A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 1
Note: The text below was recovered from the last few leaves yet unburied by snow.
It’s the end of the world. Ongoing genocides, a global pandemic ignored, unceasing mass shootings treated with barely a shrug in the news—we live in such overwhelming proximity to disaster that acute catastrophes lengthen into atrophy, into hopelessness and disengagement and boredom. I often find myself inarticulate, running my fingers across the featureless stone of well-worn grief where I hoped to find an inscription of resistance or solidarity.
Yet I still turn to poetry, its ability to mediate emotion and truth in difference to the exhausted utilities of everyday expression or the pronouncements of statecraft. Poetry offers no easy answers yet grounds us in the fundamental truths of living: the pleasures of a graceful phrase, how tenderness is both embrace and wounding, that the morning light is best savored in the company of others. I have been turning to poems, whether they thrum with defiance or cradle our smallest joys, as a register for feeling and thinking outside the withering terms of a broken world.
Reading and writing poems reminds me of the preciousness of encountering creative work that bears witness to many worlds—interior, speculative, the stark present or faded past. There’s something comforting, knowing that the craft of poetry continues ever on. Even the largest empires have been unable to eradicate the work of poetry—the ability to stand in wonder before the world and share that wonder with others. To trade words in a form that understands how one word is never guaranteed to be followed by another.
I like to think of the poem as a dispatch of hope, for us who dwell in the ruins of what ought to have been. I believe in a mode of poetic engagement that does not induce us to comfortably look away but to look with, a dynamic mediation of the world unburdened by the arrogance of believing itself a substitute to action. A couple of months ago, I read Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s excellent essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” which critiques how the neutral-universal notion of “craft” as a technical context undisturbed by politics and culture serves as a reifying implement of active oppression and effacement. Like most writers, I find myself in the lives-long, worlds-spanning struggle to not only theorize but live with a writing craft that can remain attentive to the reproduction of violence and power, emergent particulars, and the wondrously unknown. The only certainty is that it needs to be improvised collectively, full of stumbling and friction, yet moving toward hope.
I wish these words could do more, that action was immanent to utterance. The genocide of Palestinians while us Americans sit enthralled by a football show fills me with despair, especially as I find myself effectively a spectator in the imperial core. I read a post from Hanine Hassan sharing the death of a 3-month-old killed in Rafah, who asked, “Is there any piece of me left as I’m writing this?” For how much longer will we keep manufacturing the conditions that force her and so many others to ask themselves that question? Whatever words I write, our bombs continue to fall.
And yet, giving into a sense of powerlessness is to abdicate what makes a life of writing so important. Poetry has been written in prisons, on the eve of one’s execution, in overflowing streets and deserted roads. I remember a writer telling me, “When I worked as a dishwasher, I wrote in my head.” Her words taught me that a life of writing demands resilience, purposefulness, and an attentiveness to the things that matter which can pierce apathy, obfuscation, and hopelessness. As long as one still finds themselves in this world, in relation to others—the work continues. May we collectively improvise worlds where the oppressed can live with and be enriched by poems, rather than just being turned into them.