Description:
The editors began to assemble this anthology following 9/11 at the start of the U.S. war on Afghanistan. It is a collection of poets whose writings are interactive with the current time, writing as its matter and syntax not separate from oppressive conditions and war. In enough, U.S. poets, British, Palestinian, Iraqi, Israeli, speak back and forth to each other only in the medium of their art. Most of the poems were written for this collection; the poets were taking on being in that moment/event (of an exchange unknown until it is a book, as well as being in those real-time events).

We are pleased to include Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Darwish and Nasri Hajjaj. The U.S. poets here include Beat generation poets Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger; New York School poets Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, Lisa Jarnot, Eileen Myles, and Bill Berkson; Language poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, P. Inman, Tina Darragh, Robert Grenier, Abigail Child, and Alan Davies; and others whose work is renowned: Nathaniel Mackey, Fanny Howe, Harryette Mullen, Murilo Mendes, Abdul Kader El Janabi, Tom Raworth, Etel Adnan, Jackson Mac Low, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Jalal Toufic. Some included are young presently forming the current language.
The editorial basis of enough is that these poets’ art is not separate from their being in the world — and that: Seeing what’s happening is a form of change.
—Editor Leslie Scalapino

A radical purpose of poetry in critical times is to disrupt the language of consensus, taking possible thought into a more intimate relation to life as anybody lives it, contradicting the fanfare of established power. And inventing new ways of making art reflects the rejection of hegemonic forces in the world.
Engaged art perceives that when the wounded speak they use the language of the wound.
The work gathered in this collection opens and extends these radical practices.
— Editor Rick London

“We are alone. We are alone to the point of drunkenness with our own aloneness,/with the occasional rainbow visiting...The prisoner said to the interrogator. ‘My heart is full/of that which is of no concern to you. My heart is full of the aroma of sage./My heart is innocent, radiant brimming...in the remains of dawn I walk outside of my own being...” Mahmoud Darwish. “This moment,/this second/cuts in be-/tween in two...” Pierre Joris. “THE CUPS WE DRINK FROM ARE THE SKULLS OF ARABS/AND THIS SILK IS THE SKIN OF BABIES...THE SOULS HAVE NO VALUE THEY ARE FOX FURS/THAT WE DRAPE OVER WELL-FED ARMS AND SHOULDERS...” Michael McClure. “Are you glutted yet, no there are other countries to vomit bombs out on, the sec of defence that is the every moment of cruelty, has a gleeful face, carnage who knows the new wind, there isn’t enough oil so...” Alice Notley. “Where, that which is interior side half rind, throughout, or half of a rind that’s no retina out ahead floating in it night meets black night is disintegrate cut savagely by them, not ignored—it’s reversed there and to, disintegrates—but suddenly she gets it that she doesn’t have to fight that which disintegrates it, her, lye, that one can just be near it, all the time beside it go on and on, without...” Leslie Scalapino. “A corpse the size of my body, turning into coal. Protecting the head between the shoulders. An impacted tooth. A wide forehead, and long fingers. A silver ring I inherited from my father, and the residue of burns suspended between my jaws. Waw turning over a dying ember, ta with a gouge in its belly and nun that has became a hearth for ashes [watan: homeland]...” Nasri Hajjaj. “so if I speak of blood across the tropics of Neptune/it is unfixed as regards historic detonation/but always merging with mirrors which glaciate & spin...” Will Alexander. “you mean guerrilla loose/weave in another language...” Heather Fuller. “It is perhaps lucky that the spoken word remains wild inside us, rushing and vanishing out of our bodies. Speech is not thought...is a form of breath” Fanny Howe

Book Review

enough! ed. Rick London and Leslie Scalapino
(O Books 2003)

by Laura Hinton

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper....
– W.W. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

