Dear Hannah and Scout,
The past few days have been long, hot, confusing. Three weeks or so into my two month research project in Jordan, I find things slow and difficult to enter. The bureaucracy: men standing slouched in blue uniforms, oversized helmets and guns half their size, the reframing of Palestinians forced to resettle in Jordan as Jordanian-Palestinians, construction projects of new sidewalks built of beautiful but slippery stone. In Amman there are four to five coffee shops on every major road, mostly empty, shop owners standing outside, placating our entrancing and purchasing, so unlike my childhood visits in Irbid, where my memory is of long stretches of dust and wide grey roads and very few tourists. Increasingly, discussions of how to leave the failing economy, to Beirut (where the economy is worse, but the culture more romantic) to Dubai (where slave labor makes an Arab at least one caste above the lowest by default) but not to America (anymore, because it is too difficult, too expensive, and the government is terrible).
When Iran struck Israel, all of the young people at the hookah lounge outside of Paris Circle in the neighborhood of Amman called Weibdeh (where the most artsy and well-paid youth and expats stay) filtered away from the coverings of the awnings to look at the sky unobstructed. Cheers and claps while the alarm blared instructing people to stay indoors. Someone next to me leaned over and in English, told me not to worry, sit and relax. Above streaks of red—missiles from Iran headed to strike so called Tel-Aviv and Haifa. It is for this reason that three days ago my friend was stuck at the airport for seven hours (her flight and all flights from Amman since cancelled) and has been unable to leave Jordan since. The complexities and minor inconveniences of fairness and retaliation.
Meanwhile, I worry. I develop painful sores in my armpits from the aluminum in my deodorant and diarrhea from the bacteria in the watermelon. My whole body is smooth, free of hair like a fleshy slug. I sleep eleven hours a day and the heat lulls me back to distracted napping. When and how will I cross into Palestine and then into Egypt? The intricacies of the Oslo Accords and how it has and continues to benefit Israel. The existence of Palestine as “many islands” surrounded by and controlled by both the Israeli government body and the many settlers eager to shrink further the already small amount of land still owned by Palestinians. The weakness and milquetoast politics of the PA that seems often to work in tandem with Israel.
I am reminded of an article I read that a few Palestinians were also injured in the most recent targeted attack by Iran on Israel. And so what to do if Iran does have and chooses to use nuclear weapons against Israel? Of course this will destroy much of Palestine as well. And is this just another of the Western world’s long-running myths against Iran? How to prepare for this potential, however slim? And what of Iran, will Israel do to them what they’ve done to Palestine? How to imagine a different reality? As I type this on my laptop, a beautiful couple walk by, a woman with cropped curly hair and a loose orange dress exposed at the back, revealing a large tattoo of a rose with a winding, thorny stem and the man, holding his phone and silver vape in a claw grip while his other hand swings. Meandering slowly together forward, the woman turns and looks at me through the window and I see the kohl rimmed thickly around her eyes. Internally, I keep returning to Ahmad Almallah’s poem, “Table.”
In “Table,” Almallah’s lines are short and winding. I feel a dual desire to move forward and uncover the meaning existing in the unit of the sentence and a desire to linger in the choices the poem makes in its line endings.
Table, where are
Your hands?
Your face, your eyes
Your mind?
The poem opens and already I am beset in a reality where idioms, “figure[s] of speech”, (if one imagines Almallah is playing off the phrase “table legs” in this moment) are interrogated past what I might consider ‘reasonable’ assumption. Rhetorically, one is made to question how far the anatomy of a table functions in the linguistic imagination of a reader. What would a table’s hands be, one might ask. How would one even identify the “mind” of an inanimate object. I hear two readings here. The first: the focus on the mind, not the head, brings the anatomical discussion into one of autonomy. The mind becomes shorthand for imagining the imaginative capabilities of the table. Can an idiomatic table think, make decisions? Do “figure[s] of speech” have their own internal processes, values, ideas?
I think of course the answer is no. Language is loaded but not all-powerful. It might instigate but is not itself state violence, genocide. People are the decision-makers in this reality, the ones with minds. I think where this interrogation of the table actually lands is a challenge to the reader of our own desire for personification and its inverse (chremamorphism). Perhaps inherent here is a desire to cast off blame, make the “mind” a universal element of internal decision—making all creatures, even the inanimate, hold. The second reading: I feel in “Table” the urge to instead think of the “mind” less literally. The actions of the table to “turn” to “sit or/ Stand” to “wait” perhaps ephemerally call attention to the atmosphere of inertia the rules of physics denote to all beings. Can this even be applied to the abstract, to the table as an idiomatic phrase? Can it thus be said that language, too, is dynamic and moving? And what would this make the “mind” of the table, the internal motion that powers the outward?
Ultimately I’m not sure. I feel the inertia of this poem strongly, though. There is a desire I feel for this poem that often ends lines on moments of suspension (articles, copulas, dashes) for action. The world of the poem feels to be “wait[ing].” It’s a feeling I feel strongly attached to these days.
