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Carmella de Keyser @carmellapoetry.bsky.social · Aug 28

THE MADRID REVIEW🌍Poems for Palestine. Launches today.
@madridlitmag.bsky.social
🕊️Edited by🕊️
JAMES HARTLEY & HAIA MOHAMMED🕊️
Read it - it's moving, defiant & important. 💔
Here below is my poem 'THE SAPLING TESTIMONY' 🤍 Thank you to James Hartley & Haia Mohammed.🙏🏻
themadridreview.com/f/the-madrid...

The Madrid Review, Editor James Hartley - Poems for the people of Palestine and Ukraine

The Sapling Testimony by Carmella de Keyser

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Creative Writing at NEIU @neiu-cw.bsky.social · Aug 28

To Write Poetry After Gaza is a Necessity

Translators’ note:All the translations of the poems cited in the following essay are by us. This is partly for consistency’s sake, and partly in tribute to the spirit of (re-)translation that perme…

lithub.com

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Jenevieve Carlyn @coastalpoet.bsky.social · Aug 28

A poem for Palestine about something I witnessed in March 2024. It left such an impression, I told a friend about it the first time we spoke. In fact, it was the reason we spoke, as I wanted to tell someone and knew they'd understand. Thank you for this beautiful issue, @madridlitmag.bsky.social ❤️‍🩹 🇵🇸

TRAVELER'S PRAYER
JENEVIEVE CARLYN

I couldn't tell you where I was going that day.

No, I was going to see my father, it was snowing.
On the news, gray ash was falling elsewhere from the sky.

Through the windshield, I saw a man on the overpass holding a Palestinian flag and a cardboard sign

that said GENOCIDE. It was absolutely freezing
and he was all alone.

I honked my car horn, a fleeting gesture of solidarity
then I was gone. Thought of his family, We the People,

the complicity of the government which had designed this
highway to move troops between the city and the sea.

One late American summer, I saw a man kneeling beside
a floodlight in the parking lot at a rest stop, facing east.

Trucks rushing past, no prayer mat, nothing between him
and the concrete. His children, also praying beneath the stars.

An invisible geography, a gateway to the great beyond—
the Atlantic, Mecca, Gaza, a place that he called home.

To inhabit this world this life this body as completely
as this man on this night on his knees before his God.

If there is a universal sound of prayer, let it be the silence
of every bomb halted, each scream transmuted into peace.

The Madrid Review's Poems for Palestine (Issue 5)

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 25

To all who read, commented, & shared the poems in this series, & to the poets who contributed to a new project without knowing exactly how it might unfold: thank you. The 12th poem is now posted in the archive, this account is a resource for articles, & there may also be an essay or two in the fall.

Poetry of Witness (@poetryofwitness.bsky.social)

'We Are the Chorus: Poetry of Witness' A collaborative project to encourage conversation, inquiry, & action. Creating an online archive with 12 poems of protest & witness. Sharing 2 poems a week: p...

poetryofwitness.bsky.social

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Merril D. Smith @merrildsmith.bsky.social · Aug 24

Thank you to @poetryofwitness.bsky.social for sharing my #poem "Emerging from the Penumbra" first published by @chaossectionpoetry.bsky.social #PoetryOfResistance

Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

Calling for freedom from fear and coercion, and for the safety and security of lives under threat, a poem of dissent that continues to resonate in the U.S. and beyond by @merrildsmith.bsky.social.

Emerging from the Penumbra

By Merril D. Smith

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Lucy Heuschen (she/her) @petitecreature1.bsky.social · Aug 20

I would love someone to write a poetry book about Jayaben Desai and the women of Grunwick. I would read that book in a heartbeat. We need their courage and their voices more than ever.

Women's History Network @womenshistnet.bsky.social · Aug 20

#OTD 20 August 1976, a group of mainly South Asian workers led by Jayaben Desai, walked out in protest against their treatment at the Grunwick photo processing factory. The dispute became a critical moment for trade unionism and social change.
#GenderHist
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-...

Jayaben Desai and the Grunwick dispute

In August 1976, a group of migrant workers led by Jayaben Desai walked out of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory in the London Borough of Brent. Taking a stand against racism, low pay and limited...

