Course Map
-
- Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
- Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
- The Library
- Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
- Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video.
- The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
- Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
- Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
- Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
- Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
- Week Eight Materials: The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
- RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE
Agha Shahid Ali
1949–2001
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages.
Known particularly for his dexterous allusions to European, Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary traditions, Ali’s poetry collections revolve around both thematic and cultural poles. The scholar Amardeep Singh has described Ali’s style as “ghazalesque,” referring to Ali’s frequent use of the form as well as his blending of the “rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of love and longing,” Singh noted, “but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance (and sometimes political importance).” Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up, leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the idiom is American and contemporary.”
The poem originally called “Kashmir Without a Post Office” was published as the title poem in The Country Without a Post Office (1997). Taking its impetus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to political violence and closed all the country’s post offices for seven months, Ali’s long poem is considered one of his masterpieces. Rooms Are Never Finished (2001) similarly yokes political and personal tragedy, again with a long poem as its focal point. Ali used a line from Emily Dickinson as the title for “Amherst to Kashmir,” a poem that explores his grief at his mother’s death and his own continued sense of exile from his home and culture.
Ali was a noted writer of ghazals, a Persian form that utilizes repetition, rhyme, and couplets. As editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), he described the long history of the fascination of Western writers with ghazals, as well as offering a succinct theoretical reading of the form itself. In his introduction he wrote, “The ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself… once a poet establishes the scheme—with total freedom, I might add—she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master.” Ali’s own book of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2001), frequently references American poets and other poems, creating a further layer of allusive tension. The poet Michael Palmer alleged that Ali’s “ghazals offer a path toward a level of lyric expansiveness few poets would dare to aspire to.” The volume was published posthumously, following Ali’s untimely death. (from poetry.org)
Here is video of Agha Shahid Ali talking about the ghazal form: https://vimeo.com/104504736
Two Ghazals
on the form:
https://poets.org/glossary/ghazal
The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif,) and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the which appears twice in the first couplet). Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazal
Comprehensive overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazal
Helpful info: https://poets.org/glossary/ghazal
from the above link: “The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.”
& from Stephanie Burt: www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69597/agha-shahid-ali-tonight “What is a ghazal? The term (pronounced “guzzle”) originated in Arabic, where it denoted a topic: early Arabic ghazals were lyric poems about erotic love, and like other Arabic poems they used monorhyme (all the lines end on the same sound). Poets of medieval Persia codified the form by employing couplets of uniform meter and length, with the same word or phrase, the radif, at the end of each couplet. A rhyme—the qafia—also appeared in each couplet, twice in the first and once, just before the radif, in all others. All the couplets had to be complete and independent in sense and syntax, almost as if they were separate poems. The final couplet also contained a name (usually the poet’s own name or his pen name, the takhallus). The form encompassed secular, erotic longing and (as in the work of the poet Jaladdin Rumi) mysticism, in which the Beloved is God. It also lent itself to sung performance and to public contests, called mushaira, in which poets would sing or recite their work.”
So, to review, the basic form is this, going through and taking apart Agha Shahid Ali’s “Ghazal” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43279/ghazal-56d221fe8a756
Ghazal
BY AGHA SHAHID ALI
Feel the patient’s heart
Pounding—oh please, this once—
—JAMES MERRILL
I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.
A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.
(see, in the first couplet, there in a rhyme “-old” followed by the repeating phrase “in real time.” In the first couplet, they occur in both lines)
Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?
A former existence untold in real time …
(now in the second and following couplets, the rhyme “-old” and repeating phrase “in real time” only occur in the second line. The poem continues thusly in couplets, each a discrete unit independent from the others in terms of content — this is not a narrative form, though you could try and make it one)
The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?
What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?
Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth—
The funeral love comes to hold in real time!
They left him alive so that he could be lonely—
The god of small things is not consoled in real time.
Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys—
It’s hell in the city of gold in real time.
God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn.
Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.
And who is the terrorist, who the victim?
We’ll know if the country is polled in real time.
“Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound
the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.
The throat of the rearview and sliding down it
the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time.
I heard the incessant dissolving of silk—
I felt my heart growing so old in real time.
Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.
What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?
Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words—
Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time.
(for Daniel Hall)
Notes:
Yaar: Hindi word for friend.
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The above is an unusual example of a ghazal, as usually in the last couplet the poet refers to themself by their own name.