One of poetry culture’s continuing debates is whether or not Auden was right – whether or not poetry can be a political act. The Bush administration’s war against Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of September 11, 2003, resurfaced this debate over the last two years, in internet and small-press productions that raised the verse clamor of anti-war protest. While Donald Rumsfeld and the military-industrial-corporate complex has been striking up the gleaming hardware of the U.S. war machine, the post-September 11th work of conflict resolution and peace has been left (abandoned) to the “soft” industry of poetry. And maybe that’s the kind of irony that rings true in Auden lines that many of us have missed.
Most well-publicized in this current anti-war poetry voice, was Sam Hamill’s internet site and book, Poets Against the War, which emerged initially as his RSVP refusal to First Lady Laura Bush’s invitation to attend a White House symposium on American poetry on the eve of Gulf War II. (The event was later cancelled). Taking off as a web site that soon grew to more than13,000 poems, the Poets Against the War print version came out in April, published by Nation Books. Meanwhile, other poetry collections were simultaneously emerging – perhaps with not as much mainstream media attention – filled with poems by some of America’s, and the world’s, most pre-eminent poets. These publications include Poets Against the War, edited by Todd Swift and published in England by Salt; Faber & Faber’s 101 Poems Against the War, widely available in United Kingdom and Irish bookstores; the Canadian anthology, A Common Sky; and Irish Poets Against the War. Such collections have either been stimulated by or have resulted in poetry readings of protest, from San Francisco to the steps of New York City’s public library to London.
enough!, edited by Rick London and Leslie Scalapino and published by Scalapino’s Oakland-based O Press, flooded out amidst the wave of poetry volumes last spring. But it has tried to do something different than be just another anti-war volume. It is, of course, that, too – an anti-war volume. But, inspired long before Gulf War II became a public reality when America went to war against Afghanistan following September 11th, enough! focuses not only the thematic “war is bad,” but also on the problem of the language we use to describe that thematic. It attempts to explore language’s complicity with war, in a process that observes the act of “seeing” as a more honest form of resistence, and investigates the problem of “seeing” in a language too often co-opted by other institutions. London’s and Scalapino’s stated goal in the book is to suggest a way that poetry might function as dissent -- but only by acknowledging, in Scalapino’s words, that “writing as its matter and syntax [are] not separate from oppressive conditions and war.”
Thus, one finds many of the poems in enough! reflective of different points of view, not static or rigid political and/or aesthetic stances. The poems collected here are not necessarily stating anti-war sentiments in a polarized rhetoric of good versus evil, or merely in images that disclose wartime horrors (although some poems do that, too). Collectively they “see what’s occurring,” in Scalapino’s suggestive expression, into the deeper drama of “the glazed reflecting in destroyed language,” which Scalapino reminds us is “propaganda.” One need not be a scholar of Julia Kristeva, and the notion of a “destroyed” language versus the well-spring of the semiotic, for readers of enough! to understand its critique of institutional language. And institutional language can also include contemporary poetry itself. London’s and Scalapino’s work in the volume has been to try to evade that institutional language as much as possible – and without arrogance or posturing. The collective works presented here attempt to revive a language that is not coercive, and not without self-consciousness but not participating in the glaze/gaze of traditional rhetoric and reporting.
It’s a beautifully arranged and produced volume, beginning with Abigail Child’s stunning cover art, “Tower of Babel,” which conflates a Tower of Babel image with the image of the World Trade Tower wreckage. And the selection of mostly vanguard poets represented here reflect the original approach and diversity of this volume to what is the contemporary vanguard:: from a couple legendary representatives of the “Beats”; to English translations of Arab, French, and Spanish poetry by Palestinian, Iraqi, and other Arab and Latin American writers; to British, Israeli, New York School and “Lang-Po” writers. Most of the poems were explicity written (and/or translated) for this collection – which in itself makes the collection a major contribution to modern poetry. One imagines many of the pieces written just after September 11 – throughout are images of things and bodies “coming down,” as in Charles Bernstein’s “Let’s Just Say”: “Let’s just say that every time you fall you never hit the ground....” The pull of heights, of towers, fill such poems (“Let’s just say that the top of a tower is not a good place to hide”), as in Nathaniel Mackey’s “Son of the Andoumbouloo: 58,” which conflates “the sky ... oddly fed,” with “Debris bumped our heads, rubble/hurt our feet,” a collective image of desolation, rubble and the body in pieces, in a language playfully rendering a new Lord’s Prayer: Fingerless, if not
Without hands, drew back from
treachery.
Nub the new kingdom come....
And other images invoke the fallen Trade Center as icon of meltdown, like Ed Robeson’s “Memorium”: “The cole marble/to marble behaved/as if it were liquid” – a language of “marble” wrought hard and yet blisteringly fragile in another context, in Diane Di Prima’s “Notes Towards a Poem of Revolution” that reads, perhaps, as one of the most directly damning (and controversial) critiques of the policies that lead to September 11, in lines:
The long fingers of
Impermanence
Touches us all & nobody
Can hog the marbles & expect
The others to play