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

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Matterist Books @matteristbooks.bsky.social · Aug 23

Ilya Kaminsky on Discovering Poetry as a Deaf Child in Ukraine

This essay comes from Owning It: Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words, out now from Faber US, the definitive anthology for children on what it’s like to grow up disabled, featuring twenty-two a…

lithub.com

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David Willoughby @davidwilloughby.bsky.social · May 27

French-Tunisian-Moroccan journalist & filmmaker Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us' is vital and rousing documentary which examines the troubled situation in Sudan from ground level, while nodding to country’s rich literary history. Poetry recitations have never been this... riotous. #SudanRememberUs

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ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly @arablit.bsky.social · Jun 18

Armed with October: Thawra and Poetry, from Khartoum to Toronto

Here, Khaldah Salih and Fathima Cader interweave a translation of “October Al Akhdar” with their reflections on the lessons that historic and ongoing struggle in Sudan provide for liberation struggles everywhere.

Armed with October: Thawra and Poetry, from Khartoum to Toronto

Here, Khaldah Salih and Fathima Cader interweave a translation of “October Al Akhdar” with their reflections on the lessons that historic and ongoing struggle in Sudan provide for liberation struggles everywhere.

arablit.org

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Jenevieve Carlyn @coastalpoet.bsky.social · Aug 24

'Who writes the elegy
when the future dies unseen?'

Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

‘No flags fly over this battlefield,
only logos,
empires built on zeros and ones’

An elegiac poem that questions what is at stake when societies become dictated by greed and the machine, written by Dermot Murphy @fiftywords.bsky.social.

Modern Sacrifice

Dermot Murphy

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Jenevieve Carlyn @coastalpoet.bsky.social · Aug 24

And for the protection of all lives including immigrants, as it was inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

Calling for freedom from fear and coercion, and for the safety and security of lives under threat, a poem of dissent that continues to resonate in the U.S. and beyond by @merrildsmith.bsky.social.

Emerging from the Penumbra

By Merril D. Smith

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

‘No flags fly over this battlefield,
only logos,
empires built on zeros and ones’

An elegiac poem that questions what is at stake when societies become dictated by greed and the machine, written by Dermot Murphy @fiftywords.bsky.social.

Modern Sacrifice

Dermot Murphy

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

Calling for freedom from fear and coercion, and for the safety and security of lives under threat, a poem of dissent that continues to resonate in the U.S. and beyond by @merrildsmith.bsky.social.

Emerging from the Penumbra

By Merril D. Smith

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Jenevieve Carlyn @coastalpoet.bsky.social · Aug 24

Visiting w/ family tonight to escape my apt a bit. Recognizing the incongruity of reading these in a situation far removed from extremity, but excerpts now posted for 'Against Forgetting' (full intro: tinyurl.com/2skuc2tw). Recommend the audio for Milosz' book, as it's based on his 1981-82 lectures.

Reading the book, 'Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness,' edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché

Cover of the book 'The Witness of poetry' by Czeslaw Milosz

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 24

"In such a world, poetry will yearn after truth through indirection—will speak, in the terms Jabès used to describe Celan, in wounded words."

Excerpts from Intro to 'Against Forgetting: 20th-Century Poetry of Witness,' ed. by Carolyn Forché (W.W. Norton, 1993)

Full text here: tinyurl.com/2skuc2tw

I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the back of the neck. That's how you too will end,
I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.
Patience now flowers into death.
Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.
On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.