Love, Samira
Dear Samira and Scout,
I don’t know how else to say it, but you have been really brave Samira, under rocket fire, and the uncertainty of if you will be able to leave. I hope you can make it to Palestine. I trust your seasoned traveling skills will help you cross the Red Sea, if you need to find another way to leave. I’m writing from the Old Cemetery of St. Jacobi in Reuterkiez, Berlin, where I’ve been living for the past few weeks. Every day I take the train to Alexanderplatz for my German class, which is held in what used to be the Soviet building Haus des Lehrers (“House of the Teacher.”) Before I go to class, I blankly stare at the mural Unser Leben (“Our Life”). Is that our life, a man on the phone, three people who, at the table, plan?
My German teacher, Olga, is very patient with us, and there’s not much we seem to understand. My favorite thing to say: “Ich habe keine kinder.” I have no children. Across the street, four giant red cranes tower over Alexanderplatz, both beautiful and worrisome. They seem to be spinning around in circles, ready to drop and not to build.
The world of the poem is waiting. The table is both static and turning. The struggle in “The Table” between obliqueness and interpretive possibility—your sense, Samira, of it turning on a halted precipice—reminds me of Mick Toma’s poem “The Audition,” which figures “interpretation” itself as something that poetry can both freeze and transform, into dispersed flight. As the lines turn, interpretation gives way to belief: the “believability” of a performance “freezes / interpretation // soft upon the audience,” so that the compulsion to interpret both suddenly halts and spreads softly, is by the audience collectively released.
“The Audition” considers the ambivalent relation between poet and reader, performer and audience. We can succeed at “winning hearts,” just as we need to run away, and into the mirror. Our speaker is in a predicament that conditions the lyric poet: both alone with the mirror and being watched, solitary but accompanied by a judging audience who can’t be easily forgotten: “but, the audition was underway.” This somewhat frightening reminder of an ongoing audition interrupts an illusory dream of solitude: “the thrill of perfect conversation / perfected alone.”
This solitary but albeit social, “perfect conversation” figures the apostrophic address of the lyric—but here, the absent audience becomes involved in the poem. The “audience” quite literally gets the last word. This poem’s idealized form of “perfect” dialogue resounds in Toma’s poem “Untitled [excerpt]”: “in momentum’s perfection the flute plays itself / I believe in my heart that the flute is upset.” “Perfect conversation” between poet and mirror finds its synonym in an empathic dialogue between poet and flute, which like the lyric poet “plays itself” a song. And like a flute, this poet makes some music too, rhyming “flower” with the “hour.” The last couplet becomes an amiable duo in “perfect conversation.” The poem wishes for musical alignment.
Poets play themselves a song, and for an audience. Asha Futterman’s poems consider the risks of performing for an empathic audience, one who seeks to enjoy and contain the feelings they demand to be articulated with legible clarity. In the poem “pain,” this audience takes the form of a coworker, who wants the speaker to be “sure about my pain.” To be “sure,” the speaker needs an audience: “I want other people to tell me / how much pain I’m in.” Internal feeling comes to be legible through the language of a distant audience, those “other people” who know. But there is difficulty in being asked to make oneself clear:
the girl wants me to have a clear
problem but I can’t
experience pain in service
to a concept
It’s hard for me to tell
if or why I feel pain
because it doesn’t seem
contingent on anything
In the process of translating pain into language, it becomes a rigid concept, something in the world that can be contained. I have been reading the great ballet dancer Vaslav Njinisky’s diary, written in the years before he was taken to an asylum. He describes performing sheer “feeling” for an audience: “Now I will express feeling and the public will understand me. I know the public because I studied them well. They like to be astonished, but they know little about Art, therefore are easily amazed. I know how to astonish the public and am therefore sure of success.” He has learned to perform what the “public” wants: to express a feeling that can be understood.
In Futterman’s “pain,” direct expression of feeling is suspicious. They tell of feeling, but in language feeling lies. In “Halloween,” a child at theatre camp performs a lie for an audience, an audience of fellow liars: child actors.
when I was at theatre camp
one kid told everyone his brother got shot
the night before to get attention
it didn’t happen and we all knew it
but every day is a threat the world might change
not into a different world but into the world
of someone else
The boy performs pain to be loved, to get attention. But the syntax renders ambiguous who acted to “get attention,” the kid, or his brother, so that the poem allows them to switch places. In this exchange, both boys recede, disappear. Changing places means losing oneself: it is a kind of death. Here Futterman articulates the danger of performing empathy: the world threatens to change into the “world / of someone else.” What are the dangers of imagining we can switch places?
everyone else got off the train
except for me and a man
in all black
holding realistic angel wings
The poem ends in an empathic unit of two: “except for me and a man” who have been left behind by “everyone else.” Like the brother and the boy, this syntax allows them to switch places, and it’s as if they are both wearing the same costume. Like the acting training that, instead of a larger than life performance, “was mostly learning how / to get out of a chair,” the poem teaches us how to tell a “realistic” life, and lie.
Another poet of “realistic” life: Courtney Bush. The language in her poems for this issue arise from an epistolary medium, language grabbed from years of writing to an audience via emails. They strike a friendly pose, reminding us that poetry can arise not just from an imagined address to an audience, but from a sustained, direct address. Those who were emailed were addressed, but so too were the subjects of the emails: Satan, Rilke, a hermit, Platanov, North Carolina.
