty much explain everything."

His own poems and his work in translation, were certainly worthy of the award (though I've always disliked his dismissiveness toward experimental poets like Jackson Mac Low and John Cage, to whom he is at least partially indebted for his own employment of chance operations). The fact that he was unapologetic about his political distaste for the Commander-in-Chief makes me admire him, particularly when one gets invited to the White House as PL:

Simic's feeling for Bush is not the typical snub of a liberal academic of his generation. Simic began life in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on the eve of World War II, and his earliest memories are of what bombs do to a city. A series of poems in his most recent book catalogues horrors of war, some witnessed, some imagined. One begins:

The president smiles to himself; he loves war
And another one is coming soon.
Each day we can feel the merriment mount
In government offices and TV studios
As our bombers fly off to distant countries.

Yet, somehow, this article seems to want us to feel sorry for the guy. ONLY $35,000 a year, a MODEST travel budget. Poor fellow! The article fails to mention that the Poet Laureateship enables a poet to charge upwards of $10,000-$15,000 per reading. No one should ever feel sorry for a poet laureate, nor should we feel that they are being underpaid.

I do feel a little sorry that he didn't write anything new, but taking a year off from writing new work is not always a terrible thing.

We learn in the next paragraph, however, that he didn't even take a leave from his normal teaching duties:

Beginning last fall, he made nine trips to Washington. He did dozens of interviews with newspapers and electronic media, arranged readings and a poetry fellowship and answered hundreds of letters and e-mails. He went to New York each week to teach a course at Baruch College and read at other colleges in the East, Midwest and California. "I was like a traveling salesman," he said.

And as for the "dozens" of interviews, I recognize in "dozens" the hyperbolic vagary that I sometimes shamefully employ to mean, some number over 12.

What if the Library of Congress were to choose a mid-career civically-engaged (if not politically-engaged) poet for whom such duties are not perceived as a devil's bargain, but a tremendous boon, for which any number of younger, hungrier, poets would happily work? When I think back on the highest-profile tenures of Poets Laureate, the following come to my mind: Rita Dove, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky--all mid-career, civic-minded poets. Others (who shall "rename mainless") have gratefully received their laurels and did their duty and rode off into the sunset.

Perhaps I am trying to make something out of something that's meant to be a sinecure, rather than a site of real cultural engagement.

Simulated Killing at the (Cleveland) Air Show

Just yesterday, I was having a conversation with my colleague about her son, who is playing some video war game set in the mythic past (fire-breathing giants and the like), and we talked about the uneasiness that we have about exposing our children to such violence and imperial thinking.



I recalled that, when I was a young boy, my mother forbade my father from even buying toy guns; then, a few days later, she saw me outside, playing with a friend, holding a nice stick as if it were a gun. I suppose I turned out all right, but it's fascinating how boys are so drawn to the mechanics and fictions of warfare.

Of course, it's not just boys:

What happens when such psychobiological urges and imperatives (which could be mostly about "techne" and empowerment, rather than violence and domination--though I'd argue that even fantasy violence has a place in the world, even a pacifist's world) get exploited and harnessed by the military-industrial complex?

Waiting to Kill (Virtually)

You get:

Simulated Killing at the Air Show

This year, the Cleveland National Air Show is hosting a new exhibit called the “Virtual Army Experience” (VAE) that we think is inappropriate and unacceptable. Participants in this virtual urban warfare game hop into full-size Humvee simulators and fire machine guns at life-size people projected onto giant, wraparound screens.

Consider the following:
• The Cleveland Air show is promoted as a wholesome family activity.
• Technology that simulates killing human beings has no place at an event that purports to be a celebration of aviation.
• The VAE misleads people about soldiering. It portrays a sanitized picture of war that disrespects what real soldiers experience in combat and trivializes the burden they carry the rest of their lives. War is not a game.
• The Army may call it “virtual,” but it inflicts real pain on those who have experienced the physical and psychological trauma of combat, have lost loved ones in war, or have lived with those who carry the scars of war.
• The VAE desensitizes young people to killing in our region, which has experienced far too much urban violence.
• Labor Day celebrates working men and women. The Cleveland Air Show’s stated pur- pose is to assist young people who seek careers in aviation.
• Tax dollars are being used to pay for the VAE.
Veterans For Peace opposes the inclusion of the VAE in this year’s Air Show. We respectfully ask the Army, the organizers, and the sponsors to remove the VAE as an activity. We ask that other peace activist groups, government officials, churches, mental health and educational professionals, and most importantly, PARENTS, join us in voicing their opposition.