This verse describes the death of his fellow prisoner Miklós Lorsi, a violinist, & remains the only trace of his dying. Miklós Radnót's poems evade easy categories.... not merely personal, nor are they, strictly speaking, political. What is one to make of the first lines of "Forced March"?
The man who, having collapsed, rises, takes steps, is insane; he'll move an ankle, a knee, an errant mass of pain, & take to the road again...
The poem becomes an apostrophe to a fellow marcher so it is not only a record of experience but exhortation & plea against despair. It is not a cry for sympathy but a call for strength. The hope that the poem relies on, however, is not "political," not a celebration of solidarity in the name of a class or common enemy. It opposes the dream of future satisfaction to the reality of current pain. One could argue it uses the promise of personal happiness against a politically induced misery, but it does so in a spirit of communality.
We know the atrocities in the last 100 years. Such monstrous acts have come to seem almost normal. It becomes easier to forget than remember; this forgetfulness becomes our defense against remembering: a rejection of unnecessary sentimentality, a hardheaded acceptance. Modernity, as 20th-C German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno argued, is marked by a superstious worship of oppressive force & concomitant reliance on oblivion. Such forgetfulness is willful & isolating: it drives wedges between the individual & collective fate to which he or she is forced to submit...How do these poems remind us? Holocaust survivor Paul Celan's "Todesfugue" warns us the poem will not represent the world "directly."

If religion can provide a countersolidarity to the enforced communalism of the Stalinist era, it can also lend meaning to desperate experiences. The death of the son in Akhmatova's poem becomes a form of crucifixion: the apparent meaninglessness of terror is transfigured when it is mapped onto the story of Christ's Passion.
Furthermore, it transforms that story by giving a special place to the Virgin Mary. Akhmatova's poem enters into a discreet dialogue w/ Christianity, a mutually informing interchange of meaning & pathos that indicates an enduring place for the explanatory possibility of religion: its ability to speak about us & to include us.
In countries where religion has been more firmly institutionalized, more central to the workings of the state, its conventions could provide an ironic counterpoint to the official version of extreme events. Wilfred Owen, himself killed in WWI, writes an anthem, a hymn of national praise & victory, for "doomed youth." Bells rung for the newly dead, prayers, candles: all the ritual accounterments of mourning have been superseded by realities of modern warfare:

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Not any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells

The dead are mourned not by human song, but by the cacophony of new technologies & armaments. The comforts of religion seem to have no place in this poem. They only remind us of the lack of comfort of the present.
Religion in an age of atrocity, as Owen's anthem indicates, can itself bear a heavy responsibility for suffering. For Owen, the difficulty arises from the marriage of religion and the state, of the belligerent and nationalistic aspect of the very notion of the anthem itself. For other writers, religious qualms arise from the sheer prevalence of evil in this century, from the assault on theodicy that genocide, torture, & imposed misery present. This is perhaps most evident in the writings of Jewish poets, like Paul Celan...

Irony, paradox, & surrealism, for all the interpretive difficulties they present, might well be the answer & restatement of Adorno's oft quoted & difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno wrote this just after World War II, & his indictment extends to all forms of art. Art, Adorno felt, rested on the social inequities & objectifying tendencies that made Fascism not only possible but inevitable. Auschwitz, then, was contiguous with all the ornaments of Western art, for it stood as the culmination of culture where culture turned into its opposite. While the language of the everyday might appeal to Hikmet and Radnóti, it may not present an adequate language for witness in situations where the quotidian has been appropriated by oppressive powers. The colonization of language by the state renders that language inaccessible to a poetry that wants to register its protest against such depredations. The accepted languages of art might not be adequate either, for the sphere of art is frequently the first to be at-tacked: Hitler banished the work of the expressionists & celebrated Wagner. Socialist realism displaced all other forms of aesthetic expression under Stalinism.
The ultimate example of the cross-fertilization of culture& barbarity took place at Auschwitz, where Jews were forced to play chamber music for their executioners. Art in such a world carries with it a dangerous complicity which it can neither refute nor ignore. Adorno did not wish to banish art from an ideal republic. He wanted art to become conscious of the sins it had to suffer & withstand. A better expression of his understanding of the task of poetry comes in an aphorism from his book Minima Moralia:
.. there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, &...holding fast to the possibility of what is better.
In such a world poetry will yearn after truth through indirection...will speak...in wounded words...

For decades, American literary criticism has sought to oppose "man" & "society," individual against communal, alterity against universality. Perhaps we can learn from the practice of the poets in this anthology that these are not oppositions based on mutual exclusion but are rather dialectical complementaries. Extremity is born of the simplifying desire to split these dyads into separate parts. It is the product of the drive to expunge one category in the name of another, to sacrifice the individual on the altar of the communal or vice versa. The poetry of witness is itself born in dialectical opposition to the extremity that has made such witness necessary. In the process, it restores the dynamic structure of dialectics.