Then there are the more displaced critiques of American global policies, such as in Brazilian expatriate poet Murilo Mendes’s “Christmas 1961", a witty revision of the nativity story posing as modern-day tale of a “bureaucratic operation – the census,” which dislocates “the Virgin and the carpenter” as they “approach Bethlehem” to face soldiers of Harod who “hand out radioactive food to all boys under the age of two....” (Mendes, who died in 1975, wrote his native Portuguese, as well as French and Italian, while living in France.) The inclusion of this poem is one of several example of poetry that crisscrosses modernity’s cultures and nationalist/linguistic boundaries, and which remind us that the issue raised by September 11 and the American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are not just local to our time and space. And a poem like Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Extasis” crisscrosses through the use of a word itself the language used to make a cultural critique. Traditional if stunning images of light and dark pervade this seemingly simple, dynamic poem: “When we stand dumbstruck/before the late sun slanting ... last light/pouring over us.” But the title word that this short piece a cascading series of linguistic frames that ring with more irony than the dark/light images could hope to construct. “Extasis” is Ferlinghetti’s a portmanteau word, suggestive of “extant” – to be visible, to exist (thus ironic when cast in the shadow of the World Trade Center rubble and the two wars it fermented;) and suggestive also of “stasis” – to remain standing, yet as a “stoppage of flow” (multiple ironies in that single word-image). Then there’s the homonymic if not etymological echo of “ecstatic” in “Extasis” as title term: that experience marked by ecstacy, or one that is subject to ecstasies (again, a brilliantly ironic stance, given the poem’s imagery and subject matter).
Other brilliant pieces published in enough! by Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Jarnot, Michael McClure, Scalapino and London themselves – there are too many strong artists here to all name – leave me ironically “ecstatic” with praise and yet strangely “mute” (in a state of “extasis”?), trying to summarize the effects of enough! The subject matter itself is often too troubling to even contemplate in this shimmering and yet deeply strange language used to “see” and “perceive” our tragic, historic events as they are unfolding before us, leaving the reader without conclusive thoughts or judgement or the feeling of “positive” political knowledge or the “right” action to take. It’s as if the problem Auden was raising is given tragic flesh and bones here in enough!. Poetry may generate words of protest in a semantic field of meaning. But words ironically survive “In the valley of its saying” – only. No matter how forceful or impassioned the sentiments expressed, words are words and remain in this tamed valley, unless used against themselves, used as a critique against language and the poetic traditions of narrative, imagery, verse form -- and the invention of words themselves.

Rusty Morrison

To Say “Enough”

Reading Adam Liptak’s NY Times exposé of the Treasury Department’s intention to make criminal the act of editing for publication the work of any writer, in any discipline, from any nation whose government is in US disfavor, I hear in my mind “enough!” Not only as response to this idea-embargo’s further encroachment upon our freedoms, but because the word enough (in lower case and sans my own exasperation expressed in punctuation) is title to a collection of writings that would most likely bring on the ire of the Treasury, as it allows for the open trade of ideas among writers from nations favored and disfavored, appropriately complicating many lines of political entrenchment.