What you can do:• Share this information with everyone you know including friends and family, churches, health and educational professionals, community associations, etc.
• Contact elected officials:
- Mayor: Hon. Frank Jackson (216.664.3990), or your own mayor
- City Council: Individual Councilperson or Clerk (216.664.2840), or your own council members
- Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners: Individual Commissioner or
Administrator: 216.443.7215
• Contact local sponsors:
- Cleveland Air Show: Kim Dell; kdell@clevelandairshow.com; 216.781.0747
- Discount Drug Mart: Anita Fontana; afontana@discount-drugmart.com; 330.
725.2340 Ext 4478
- Cleveland Coca-Cola Bottling Company: Randy Cornette; 216.690.2653
- Metro Life Flight: Dr. Craig Bates; cbates@metrohealth.org; 216.778.2100
- Parker Hannifin: James Cartwright; 216.896.3000
- Cleveland Magazine: Lisa Sands; 216.771.2833
- The Wave (107.3): Lonnie Gronek; 440.236.9283
- WKYC-TV3: Micki Byrnes; 216.344.3333
- WDOK (102.1): Joe Restifo; 216.696.0123
• Contribute to a signature ad in the Plain Dealer. If the VAE is cancelled, the ad will thank the sponsors for taking action.

Tom Raworth and the Poetics of Speed

I got to see the poet Tom Raworth read in Orono as part of the National Poetry Foundation Conference on "Poetry and the 1970s," and he was a revelation. Raworth read his poems at such a breakneck clip, without breaks or patter between them, that it destroyed the polite conventions of the traditional poetry reading.

In a way, Raworth's performance recalled for me other instances of speedtalk--the famous pitchman from the 1980s John Moschitta--

--and the relentless hardcore of Minor Threat--

Though it's strange to place Moschitta and Minor Threat side by side--given that one is an ad man and the other is a band that situated itself as an underground anti-capitalist scourge--both emerge from the conditions of late capitalism, the increased time/space compression articulated so well by David Harvey, where the subject is increasingly subject to the hurtling of postmodern life.

In his reading style, Raworth likewise has devised not only a distinct counterpoint to the mostly-vertically slim poems as they appear on the page, but also a response to the cultural conditions of speed. In his own way, Raworth is performing that "pushing back" against the pressure of reality that Wallace Stevens in his essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" saw as the fundamental work of poetry.

While Robert Creeley, one of Raworth's influences, often would read poems like "I Know a Man" with a kind of slowness that made each line break function as a kind of painful silence, as if they were stunned words of lovers at an impasse, Raworth speeds down the page--as if he imagined that letting up might allow his lover to leave. (In this way, just as Creeley was said to have "misread" William Carlos Williams' notion of the linebreak, Raworth "misreads" Creeley's linebreaks back to Williams' sense of the linebreak as an increase of speed).

At the Orono conference, Raworth read so headlong that, when he finished the main portion, the audience applause resembled one after a bravura musical performance--the words themselves had neared the status of pure signifiers, disconnected from any system of meaning but the sounds themselves. As Stevens says,

Those of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is they are thinking, must be conscious of this: that, above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.

For Stevens, it is the sounds of words themselves, in the end, that can save us. That's the grandiosity of modernism talking, perhaps, but it's also someone who believes that art has a role to play beyond being consumed, or merely understood.

When I asked Raworth about his "reading style," in pure punk fashion, he rejected the notion that it was anything like a style:

I never thought of it as a style: simply the way I read what I've written, if aloud -- and now I've realised, over the years, that people think I read quickly, it would seem totally false to deliberately slow down. But I don't see mine as any sort of definitive reading... I'm quite happy if others read my writing slower, or differently (which has happened many times... a now-dead friend in Italy, Corrado Costa, used to insist on reading the same piece after me, but much slower.... fine. My assumption is that if I'm asked to read, I should read as I want to.... the texts, after all, are available for anyone thinking they've missed something.

(from an email exchange July 2008)
Indeed, at other readings available online, I've discovered that Raworth varies his tempo by situation and poem. You can hear him read, for example, this diatribe against the Iraq War at a relatively midtempo pace:

"Listen Up"
by TOM RAWORTH

Why should we listen to Hans Blix
and all those other foreign pricks:
the faggot French who swallow snails
and kiss the cheeks of other males:
the Germans with their Nazi past
and leather pants and cars that last
longer than ours: the ungrateful Chinks
we let make all our clothes; those finks
should back us in whatever task--
we shouldn't even have to ask:
and as for creepy munchkin Putin...
a slimy asshole-- no disputing!?
We saved those Russians from the reds--
they owe support. Those wimpish heads
of tiny states without the power
to have a radio in the shower
should fall in line behind George Bush
and join with him and Blair to push
the sword of truth through Saddam's guts
(no need for any ifs or buts)
we'll even do it without the backing
of UN cowards and their quacking--
remember how we thrashed the Nips
and fried them like potato chips?
God's on our side, he's white and Yankee
he'd drop the bombs, he'd drive a tank: we
know he's stronger than their Allah
as is our righteousness and valor!
We'll clip Mohammed's ears and pecker
And then move on to napalm Mecca.

