Kind of a National Poetry Month post. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll keep it short: it times of great crisis, I think poets have more to offer than poems. We should still write the poems, of course, but we can also “be mobilizers. We can be movement-builders. We can use our networks to spread information” and on and on. One way this plays out in our everyday work, for me at least, is the practice of kicking off events and performances by bringing someone else’s voice into the space.
I’ve done this here-and-there through my whole career, but it’s felt like a real necessity over the last five months. If I have 20-60 minutes of stage time at an event, I’m not really interested in just jumping into my own material. I want to acknowledge context. I want to acknowledge that the audience’s hearts might be in two places at once. Opening a show with a poem from a Palestinian poet is a small thing, a tiny thing, but I think it matters. A big part of my own pedagogical approach has been the idea that poems are excuses—they have value on their own, of course, but beyond that, they are footholds, opportunities for us to look at something we weren’t already looking at, to think deeply about something that would otherwise be ignored. If we’re not doing that as a bare minimum, what are we doing?
This post is just a list of links—both to short poems I’ve been returning to, over and over recently, and some articles/interviews on how poetry can be used in this moment. I use that word, used, intentionally. It’s not just about what we can say via poetry; it’s about what the process of writing and sharing poems can help build. Hope these can be useful:
A FEW POEMS
A note on the selections: Any time I make a topic-based list, the list is not exhaustive. This one does not feature every great Palestinian poet, or every poet who has written about war and peace (indeed, the ones listed here are not all by Palestinian poets, and they are not all from the last five months). The list is, very specifically, a small sampling of poems on this topic that have been useful to me in my work as a performer, educator, and facilitator. I’m less interested in the “best” poems, and more interested in poems that can be generative, that can lead to good conversations, and questions—poems that can open doors. There are so many others, and I’d encourage all of us to make these kinds of lists and share them.
Also, while there are a ton of books I could include here, I want to specifically shout out this anthology featuring multiple voices: Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi)
A FEW OTHER LINKS
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