In 2003, when the dangers of the Patriot Act were becoming blatantly apparent, I wrote about enough for the web site of Small Press Traffic, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Literary Arts Center at California College of Arts, which is itself a forum where controversial and diverse ideas are encouraged to flourish in physical and virtual conversation. Given the Treasury’s latest erosion of our freedom of speech, freedom of publication, I am grateful to Small Press Traffic and to Slope for allowing me to reiterate enough’s relevance.

Edited by Leslie Scalapino and Rick London, and published by O Books in 2003, it reads in 2004 as a prescient and myriad response to what seems an unabashed attempt by the Treasury to create an information vacuum. It is fertile with the kind of idea-variety and -variation that our government obviously considers varmint and would liken to fleas set loose upon those attempting to sleep under the Treasury Department’s blanket of repression.

On the back cover of enough, Scalapino explains that she and London began collecting this work "following 9/11 at the start of the US war on Afghanistan." Her choice of the word "following," which suggests chronology rather than cause, is aptly expressive of a project that intends neither a unified response to a single act nor acceptance of any proscriptive position. In fact, the only position the editors take is to propose that this anthology's "writings are interactive with the current time." Scalapino explains that what these contributors¾from Britain, the US, Palestine, Iraq, Israel¾share is the willingness to "tak[e] on being in that moment/event (of an exchange unknown until it is a book, as well as being in those real-time events)." And, as Rick London suggests, these writers also share a willingness to "contradict the fanfare of established power," though they do so without denying the complexity of competing values that such a position can unearth. With respect to individual pieces and to the aggregate of those pieces, enough might be described as a collection that questions with juxtaposition rather than answers with amalgamation. In reading through this collection a reader will find many illuminating, surprising connections. But the editors of enough have created an order which allows the various writings to rub hard against each other, sharpening the exposed edginess of experiences that will not coalesce into an easily summarized whole.

Contributions range in subject, scope, and referentiality, and include:

direct reportage of atrocity:
"the resulting vaccum sucking the building down and turning it into a buried graveyard. "
(Darwish 18);
metaphoric reflection, here, upon the inevitable insularities of subjectivity:
"a drop flees the ocean, becomes ocean" (El Janabi 75);
discursive analysis of event:
So this act was impossible to understand from any coherent point of view. It can only be
understood as a religious act, an act that strikes to the heart of religion's essence - the
sacrifice of like, the hurling it into the abyss of timelessness, toward God." (Fischer 111);
critical study, here exposing the insurmountable impediments to objectively expressing event:
"Karmel walks doubt into a furnace of gestural and physical details and leaves it there"
(Howe 115);
as well as many other means of expressing personal and political, as well as mimetic and non-mimetic forms of witness.

Despite this enormous diversity, this text constellates as text, perhaps because each of these pieces is held to the others by the gravity of their authors’ similarly courageous and irrepressible need to speak, to be heard in and among others. But their places in such a constellation are not fixed, and a reader will, in her active engagement with these writings, feel the constantly shifting movement as meanings re-order in relation to each next work read. The potential created by such diversity cannot be limited, and neither can a simple, comforting purpose be assigned to it.

As contributor Judith Goldman writes in her poem "The Real Devotion of Events": "no help whatever,/ which you take in hand to them/ you cannot be and are.// we are broken of the winged forms/ from which you have been gone/......the traps laid betray the traps you lay./ if we dreamed in the company/ of others and our dreams happen/ to agree. small// change. you/ can exceed it" (81-85).

The formal and contextual means used by these writers to address the present offer none of the comfort of uniformity. Instead, the reader is given a constantly reconstituting apprehension of event and an appreciation for the possibility that when "our dreams happen/ to agree. small// change. you/ can exceed it." Rather than comfort, one can take heart in the implicit suggestion that future isn't necessarily what we perceive from our limited vantage, but is more what Wittgenstein, in Culture and Value describes as: "a curve, constantly changing direction." Or, to quote Lyn Hejinian's "The Fatalist" from the pages of this collection, "The presences that constitute life do so by entering life/ and they do so infinitely" (55).