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Tonight
BY AGHA SHAHID ALI
Listen to Shahid Ali read “Tonight”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/play/75365
An annotated version of the poem is available here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51652/tonight-56d22f898fcd7
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
—Laurence Hope
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”
“Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—
All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.
Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.
He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.
In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.
God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.
Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.
The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.
My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
++++++++++++++++
Stephanie Burt’s short, helpful essay on “Tonight” from poetry.org: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69597/agha-shahid-ali-tonight
Let Your Mirrored Convexities Multiply: Kazim Ali discusses Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal “Tonight.”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/75540/let-your-mirrored-convexities-multiply
++++++++++++++++
Even the Rain
by Agha Shahid Ali
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.
“Our glosses / wanting in this world”—“Can you remember?”
Anyone!—“when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain?
After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain.
Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.
How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.
This is God’s site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?
After the bones—those flowers—this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.
What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.
How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames—
To help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain.
He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves;
he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain.
New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me—
To make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain.
They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?
No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.
++++++++++++++++
the full lecture by Agha Shahid Ali from which the excerpt on the ghazal above is taken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iu3pkJQJOw&feature=emb_title
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Lenox Hill
(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery,
my mother said the sirens sounded like the
elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove
them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.)
Poems on pdf:
Agha Shahid Ali – From Amherst to Kashmir
Agha Shahid Ali – I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World
More on Agha Shahid Ali:
Since Last We Met: Painting Agha Shahid Ali’s Couplets on Kashmir by Masood Hussein. “Here are a few couplets of mine that I had written keeping you in mind. I want you to paint them when you have the time.”
https://thewire.in/the-arts/kashmir-agha-shahid-ali-couplets-painting
Sophia Naz
Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc Her poetry collections are Peripheries (2015), Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017). Shehnaz, a biography of her mother published from Penguin Random House in November 2019.
Sophia will be live on April 1 on a broadcast podcast:
Sophia was live on April 1 on a broadcast podcast: Here’s the recording of her reading and Q&A: http://tobtr.com/11702878
Sophia’s website: sophianaz.com
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Habeas Corpus
Produce the body, her delicate coinage laid
out as dowry would be, for all to examine
Richness of loss, touch her mongrel flair
curve of missing column, absent shair
+++++++++++++
Bomb
Semantics
Seem antics
See, man ticks
Language is the bomb
+++++++++++++
Chrysalis
Well, the bucket list fills up
water sings, frogs jump in
Skin in the game, a rumor burns
your tongue, spring in flames
Resurrection’s theme, lilies
a social distancing species
outsourcing copulation
to bees, benevolent breezes
& you too, uncoupled from the train
of thought, its cranky bogies
on a day like this, when mustard fields
are leavened with poppies
above girders locked in cat’s cradle
Tamalpais holds a world’s blue in place
and sedate slate grey sea
a study in placid fluidity
cell bars stir volumes on the house
of cards, blow by blow, tiny death
while the sky, an unmade bed
spilling silk
on a day like this.
+++++++++++++
Mother Tongue
Take off your shoes outside this shrine
where ghosts of the mother
tongue reside, alongside
lamps of extinguished geographies
Should I gauze this Dacca muslin today?
Say: *mull, mull, glaze a homonym hymn
in Kabir’s cadence over an earthen p(l)ot
of amputated thumbs?
Warp and weft pour from the cleft
mandible as tomb, sanctum
sanctorum, womb of wombs
mother tongues ferment
Matryoshka dolls, each within
another, mother, grandmother
great grandmother till the last pod
God – embedded seed syllable wails
Ma, mother of memory, heal me
unmake my prosaic days of bricks
troll *bhooths, malware, endless phishes
click by click the dick pics box me in
*Anarkali, sentenced to snark alley
by that blind emperor, autocorrect
the walls the walls are closing in
trance fixed on a selfie stick
Mother of memory, Ma, reveal me
a heaving loom the greater grid
buried in these lines, electrify a thousand-
fold suns in the mouth of every silence
*mull mull is a homonym for mulmul or a very fine muslin, renowned all over pre-Partition India, it was of such fine quality that the British cut off all the thumbs of the weavers who produced it
*Bhooths: Evil spirits
*Anarkali: Pomegranate Bud, heroine of Mughal Azam a popular Indian film epic in which she is sentenced to death by being walled up alive for the crime of loving the crown prince.
