Tag: the situation

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In the Fray

A prose translation in the style of Jack Spicer of Federico García Lorca’s “Reyerta,” part of a larger project I’m working on, but felt appropriate to share now:

In the fray: Deep in the trenches, the switchblades made in Albacete shine like fish, beautiful in the other side’s blood. A hard, playing-card light cuts through the acrid green, the frenzied horses and their riders’ silhouettes. Two old women cry into an olive-wood cup. The fighting bull climbs the walls. Black angels bring handkerchiefs and melted snow: angels with huge wings feathered with switchblades made in Albacete. Juan Antonio, the one from Montilla, rolls dead down the slope, his body full of lilies and pomegranates at his temples. Now he climbs the fire-cross and sets out down the highway of death. Now the judge approaches through the olive grove, National Guardsmen accompanying him. Spilt blood screams a muted serpent-song. Here, officers! The same thing has happened as always and four Romans and five Carthaginians are dead. An afternoon of crazy fig-trees and hot rumors falls on the wounded legs of the cavalry. And black angels fly through the air following the setting sun: angels with long braids and olive-oil hearts.

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Why is Nobody Here? Who is Listening to Us?

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?

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The Martial Races

In an interview this morning, the president said deportation might be the appropriate punishment for football players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and the extent to which the American promise reflected in the lyrics to the song does not extend to African-American people. That’s not a good thing for the president of the United States to be saying.

On the one hand, he’s a madman and he doesn’t think before he speaks. But on the other hand? Well, on the other hand it reminds me of one year in grad school when the prospective students were visiting:

The players are J, a prospective student, and H, a current student two years behind me, a friend, and a guy who had immigrated to the US from an Asian country as a teenager. Also me and A, both white, American-born grad students.

During one of the meet-and-greets with the current students, the four of us were standing around talking and J asked H where he was from. H named the Asian country where he had grown up. “Ah,” said J, “I could tell that you belonged to one of the martial races.” We were all a little dumbfounded and I don’t remember how we changed the subject or recalibrated the conversation.

A and I had some words with J later. To everyone’s relief, he ended up enrolling in a different graduate program, one that, as it has emerged in the last few years, rather tolerates racialized comments towards Asian and Asian-American people.

When I talked with H about the whole incident later, he was inclined to give J the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that perhaps he had just been nervous and blurted out something really stupid because of that. And I remember saying to H that maybe that was the case, but that for J to have blurted out a comment out of a 19th-century ethnography textbook, it would have to have been not only in his brain but pretty close to the tip of his tongue to be the thing that he blurted out when he was at a loss for words due to a moment of pressure or social anxiety.

And here we are. Every rational fiber of my body and brain is trying to tell me not to worry that the president of the United States just admitted that he is considering deporting people who protest police brutality: it’s impractical (what country would agree to take political deportees from the US?); the institutions of our country are still, I hope, too strong for that to happen; and (again, I can only hope) citizens would flood the streets and prevent it from happening. But all the same — and I do not resort to Holocaust analogies lightly — nobody in Germany really thought that its own citizens would get deported, even as this kind of rhetoric surged on the political stage.

Maybe his off-handed comment about deporting football players who protest police brutality was just that, a stupid, off-hand comment; but it reflects something in his brain and on the tip of his tongue. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, the president has shown us all along who he is and he continues to show us; we need to believe him and we need to be prepared for what may c0me next.