Of course, for some readers, such a view of future may be more frightening than heartening. Certainly, much was said in the popular media, immediately following 9/11, about the need for writing that would salve our dismay and unite us in our present experience and future purpose. Unfortunately, we have seen how difficult it is to cherish unity without demanding uniformity. And as the Treasury Department’s latest dictate demonstrates, uniformity is too easily predicated upon censorship.

Ed Friedman suggested in a talk given in '94 at St. Mark's Poetry Project, later published in Paradise & Method¾which is also a collection of essays united primarily by respect for difference and disruption¾that we must stay attentive to the ways we are drawn into compliant accord with currently accepted views. He emphasizes the point that everything we read can act upon us in this way: "We're supposed to be pulled in by literature, just like we're supposed to be absorbed in the social status quo... magnetism trains you. A worshipful, forgetful, unwitting magnetizing... we're up against a glamorizing of the already."

By bringing together these contributors' various, even contradictory means of addressing and disrupting the "already," the editors of enough not only demonstrate the aliveness of such alternative, but also offer readers ample opportunity to consider how many different “already”s may be present in the various literatures of writers writing today. Attention to such difference allows us to become sensitive to the ways that we each frame our relationship to these works, and our relationship to the "real-time" events that the authors of these works have witnessed. To use Friedman's terms, such awareness is essential in that it allows us to continually re-assess where we have unwittingly become magnetized, worshipful.

Yet it is very difficult to make such re-assessments. If we take the latest Treasury Department decisions as example, I have no doubt that we will find apathetic consensus among many US citizens who believe that there could be no real danger in any of the current policies. Since our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are foundational elements of democracy, which our officials are elected to protect, no government decision could be approved that might put these in jeopardy. Certainly many of the materials we find to read will corroborate this kind of mesmerizing forgetfulness, if I might borrow Friedman’s terms.

As George Lakoff, explains it, we can only make sense of our experiences by creating frames, holistic structures that we use to hold, and to hold together, all of our experience. Of course, many of these framing devices come from our sense of kinship with the communities, cultures, political systems in which we have become invested. It is an apt definition of ‘crisis’ to say that we suffer it when our most intimately accepted frames are disrupted¾be they the frames with which we shape our environment, our social group, our ideologies, our constitution of self. With every crisis comes the fearful necessity to admit to ourselves that we are indeed experiencing these disruptions. It can be a very painful experience to heighten our sensitivity to, and awareness of, these frames that we operate within¾questioning which ones remain useful and which must be discarded because events, experiences, realizations have made them uninhabitable.

Thus, it is exactly in periods of crisis that we need texts like enough, which not only ranges in content and context and formal approach across wide social, political, and geographic expanses, but also exposes to its readers the complex often contradictory ways that people frame similar experiences.

London and Scalapino's enough offers active, even uncomfortable awareness to its readers¾different, but distinctly related, to the active awareness that the contributors have brought to the act of writing. As Scalapino tells us "the editorial basis of enough is that these poets' art is not separate from their being in the world¾and that: Seeing what's happening is a form of change." Implicit in this statement is a respect for the changes that such seeing can bring about within a reader, as she attends to what is happening in and among the works in this collection, and an appreciation that this will impact her own changing relationship to our changing world.

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Excerpt

Joanne Kyger

DEEPLY IMMORAL ARROGANT AND IGNORANT

For this you get a degree in the government
of My World My Rules
Here’s some of the buzz words –
Foolhardy and Inexplicable

The current president has been called
‘a craven coward’
by the female senator from California
and it’s only May 2001!