++++++++++++++++
Lineage
Before you were born she skimmed
your boundary, mother
of all stripes, linea negra, a lean line, simple as the clean
cut that popped you, squeak & pip
of two signature lines
cradled in timbre, the line
grew shape, a skipping scribble float the *maulvi
twisting your naughty ear to still of bey, made slender
letter-boat anchored by a single *nukta, point being
that slowly you were made to form
*lakeer ka faqeer, the line that would fill your life as water
does a glass, this much was clear
must memorize, repeat
line after line
no loving in this repeating
which brings us
to lineage, conundrum
at hand, look, under
the womanhood
the line you must not cross
is given, circumscribed
it hems you in from head to toe
the line, as manual, precipice, edge, abyss, endless delineation
of nots & crosses
Ash Wednesdays the forehead weathers
season after season
red and unread lines are everywhere, demarcations
of otherness, the puzzled dashes—
of word processors helpless
to corral *Alif-Laila under their spell
when the line fell in love
it became a couplet
*radif and qafia eloped a ghazal
that briefest of springs lingering
in between the margins
even as the line stops galloping
on the electric page
above the hospice bed
slumps two sad elbows, becomes
the four lines of the coffin
a quatrain from whose walls
there is no escape, only passage
*Maulvi definition, (in India) an expert in Islamic law: used especially as a term of respectful address among Muslims.
*Nuqtā (Hindi-Urdu नुक़्ता, نقطہ, from Arabic nuqta نقطة “dot,” or “period.”), also spelled Nuktā, is a term for a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanāgari and some other Indian scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukta
*There is an urban legend that students all wanted to be great Saint like their teacher but one of them was quite ambitious. He worked hard to get all the theoretical knowledge but lacked common sense and behaviourial applications. So, one day, The Saint advised his students to dry their washed clothes outside their hut and have drawn a line (laqeer) to fix an individual spot for each student. All students made this a routine and continued following this as a rule. But one day, it started raining. All students took their half dried clothes inside their huts but that unique student stuck to his line to dry his clothes resulting in them getting more wet. That was when people started calling him laqeer ka faqeer.. which simply mean to strictly follow something without applying much sense. https://www.quora.com/What-does-%E2%80%98Lakeer-ka-Fakeer%E2%80%99-mean
*Alif Laila is an Indian television series based on the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights. The series ran from 1993–1997 for 143 episodes. The plotline starts from the very beginning when Sharzad starts telling stories to Shahyar and contains both the well-known and the lesser-known stories from the One Thousand and One Nights.. The name Alif Laila is a short form of the original Arabic title of the One Thousand and One Nights – Alif Layla wa-Layla (Arabic: ألف ليلة وليلة). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alif_Laila
*Radif (Persian: ردیف, meaning order) is a rule in Persian, Turkic, and Urdu poetry which states that, in the form of poetry known as a Ghazal, the second line of all the couplets must end with the same word/s. This repeating of common words is the “Radif” of the Ghazal. The radif at the end of the line is preceded by a qafia, which is a repeating rhyme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radif
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Resources on Sophia Naz:
In The City Of Proper Nouns, poetry reading by Sophia Naz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMvKDKjT_LA
ModPoMinute #53: On Sophia Naz’s “Bomb”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eDCRL0WhrA
ModPoMinute #25: On Sophia Naz’s “Habeas Corpus,” with Douglas Kearney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4IXPxZtWk
We Know The Green Language, poem & video by Sophia Naz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdYRNpS-E8Q
The Leisurely Art of the Goldsmith Applied to Language: Sophia Naz’s Date Palms Prashant Keshavmurthy: https://jasonzuzga.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Sophia-Naz-Date-Palms.pdf
Wound, Therapy & Vigilance in Sophia Naz’s Poetry – by Uttaran Das Gupta: http://bombayliterarymagazine.com/?p=635
THE POET AS MEMORIALIST: READING SOPHIA NAZ’S POINTILLISM by Momina Masood http://desiwriterslounge.net/blog/2017/10/review-sophia-naz-pointillism/
An essay by Sophia about her mother: https://scroll.in/magazine/879049/the-story-of-my-mother-the-actress-who-was-almost-cast-as-anarkali-in-mughal-e-azam
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively. Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018). In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. Joudah translated several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan‘s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.
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Sleeping Trees
BY FADY JOUDAH
Between what should and what should not be
Everything is liable to explode. Many times
I was told who has no land has no sea. My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.
Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.
My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.
No longer his village he found his tree amputated.
Between one falling and the next
There’s a weightless state. There was a woman
Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree
In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand.
When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew
Could turn anyone into one-half reptile.