In “Open,” Bush writes of watching friends perform: “In the show, Julia said the first thing Peter ever said to her was, “I can’t wait to make you laugh but I can’t do it right now.” These poems are built from layered forms of address: Bush writes to us of Julia saying of Peter what he said. And what was said was the desire for the most pleasurable relationship with an audience: the success of making someone laugh. Perfect conversation is making someone laugh. These poems believe in their own process, their organizational principles: Bush’s love for the number ten. Fragments cohere around the gravitas of a categorical word, like Gertrude Stein’s ROAST BEEF, here we have GLASS or EARTH, words layered with time and experience, accreted memory.
Samira wrote to us about a girl she saw at the bowling alley in Amman wearing a t-shirt that said: Poetry is life. Life speaks back to us of so much death and badness. I’ve been reading books by those writers deemed insane and locked away in asylums, Hölderlin, Nijinsky, isolated from the people they loved and still making art. They were still in the world. Of Stravinsky, Nijinsky writes: “He loves his children strangely and shows his love for them by making them paint; they paint well.” You aren’t my children, but I love you both strangely and you really write well.
Love, Hannah
Dear Hannah and Samira,
Hannah, Samira, I’ve dreamt of you both very frequently this week. This happens to me sometimes when my friends are traveling. Remember when we lived together every night under the same roof? Those were what felt like the early days of my childhood, though in reality they marked adulthood, arriving in an old form. I am in Ridgewood today, having taken the train here yesterday, the AC was out, it felt like a real summer, defined by minor discomforts. I wish I could give you Pedialyte, Samira, having just read over text about your tiredness and your stomach. My dreaming of you feels urgent if neurotic. Since you’ve last written things have already changed, the US is at war with Iran, and yet the notion that this was not in any way true a week ago or a year ago is of course another lie or partial truth of the state sanctioned news. But this news has real effect. You’ve pointed, Samira, to the true radius of a bomb. And the waiting required to know the full impacts of that radius. I feel myself hating writing about this. The sentence lends syntactic rhythm to disjunctive material horror. The broken inertia of the poem responds to that failure, but it is not, as you’ve written, “all powerful.” I tend to take comfort in good poetry’s capacity to disregard power. To violate power. Though today, against my politics, I wish it had some.
In “ALL OF US OR NONE,” Cynthia Cruz writes:
Nothing left
But this invisible.
Supreme static
Radio coming in
Through the breaking
Rooms of glass
Windows. F16s
In the English-language
Dropping smouldering
Leaflets, warning
Of the coming—
We were
Hungering
For something,
Reduced
To nothing.
As of yesterday, the US has sent fighter jets, F-16s among them, to fly over Iran. Cruz here describes a dual history. That these aircrafts were long present “In the English-language,” not previously dormant on a military base but already circulating in the linguistic and geopolitical reach of American power and material — “The blackening / Gelatinous junk” of psychocultural stuff. The supposed anticipatory “nothing” that preceded violence was too the violence, giving birth to its present form. Cruz begins with a speaker characterized by this “nothing,” a negating subject formulated by the “quickening / Melody” of modernity. A polyvocal member of a class characterized not by where or what they are, but by the iterative production of what isn’t: the constant flight, movement, trash, and disappearance necessitated by the maintenance of capital. “Nothing” happens, providing strange substance:
Like this: We were
So filled up with the nothing
There was nothing
But leaving
Left. Moving from
One city to another
Moving through
One world
Into another. One
Of us, and
All of us
And always
More of us.
It is only those
Who have nothing
Who can save
Those who have
Nothing.
Here, I think of what you, Hannah, have called Courtney’s Bush’s “sustained, direct address.” If with difference, Cruz’s poem too finds its recursive audience, speaking both as a part of and toward a group. A message from and for those “Who have nothing / Who can save // Those who have / Nothing.” The “I” is contained within the “we,” those “So filled up with the nothing,” not disappeared into nothing but defined wholly by its provocative contents. An “I” descends into a crowd, absenting itself in order to take on an identity through collective speech. In that crowd, a kind of freedom might be located, discovered not from saying “no to” the social, but from, as Cruz writes in “Beyond Negative Freedom and the Working Class Subject,” saying “yes to… something entirely new.” 1 Wielding neither positive optimism nor totalizing nihilism, a speculative affective condition emerges. A condition on the move. “This ecstatic suspension,” writes Cruz in “Clinic,” “Between two worlds.”
As I finish writing this, I am watching you, Samira, sleep on my computer screen. There is a mouse in the apartment I’m visiting, he has decided to follow me to every room, never in my sight but always nearby, just out of it. I keep you in my sight unlike this mouse. You are sick and I am waiting for you to be well. I love you both and I know we will be together in “life” again soon, not just together here, though it is also good, with poetry.
Love always,
Scout
❧
1 Cruz, Cynthia. "Beyond Negative Freedom and the Working Class Subject: Another Kind of Madness" Open Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 2023, pp. 20220236. https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2022-0236