And now still
almost a Constant Sense of Outrage
Corporate capitalist oligarchies own the war
Feel Terrified? The ‘war’

Can go where it wants, when it wants
with bizarre expansions
Endless war fear hysterias. Great

There is NEVER an end to profit. There is NEVER enough
There are no ‘acceptable losses’ when it means more ‘money’

There is no end to profit There is NEVER enough
That said again, do we enumerate the stunningly horrible

‘My Way or No Way’ direction of the Bushies
in the world
and start gnashing teeth and going ga-ga

But there’s the voice of the ‘people’ isn’t there?
I hear articulate political observation
that hasn’t collapsed into goofy anxious patriotism
that informs and lifts the veil of secrecy

‘The state of the union is none of your business’
says the Vice

Evil Terrorism or Live Rebellion?
always just out of reach except for the kid from Marin

Terrorist weather yesterday heavy frost and snow
collateral damage to the lemons
and baby Bok Choy

But what about all the hot air produced?
At least I enumerate with outrage
At least I must articulate
At least I know what’s wrong

Read the Tao
February 27, 2002

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Lisa Jarnot

Swamp Formalism
for Donald Rumsfeld

As if they were not men,
amphibious, gill-like, with
wings, as if they were
sunning on the rocks, in a
new day, with their flickered
lizard tongues, as if they were
tiny and biting and black,
as if I was a hero or they were,
as if the they and these us that
arrived, out of the same blue
ground bogs, as if from my
bog that I saw the sun and
swam up to the surface, as if
the surface was shining, like a
lizard to embrace, as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat,
as if I didn’t kill the plants, the
water, and the air, as if the
fruit and the sheep were all
diamond shaped and melted,
allowing in the sun, underground,
crowned, in shadows, in the
main dust, from the self same
main dust spring.

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My Terrorist Notebook

This is the beginning of my terrorist notebook all terrorism
all the time. I would have had to blow up the World Trade Center
to get anyone’s attention when I was a kid. I’m tired of being nice.
Nice is out. I want to live in a cave with Osama and sleep on the floor
of the cave by myself. I want to poke people's eyes out with their
cell phone antennas. Maybe I would feel better if I exercised more.
Pretty soon I will run out of money and that will be the end of my
terrorist activities. We have a situation here, we terrorists, in our caves,
blowing up the rest of the many muddy mouses, swinging by their
mousie tails over the heads of the mousie moms under the muddy
mousie moon, don¹t move, and watch the mousie moon, you mom of
mouse, now watch the mousie moon.
The United States of America

I’m going to ask you to transition into a new theme about
the war. The thing that comes to mind now is the war:
the big war, the little war, the war that’s in my head,
the war around the edges of my ears, the war to kill
the troops, the war to kill the cows, the transitional war,
the bloody war, the not-bloody war, the semi-bloody war,
the figure of the neighborhood with war, running toward
the herds of cattle in the war, not good at war, awash in war,
the war-to-mores, the more and more to war.

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Michael McClure

BLACK DAHLIA

THE CUPS WE DRINK FROM ARE THE SKULLS OF ARABS
AND THIS SILK IS THE SKIN OF BABIES.
THE FROTHING ON OUR CHINS
IS NOT RABIES NOR ARE OUR FINGERNAILS
GOLDEN SCARABS.
WE’RE NORMAL HUMAN ANIMALS
AND WE ITCH LIKE SCABIES
FOR THE RAPE OF THINGS.
It is ordinary and beautiful
to have the duty
to twist and tease
the lovely glimmering light
we see in things.

Then one day we look about
and hope to put it back
inside,
where once was fresh foam or moss.

But we’ve made a cross
of wings of birds and butterflies
and it cannot lift off the ground
or push into the soil.
-Where there was a perfume smell
of mulch
now there’s the stink of oil
turned inside out,
and finger prints of brightness
gone away.

What
will
we
say
to
all
the
singing
realms
that
try
to
rise
inside
of
us
?

(grahhr)

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SOULS for Ernesto Cardenal

SOULS HAVE NO VALUE THEY ARE FOX FURS
THAT WE DRAPE OVER WELL-FED ARMS AND SHOULDERS
BUT STILL THEY ARE HARD EARNED AND LONG SOUGHT
BY THOSE WITH THE LUXURY AND ENERGY
TO TORMENT AND TO LOVE THEM INTO BEING!!
STILL
WE ARE WARM STONES
and we smell ourselves
in the screeching
R R
A A
I I
N N
Of cluster bombs on Iraq.

SOULD HAVE NO WORTH
except red splatters on walls and gobbets
of meat and fox furs.