I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being
The only one left. When we woke my father
He was running away from soldiers. Now
He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs
About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king
And tried not to stop. He flew
But mother woke him and held him for an hour,
Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward.
Maybe if I had just said it.
Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe
I don’t know much about dreams
But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead
Know about the dying and sometimes
Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree
My father used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain stream,
And he would gently swing.
++++++++
After
BY FADY JOUDAH
Over treasure and land some texts will say it had
Little to do with slavery or the newly
Discovered yellow planet
Few men watched the glaciers recede
From shuttles they had built
During the hemorrhage years
When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges
I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree
Or without hands
By then doctors and poets
Would have found a cure for prayer
•
Or have you shoved the door shut
In the face of the dark?
Have you body and light the trap
Of retribution doing unto you
What it does to others? You protest
In the streets and papers and I leave
For a faraway land
Where with pill and scalpel
And a distant reckoning
If he should lick his lips
Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe
Infected puffy
From a bump
I’ll lance it and squeeze
Out the pus and offer
Him an antibiotic
I can’t refuse therefore I am
•
The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up
The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy
I had nothing to tell you
About letting go of the dying
In the morning you were gone
Had carried your father back to your house
His cracked skull
I didn’t know that was your wife
When I raised my voice
To those who were praying
From behind the wall to keep it down
I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat
With a gadget a century old
•
Anemic
From so much loss giving birth
If you give blood in the desert you won’t
Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat
I put your thin
Hemoglobin up to the light and called out
To the donors Donors
If you want to know your blood type
And it’s a match
You must donate
Few came some indifferent to my condition
Not having heard of it
And willing anyhow
•
And the world is south
The night a bandit with gasoline
And I’m your dancing lizard mirth
I put my one arm up
And bring my one foot down on a hot zinc top
The nearest hospital was the dawn
She didn’t know her daughter on her back was
The entry wound and she the exit
She ran a brothel so
The officer said
Where the rebels came and went
And ran into the government boys
Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet
•
He was from the other side rumors
Had a bullet through his left arm
Or had it bitten off by a camel
A camel elephant of the desert never forgets what you are
If you aren’t kind to it
When I met him his bladder was the size
Of a watermelon his prostate a cantaloupe
You cannot catheterize
A man forever
Every hour on the hour his left arm stump
Hanging his good arm holding
His penis his buttocks in deep squeeze
A charge from the rear without spillage
This poor murderous thief desperately single-
Handedly began slapping his own ass
As if he were dashing a stallion in a raid
On some unarmed village
•
The mind in the field
The brine in the field
Whether I
Is a diphthong codependent on
What isn’t there to stay in the field
The good you act is equal
To the good you doubt
Most have lost many
You are either prosperous
Or veteran in the field
•
A mother offers not necessarily
Sells her one-eyed son
For an education if you’ll bring him back
And stone dust for one
With congenital illness
And little boy with malaria
Same old gas
Money mixed with blood
Transfusion the doctor’s perfect record broken
Nobility of taking
A life you
Who must walk to and from your house
The jeep’s upkeep
The donkey-cart ambulance
•
One boot left behind
The one-boot photo I wanted
On a book military black the quad a clinic’s
Special Forces spun
By his dangling heels from
The pickup truck rushed
To a central town altered combative
With two scalp lacerations and blood
In his auditory canal
I was a lover of loss I tossed
The boot in the capital of suffering
++++++
Birth
1
Three sparrows in the schoolyard while waiting for my daughter to finish up her play with friends whose purity she will come to question in a few weeks and in that way I am reminded of the president when he speaks of enemies to the other side of the mirror but only in that way the three sparrows ruffled up the dirt as their wings and heads spun motorbike doughnuts after one of them had come back with a massive potato chip for the other two to fight over perhaps he was the provider or wasn’t hungry but simply couldn’t let a good bit of food go to waste
Then a crow came and the winner sparrow went zooming into the orange orchard knowing fully well it would be impossible to alight and reappeared with a chip the size of his beak and a flurry of birds descended on the scene (I even saw a Fletcher) but kept my eyes on that little sparrow and am happy to report he kept what his mouth held though it occurs to me he was also mean and the one who seemed a provider might have been yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called
2
In the room there were women
Counting up to ten dressed in blue
The doctor was also
Pregnant in her final week
The neonate came out broke
The sound barrier and was whisked
Away from the mother the father
Had cut the cord having held
Scissors before he couldn’t turn down
The doctor’s offer as if he would
Have denied someone an entry
Or exit visa
Then the women were gone
And neighbors and friends had to go
To work and the mother was alone
With breast or formula milk
One nurse suggested the latter