For me, this poem most reminds me of the work of another British poet, Tony Harrison, whose working class political aesthetic relies often on a rhyming that in our culture seems closer to hip hop than to the couplet...

And why is no one moved to move quite like this to a poetry reading? Is the object of the poetry reading to tutor stillness in us?

Clips from Israeli documentary "Land of the Settlers"

Insight into the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; the first deals with settlements and checkpoints in the West Bank, the second with Hebron.

Help Educate (Nicaragua)

My brother Dave, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua, has helped establish an NGO that can send promising Nicaraguans to universities for pennies on the dollar (about $400/year!). If you have pennies or dollars that you wish to donate, they'd be mighty appreciative. Given the fact that El Presidente Boosh gives less money to Latin America that Hugo Chavez, you'd be doing a patriotic duty as well.

Here's information from their website:

What is Help Educate?
Help Educate is an international development organization built on the idea that education has the power to transform individuals and communities. We work with local Nicaraguan community leaders to identify students with the greatest potential for making a positive impact in their communities. We provide these students with scholarships to leading Nicaraguan universities, where they learn the technical abilities and leadership skills necessary for moving Nicaragua forward.

How can you Help Educate?
Take some time to learn more about our organization by browsing our site. Make sure you visit our photo gallery, student biographies, and maps pages, and check back soon for student blogs and videos. Make a contribution online or by mail. Contact us by email or phone for additional information about how you can Help Educate.

Ten Propositions on (What Was?) Flarf

Ten Propositions on (What Was?) Flarf (for a future essay) by Philip Metres

1. Genealogy: Dada was its Grand-Dada, Stein its Grand-Motha. Parentage may or may not include: collagists of all stripes, objectivists, New York School hijinx (Koch and Ashbery), stand-up in the mode of Richard Pryor to Sarah Silverman, LangPo funnyman Charles Bernstein, frothmouth Bruce Andrews, performance art, etc. Deep ancestors may include: 18th century insulters like Dryden and Swift, classic scatalogists from the ancient world.

2. Google as Muse.

3. If lyric is neurotic (superegoic), then flarf is psychotic (id).

4. Politics: variable. From comically fatalist to cosmic revolutionaries.

5. Demotic (i.e., re-reads Wordsworth et. al. and takes it to its logical end). Not purifying the language of the tribe, but amplifying it to eleven.

6. Favors Charlie Sheen over finish and sheen, Groucho over Karl, asses over Parnassus.

7. Apotheosis of Anti-Poetry as poetry. Daddy, what did you do during the poetry wars?

8. Tonally: diverse. From the melancholic machinery of loneliness to the hysterical hiccuping of the masses.

9. In its collective subjectivity, organs of sharing work and publication, festivals and publicity, demonstrates the power of poetic collectivity. It's MY poetic collectivity, get OFF!

10. Always (already?) in danger of (poetic) absorption. I.e. What was flarf?

Palestinian Hip-Hop

I saw this on Marcy Newman's blog, Body on the Line, in the context of recent violence in the West Bank, including this stunning video of a cuffed and blindfolded Palestinian boy getting shot point-blank:

Ben Friedlander's "Somebody Blew Up America"/The Reaction to the Reaction to 9/11

The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 elicited an enormous poetry response--thousands upon thousands of poems by everyday people posted on the internet, anthologies by professional poets, and readings all over the world.

But perhaps none of these poems (including those written by then-poet laureate Billy Collins and read at Congress) gained more notoriety than Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America," read at the Dodge Poetry Festival and subsquently published in multiple forms (including on the internet by Baraka).

Much of the hullaballoo surrounded Baraka's dropping of a reference to a pernicious and hateful web rumor that 4,000 Israelis alleged to have abandoned the building prior to its attack:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away ?
/
Who,Who, Who/
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO

(Interestly, one poem written in response to Baraka's poem, Robert Pinsky's "The Forgetting," forgets that the poem references "Israelis" and calls them "Jews." Obviously, in either case, there is a pernicious anti-Semitic insinuation of conspiracy, but it's a poem about forgetting, after all!)

Baraka's poem, which I wrote about in Behind the Lines (the book), oscillates between a dramatization of paranoid and totalizing thinking and simply being paranoid. Baraka's defense of the poem literalized the paranoid reading, to my chagrin. This is a quote from the BTL:

While the poem’s catalogue of crimes committed by this efficacious empire is mostly irrefutable (with the glaring exception of the notion that Israelis and American administration official knew about the attacks), the desire to place all the blame on a singular, though unnamed “Somebody” dramatizes the temptation and weakness of a totalizing critique of empire. The ending of the poem clinches this reading:

Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO (+) who who
Whoooo and WhoooooOOOOOOooooOooo!