YO, NOT ME!
says the lithe cherub on his skateboard
tearing open a high protein bar.

NOT ME
says the sweaty chicken
as her beak is snipped off at the factory farm.

Not me
says the antibiotic heaved into the pig feed
with sheep carcasses and blood-clotted paper
from the slaughter house floors.

WHAT ARE SOULS WHEN
SMALL WARS,
ARE
THE
ART FORM
OF
PRESIDENTS
?

! !
!

grahhr

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MADAME SECRETARY

IN THE BEDROOM,
THEIR STARVING FACES AND BIG-SOULED EYES
SLIDE AT THE EDGES OF TELEVISION.
WHAT MIRACLES OF FIREARMS AND MACHETES
ALLOW CHILDREN TO MORPH
INTO VEIN-BURSTING, BULGE-CHESTED HEROES
PUTTING DARK FEET
ON LAND MINES?

Now,
A fat woman,
the Secretary of Deceit,
cuddles a child amputee
to her breasts and croons
of the need
for democracy to flourish.
I AM AWED
by her demon face
at it leans out,
teetering
and falls from the glass-fronted
plastic box
and crashes with a squeak
on the floor
spreading in a scarlet pool.

Grahhr

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Mahmoud Darwish – Ramallah – January, 2202

from: A State of Siege

Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope

In a land where the dawn sears
we have become more doltish
and we stare at the moments of victory
there is no starry night in our nights of explosions
our enemies stay up late, they switch on the lights
in the intense darkness of this tunnel

Here after the poems of Job, we wait no more

This siege will persist until we teach our enemies
models of our finest poetry

the sky is leaden during the day
and a fiery orange at night… but our hearts
are as neutral as the flowery emblems on a shield

here, not “I”
Here, Adam remembers the clay of which he was born

He says, on the verge of death, he says,
“I have no more earth to lose”
Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own hands
In a few moments, I will begin my life
born free of father and mother
I will chose letters of sky blue for my name

Under siege, life is the moment between remembrance
of the first moment, and forgetfulness of the last

here, under the mountains of smoke, on the threshold of my home,
time has no measure
We do what those who give up the ghost do…
we forget our pain

Pain is when the housewife forsakes hanging up the clothes to dry and is content
that this flag of Palestine should be without stain

The soldiers measure the space between being and nothingness
with field-glasses behind a tank’s armoury

We measure the space between our bodies and the coming rockets
with our sixth sense alone

You there, by the threshold of our door
Come in, and sip with us our Arabic coffee
[you may even feel that you are human, just as we are]
you there, by the threshold of our door
take your rockets away from our mornings
we may then feel secure
[and almost human]

I wrack my head, but uselessly.
What can someone like me think of, there,
on the tip of the hillside, for the past 3 thousand years,
and in this passing moment?
My thoughts slay me
my memory awakens me

A satirical writer said to me:
If I knew the end of the story at the very beginning
there would be nothing to laugh about!

[To a killer:] If you reflected upon the face
of the victim you slew, you would have remembered your mother in the room
full of gas. You would have freed yourself
of the bullet’s wisdom,
and changed your mind: ‘I will never find myself thus.’

The siege is lying in wait.
It is lying in wait on a tilted stairway
in the midst of a storm.

We are alone. We are alone to the point
of drunkenness with our own aloneness,
with the occasional rainbow visiting.

We have brothers and sisters overseas..
kind sisters, who love us..
who look our way and weep.
And secretly they say
“I wish that siege was here, so that I could…”
But they cannot finish the sentence.
Do not leave us alone. No.
Do not leave us alone.

Our losses are between two and eight a day.
And ten are wounded.
Twenty homes are gone.
Forty olive groves destroyed,
in addition to the structural damage
afflicting the veins of the poem, the play,
and the unfinished painting.

In the alleyway, lit by an exiled lantern,
I see a refugee camp at the crossroads of the winds.
The south rebels against the wind.
The east is a west turned religious.
The west is a murderous truce minting the coinage of peace.
As for the north, the distant north,
it is not a place or a geographical vicinity.
It is the conference of heavenly divinity.

A woman said to a cloud: cover my dear one,
for my clothes are wet with his blood.

If you are not rain, o dear one,
then be a tree,
fertile and verdant. Be a tree.
And if not a tree, o dear one
be a stone
laden with dew. Be a stone.
And if not a stone, o dear one,
be the moon itself
in the dreams of she who loves you. Be the moon itself.
[thus a woman said
to her son, in his funeral]

A little of the infinite blue
suffices
to reduce the burden of our times
and cleanse the mud from this place right now

He asks her, “What kind of flower is your favorite?”
She says, “The carnation. The black carnation.”
He asks her, “And where will you take me, with those black carnations?”
She says, “To the abyss of life within me.”
She says, “Further, further, further.”

This siege will endure until the besiegers feel, like
the besieged
that anger
is an emotion like any other.

“I don’t love you. I don’t hate you,”
The prisoner said to the interrogator. “My heart is full
of that which is of no concern to you. My heart is full of the aroma of sage.
My heart is innocent, radiant, brimming.
There is no time in the heart for tests. No.
I do not love you. Who are you that I may give my love to you?
Are you part of my being? Are you a coffee rendezvous?
Are you the wind of the flute, and a song, that I may love you?
I hate imprisonment. But I do not hate you.”
Thus a prisoner said to the investigator. “My feelings are not your concern.
My emotions are my own private night…
my night which moves from bed to bed free of rhyme
and of double meanings!

We sat far from our destinies, like birds
which build their nests in cracks in statues
or in chimneys, or in tents
erected on the prince’s path at the time of the hunt

Under siege, time becomes a location
solidified eternally
Under siege, place becomes a time
abandoned by past and future

The dead besiege me with every new day
and ask me, “Where were you? Give back
to the lexicon all the words
you offered me
and let the sleepers sleep without phantoms in their dreams!

The dead besiege me. “I have only changed my place of abode and my furnishings.
The deer now walk on my bedroom’s roof
and the moon warms the ceiling from the pain
thus putting an end to my pain
to put an end to my wailing.”

in the remains of the dawn I walk outside of my own body
in the remains of the night I hear the footsteps of my own being

The siege is transforming me from a singer
to a sixth string on a five string violin

Quiet, quiet, for the soldiers need
at this hour to listen to the songs
which the dead resisters had listened to, and have remained
like the smell of coffee, in their blood, fresh

Writing is a small ant which bites extinction.
Writing is a bloodless wound.

Our cups of coffee, and the birds, and the green trees
with the blue shade, and the sun leaping from wall
to wall like a doe
and the waters in the skies of infinite shapes, in what is left to us
of sky…and other matters the memory of which has been put on hold
prove that this morning is strong and beautiful
and that we are guests of evermore

Translated by Ramsis Amun
Selected passages excerpted by Rick London

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(from: Memory For Forgetfulness – August, Beirut, 1982, Edited and translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, copyright c. 1995, The Regents of The University of California.)

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Fanny Howe
Little Wrongs

When the cold-blooded are proved right -
judgment secure - case complete
we will first see a tangle
of close-ups - gourd and gold

and apples still rotten
rugosa roses down to three petals only
and each holocaust will be an ant-heap


All the little wrongs will come into focus

But who will be glad about this?
. . .

Even the bigamists
who thought they were splitting
each lie into fragments
too small to be located

might find their trail is following them

And the short-sighted whose faces
are a blur of glee
may begin to establish shapes
around pockets of light and air
in the thicket they are part of

but they won't sense the force
that gathers those shapes
into actual consequence
until they themselves can't go forward

And neither will the hesitant
experience their weakness
as an ability
until it gathers into a body
of uncertainties that has influence

When the one big cruelty comes down on us
out of a seeming emptiness

it will be a helium packed with the force
of freely given evasions

so if some still believe
that the cold-blooded alone are responsible
for this power
how will they show that it came from elsewhere

Nothing has increased

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Alice Notley
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