Because the poetry of witness marks a resistance to false attempts at unification, it will take many forms. It will be impassioned or ironic. It will speak in the language of the common man or in an esoteric language of paradox or literary privilege. It will curse & it will bless; it will blaspheme or ignore the holy. Its protest might rest on an odd grammatical inversion, on a heady peroration to an audience, or on a bizarre flight of fancy. It can be partisan in a limited sense but more often...speaks for..."the party of humanity"... I am guided in this by Hannah Arendt's meditation on the self-justifications of collaboration with oppression, on the claim that the resistance of the single individual does not count in the face of the annihilating superiority of totalitarian regimes which make all resistance disappear into "holes of oblivion":

The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect & there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story....the lesson of such stories is simple & w/in everyone's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most will comply but some will not..."

Resistance to terror...makes the world habitable...

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 21

“I often think back to the secure time of my childhood. I grew up with the scents of jasmine and geranium in my garden. I have planted those things here to try to recreate a sense of home.”

Beth Brooke @bethbpoet.bsky.social · Aug 21

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I'm a legal refugee in Britain. So why am I always being treated like a criminal? | Ayman Alhussein

I’ve met wonderful people here who make me feel that I belong – but there are now many who see asylum seekers as an easy political target, says film-maker Ayman Alhussein

www.theguardian.com

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

It's really true. Such strong poems, too.

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

This poem has origins in #PoemsAbout #Waxtears from @thebrokenspine.co.uk

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

‘until even her workers’ screaming wings / grow silent’

Tackling extreme heat and the climate crisis, a powerful ecopoem by @ignorantfairy.bsky.social 🔥

Colony Collapse

By Matthias Geh

poetryofwitness.substack.com

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

“Bless the eyes of this land, for they witness cruelty and kindness in this land... Bless us, these lands... These lands aren’t our lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land.”

Bless This Land, by Joy Harjo

“Bless the ears of this land, for they hear cries of heartbreak / and shouts of celebration in this land,” from “Bless This Land,” by Joy Harjo

worldliteraturetoday.org

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Anna Goodall @annagoodall.bsky.social · Aug 13

'Known as hibakusha in Japan, the survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only people in the world with firsthand experience of the horrors of nuclear warfare' ...

How a Japanese museum project is passing on the testimony of the last atomic bomb survivors

As numbers of atomic bomb survivors decline, can such deeply personal, traumatic memories truly be passed on to someone who did not live through them?

theconversation.com

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Stephen West @stephenwest.bsky.social · Apr 16

"Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?"

W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" 🗃️

Snip from Du Bois, "The propaganda of History" The closing chapter of black reconstruction in America

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

"The great thing about it wasn’t the garden; it was that you could look out in all directions & watch the owl come over the valley in the evening…I wanted both the garden & the forest. I wanted the garden to be the forest.”

From the documentary "Witness: The Ecological Poetry of W.S. Merwin” (1997)

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

“I always wanted a garden, & once I’d begun one, I always felt deprived without it. When I was in the country, sometimes I missed the city… but when I was in the city, I missed the country all the time. I missed the garden all the time. The garden & the wild. We’re three miles from the rainforest.”🧵

Witness: The Ecological Poetry of W.S. Merwin by Larry Cameron and John Carpenter - Merwin Conservancy

Witness: The Ecological Poetry of W.S. Merwin,” is a documentary film by Larry Cameron and John Carpenter about the emergence of W.S. Merwin’s environmental consciousness. In this film made in 1997 at...

merwinconservancy.org

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Poetry of Witness @poetryofwitness.bsky.social · Aug 20

"Human-centered witnessing is now coming into question. Climate crisis and pandemic have led to a heightened sense of human fragility and ecological interconnectedness. Witnessing beyond the human... holds the possibility of greater empathy for other species." 🌿

Witnessing Beyond the Human* - ECPS

Hart, Heidi (2021). “Witnessing Beyond the Human.” Populism & Politics. May 28, 2021. European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS).

www.populismstudies.org

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