I’m in a group that’s reading through Jack Spicer’s poetics this spring, and by way of introduction, we were asked to respond to his “The Poet and Poetry” and it spurred me to make some notes about something that I’ve been trying and failing to write since October. I’ll get there eventually.
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— I hate the idea of introducing myself as a writer with something super unpolished so I’m going with bullet points so that I don’t feel like I’m uploading a shitty first draft (Anne Lamott) but rather notes for a shitty first draft that I can then share with no-one.
— Spicer’s “embarrassing question” (“why is nobody here? who is listening to us?”) resonates with a lot of the questioning about the relevance of the humanities today, and that’s even before he gets to his jabs at the New Critics.
— In my very small corner of the academic-study-of-poetry world, cited to the point of cliché is the question posed by Mahmoud Darwish: “Is al-Andalus in the earth/ or in the poem?” He’s asking whether this place in time (medieval Spain) that is so lionized or demonized or something-else-with-teethized is or was real or exists only in the imagination of poets.
— Since October I have been avoiding writing something about the unfortunate coincidence in my undergraduate syllabus that had me teaching the Andalusi Zionides the week that the war between Hamas and Israel began. These are lengthy poems written in Hebrew by the otherwise-Arabic-speaking Jewish poets of medieval Spain that express a longing for Zion, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes geographical and real. Normally I try to draw some distinctions between “Zionism” in the Middle Ages and political Zionism in the modern world. This time I just avoided saying the word as much as possible.
— I did a terrible job teaching poetry that I normally love and teach well because I just. didn’t. want. to talk about it. My friend Noam posted on Facebook that he teared up that week in a seminar he was teaching all about Andalusi poetry; I think he did the better job of it because he let his students see the impact that medieval poetry could still have on a person.
— Me? If I cry, it’s about the Sarajevo Haggadah. (Look up Geraldine Brooks’ piece from the New Yorker a bunch of years ago if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
— NYU kicked Faculty for Justice in Palestine out of the atrium of the library where they were holding a reading of Palestinian poetry because you can’t read poetry aloud in the atrium of the library.
— “Live poetry is a kind of singing… Poetry demands a human voice to sing it and demands an audience to hear it. Without these it is naked, pure, and incomplete — a bore.” Spicer was trained as a medievalist. Of course he knew this.
— One more bullet point would be putting, well, too fine a point on it, no?