In its concatenation of “Who’s,” the poem concludes with a comic-gothic, loony-bird quality that suggests the libidinal excess that conspiracy-theorizing brings with it. Baraka’s poem thus suggests the dangers of the slippery thinking of conspiracy theories, even as it courts the same conspiracy-theorizing in the process.

Finally, it suggests that, while the documentary impulse-—and its information-gathering and dissemination procedure—-is an essential aspect of war resistance poetry, information itself in the Internet Age is extremely vulnerable to manipulation, and poets need to take care in how the handle it, lest their handiwork become weakened by its misuse.

Or you could just read Ben Friedlander's comic tonic response, which takes a step away from all of that, and questions the authenticity impulse adduceable from Baraka's poem (or his response to it). I first heard it at Bob Perelman's talk on "bathos" and poetry, and the poem clearly emerges from a flarfy sensibility; by the end, though, it re-engages the possession trope in Baraka's poem, and offers to exorcise Baraka's own demons (our own, of course, our own!)...

SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA

The poem you just heard was ironic and this one is sincere.
How can you tell? Because it was written in “my” voice.

Of course, when Carla reads it with her accent
you may mistake the meaning

for something less deliberate, say, Snoopy’s F86E Sabre
dropping napalm on Korea.

You didn’t know that? I always let the reader know.
It’s only reasonable:

if you leave your popsicle in the sun,
you have to expect the pages to get sticky.

It’s one of the reasons Lynne Cheney is careful with any book,
but especially peanuts: a protein-rich liquid mixed

with animal-infected soy,
all its ducks lined up in a row

of teeth, the smile behind the visor.
in Denmark? No pussy there, just a bunch of cartoonists.

That’s why Satan only has ten kills in the Bible.
The meaning of history is something anyone can understand

from the “inside,” except that there aren’t any sides
in poetry, just folds of sound

where the dust of old meanings
collect. A poem is not a spoil of war,

nor a spoiler warning,
but a soiled conscience

spread across a table where the meals are shared.
Poetry is only as sturdy as the wood underneath.

True? True,
your starter hole is big, but I’ve got a plan for how to fill the vacancy.

First, a “throne council” needs to establish
some mind-share. Then a “thug class” can be appointed

to keep the population in line,
or we can just sprinkle hallucinogenic corn.

PS As you can see, sucky politics is why I beat
Dick Cheney to a pulp of soaked alfalfa cubes

a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar of flies devoured by vermin has 4000 listeners

a huge audience by poetry standards. Neruda without
shooting myself in the foot b/c i am admitting i have a security hole

a disturbance of bubbles played on the E-flat trumpet.
Just to be clear, I don’t think music should be illegal

Though some people question the usefulness
of the concept,

and some deny it exists. I believe
in a bizarre collection of ideas about language.

Did you know, for example, that stuttering affects
many more men than women?

This is why women chew slowly
and men eat steak. Now make a fist

and place the thumb side of your fist
against Amiri Baraka’s upper abdomen, below the ribcage

and above the navel. Grasp your fist
with your other hand and press into

the upper abdomen with a quick upward
thrust. Do not squeeze Amiri Baraka;

confine the force of your thrust to your hands.
Repeat until the terrorists are expelled.

Howard White, on meeting Palestinian poet Fawaz Turki

I found this at Quillblog, quoting from an essay by Howard White that appears in Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory and Place. It speaks to the unusual power of Palestinian poets to articulate and name Palestinian experience, and thus present a counternarrative to the notion that "there is no such thing as Palestine." It also suggests the seemingly abyssal difference between their situation and our own cultural situation in the United States, as poets and cultural workers.

I met Fawaz at a big Amnesty International jamboree of oppressed writers in Toronto a few years ago, and one of the things that intrigued me about him was a rumour that he might be reduced to chopped liver by a Mossad hit squad at any time. I found it invigorating to think that I was sharing the planet with people who cared enough about poetry to shoot anybody over it.

I made use of a bar break to ask Fawaz if his notoriety wasn’t maybe to do with something besides versifying, like bombing buses. Fawaz was a bit piqued by this suggestion. Any damn fool can chuck a bomb while it takes brains to write a poem, and the Palestinian people understand this, he pointed out.

Back in Jordan it was nothing to have a crowd of several thousand gather on a few hours notice to hear him at an open-air reading. When he appeared in public, throngs of grown women followed him around ululating and fluttering their hands like leaves, chanting his name. His broadsheets outsold the newspapers. Poets like him and his buddies Mahmoud Darweesh and Fawazi el Asmar were far more important to the Palestinian cause than bomb-throwers, and far more worrisome to the authorities, and this was because of their ability to express the feelings of their people, Turki said. That is why so many of the poets known to Amnesty were behind bars, not only in Palestine but around the world.

You can see Fawaz talk about his life and work here.