Was the better soporific
3
An infant smile
A gas tickle
The price of milk
It goes up in war
My son is here to teach me
My temperament is genetic
His smile is blind
It dreams a spandrel
Turns opiate in the eyes
He grunts impatient wants
Gas out as soon as
It forms in peace
He coos
It’s what doves do
Though excitable
Observant of moving lips
Attempts utterance
Throws up happy spit
And hunger’s renewed
Resources on Fady Joudah:
INTERVIEW: Field of Power: Fady Joudah is known as much for his own verse as for his translations of Palestinian poets. BY ALEX DUEBEN https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70008/field-of-power
Six Questions for Fady Joudah by Christine Mallon https://scoundreltime.com/six-questions-for-fady-joudah/
AUDIO Ghassan Zaqtan: International Poets in Conversation January 14, 2013 Fady Joudah and Ghassan Zaqtan discuss Palestinian poetry with Ilya Kaminsky. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/76335/ghassan-zaqtan-international-poets-in-conversation
AUDIO Five Muslim American Poets: Part I: Literary discussion featuring readings by poets Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/75528/five-muslim-american-poets-part-i
AUDIO Five Muslim American Poets: Part II: Literary discussion featuring readings by poets Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/75546/five-muslim-american-poets-part-ii
I recommend highly this poem, “Birth,” also. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56352/birth-56d238c5bf1e5
Mohja Kahf
Poet and scholar Mohja Kahf was born in Damascus, Syria. Her family moved to the United States in 1971, and Kahf grew up in the Midwest. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from Rutgers University and is the author of the poetry collections Hagar Poems (2016) and Emails from Scheherazad (2003) and the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006). Kahf’s experiences growing up in the United States shaped her perceptions of the differences and similarities between the cultures of her home and adopted countries. Her poetry is an amalgam of both Syrian and American influences; Lisa Suhair Majaj commented in ArteNews that Kahf’s work “draws on American colloquialisms and Quranic suras; it is informed not only by American free verse … but also by a lush energy that draws on the heart of the Arabic oral tradition and Arabic poetry.”Kahf sometimes satirizes stereotypes about Muslim women—she has tackled hairstyles, sex, and clothing. In Emails from Scheherazad, she locates Scheherazad in 21st-century Hackensack, New Jersey. Majaj observed that Kahf “unsettles assumptions about Scheherazad while also emphasizing aspects of the traditional tale that often get overlooked in western portrayals.” Kahf has also written about the hardships of immigration; The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf depicts a Muslim girl’s coming of age in Indiana. Kahf co-writes a column on sexuality for the website Muslim Wake Up. Her nonfiction work includes Western Representation of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (1999). Kahf is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas.
+++++++++
My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears by Mohja Kahf
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom
My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you’d make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,
as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.
“You can’t do that,” one of the women protests,
turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”
“We wash our feet five times a day,”
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
“My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they? I
should worry about my feet!”
My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.”
Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps
that match her purse, I think in case someone
from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display
I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I
hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.
++++++
Hijab Scene 7 by Mohja Kahf
No, I’m not bald under the scarf
No, I’m not from that country
where women can’t drive cars
No, I would not like to defect
I’m already American
But thank you for offering
What else do you need to know
relevant to my buying insurance,
opening a bank account,
reserving a seat on a flight?
Yes, I speak English
Yes, I carry explosives
They’re called words
And if you don’t get up
Off your assumptions
They’re going to blow you away
++++++
Resources on Mohja Khaf:
She Carries Weapons; They Are Called Words by By Neil MacFarquhar from The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/books/12veil.html
A Conversation with Mohja Kahf by Richard Drake from The Arkansas Times https://arktimes.com/street-jazz/2010/12/15/a-conversation-with-mohja-kahf-2
‘Poetry is a witness’ to suffering wrought by Syria’s civil war by By Jeffrey Fleishman from The Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/world/great-reads/la-ca-c1-syria-war-poetry-20151026-story.html
Mohja Kahf ” I Love a Man Who Washes My Dishes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxfAyADwM1w
Mohja Kahf “The Binding” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL5WNLua6T4
Course Map
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- Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
- Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
- The Library
- Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
- Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video.
- The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
- Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
- Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
- Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
- Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
- Week Eight Materials: The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
- RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE