Civil Service, Claire Schwartz
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Hala Alyan, “Naturalized”
The poem was published in Jewish Currents on October 20th and introduced by Claire Schwartz:
Hala Alyan’s poem “Naturalized” opens with a question: “Can I pull the land from me like a cork?” A question presumes and accommodates a multiplicity of responses; it is, as the poet Jos Charles says, “a program for contradictions to emerge.” In Alyan’s poem, the horrifically divergent matter of the world—brunch and marigolds and Vice and genocide—commingles, not only globally, but also in the speaker herself, who summons her father and thinks of Gaza, even as she wonders about the frivolity of her own life: “Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.” But if the speaker is critical of her own consumption, she is also attuned to the ways she is consumed—her position as a diaspora Palestinian in empire’s transnational scheme means that she, too, is flattened to a form easily metabolized: “They like me. They like me in a museum.” Near the poem’s end, questions return, this time in rapid succession, as though struggling to reopen space for the irreconcilable: “Tell me, Tell me, / what op-ed will grant the dead their dying? / What editor? What red-line? What pocket?” But in the poem’s final line, the question mark falls out even as the syntax persists, the interrogative what transformed into declaration, testimony, indictment. There is no out from here, there are no two ways. There is only the fact of the world, refusing to be folded back into itself. Now what will you do with it?
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favourite poems of july
knar gavin strindberg grey
dahlia ravikovitch the love of an orange (tr. chana bloch)
danez smith summer, somewhere
hannah gamble your invitation to a modest breakfast: “your invitation to a modest breakfast”
claire schwartz lecture on the history of the house
joseph brodsky collected poems in english, 1972-1999: “a part of speech”
ralph angel twice removed: “alpine wedding”
bob hicok insomnia diary: “spirit ditty of no fax-line dial tone”
caleb klaces language is her caravan
philip good & bernadette mayer alternating lunes
hester knibbe light-years (tr. jacquelyn pope)
tracy k. smith life on mars: “the universe as primal scream”
rigoberto gonzález other fugitives and other strangers: “the strangers who find me in the woods”
stephen edgar murray dreaming
james schuyler other flowers: uncollected poems: “light night”
amy beeder because our waiters are hopeless romantics
diane seuss backyard song
tomás q. morín love train
safiya sinclair the art of unselfing
carol muske-dukes skylight: “the invention of cuisine”
peter gizzi the outernationale: “vincent, homesick for the land of pictures”
william matthews selected poems and translations, 1969-1991: “onions”
c.k. williams butcher
mark mccloskey the smell of the woods
jennifer chang the age of unreason
richard blanco city of a hundred fires: “contemplations at the virgin de la caridad cafeteria, inc.”
bob hicock the pregnancy of words
j. allyn rosser impromptu
carl phillips then the war
stephanie young ursula or university: “essay”
gloria e. anzaldúa the new speakers
kofi
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Cross-Examination, Claire Schwartz
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Claire Schwartz, Lecture on the History of the House
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Civil Service, Claire Schwartz
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You have been chosen to carry the heaviest thing.
Claire Schwartz
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claire schwartz lecture on the history of the house
support me
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