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“The Jewish voice must be heard, not because it's more right or less right, but it's there. The suffering is there, the grief is there, and human grief is human grief.” As Jews around the world mark Tisha B'Av, we're joined by Columbia University professor and award-winning poet Owen Lewis, whose new collection, “A Prayer of Six Wings,” offers a powerful reflection on grief in the aftermath of October 7th. In this conversation, Lewis explores the healing power of poetry in the face of trauma, what it means to be a Jewish professor in today's campus climate, and how poetry can foster empathy, encourage dialogue, and resist the pull of division. *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: Untold stories of Jews who left or were driven from Arab nations and Iran People of the Pod: Latest Episodes: An Orange Tie and A Grieving Crowd: Comedian Yohay Sponder on Jewish Resilience From Broadway to Jewish Advocacy: Jonah Platt on Identity, Antisemitism, and Israel Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War: The Dinah Project's Quest to Hold Hamas Accountable Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Transcript of the Interview: Owen Lewis: Overheard in a New York Restaurant. I can't talk about Israel tonight. I know. I can't not talk about Israel tonight. I know. Can we talk about . . . Here? Sure. Let's try to talk about here. Manya Brachear Pashman: On Saturday night, Jews around the world will commemorate Tisha B'av. Known as the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, the culmination of a three week period of mourning to commemorate several tragedies throughout early Jewish history. As a list of tragedies throughout modern Jewish history has continued to grow, many people spend this day fasting, listening to the book of Lamentations in synagogue, or visiting the graves of loved ones. Some might spend the day reading poetry. Owen Lewis is a Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University. But he's also the award-winning author of four poetry collections which have won accolades, including the EE Cummings Prize and the Rumi Prize for Poetry. His most recent collection, A Prayer of Six Wings documents in verse his grief since the October 7 terror attacks. Owen is with us now to talk about the role of poetry in times of violence and war, what it's been like to be a Jewish professor on the Columbia campus, and a Jewish father with children and grandchildren in Israel. And also, how to keep writing amid a climate of rising antisemitism. Owen, welcome to People of the Pod. Owen Lewis: Thank you so much, Manya. Manya Brachear Pashman: So you opened with that short poem titled overheard in a New York restaurant. I asked you to read that because I wanted to ask whether it reflected how you felt about poetry after October 7. Did you find yourself in a place where you couldn't write about Israel, but yet you couldn't not write about Israel? Owen Lewis: Among the many difficult things of that First Year, not only the war, not only the flagrant attacks on the posters of the hostages one block from where I live, 79th and Broadway, every day, taken down every day, put back up again, defaced. It was as if the war were being fought right here on 79th and Broadway. Another aspect that made this all so painful was watching the artistic and literary world turn against Israel. This past spring, 2000 writers and artists signed a petition, it was published, there was an oped about it in The Times, boycotting Israeli cultural institutions. And I thought: artists don't have a right to shut their ears. We all need to listen to each other's grief, and if we poets and artists can't listen to one another, what do we expect of statesmen? Statesmen, yeah, they can create a ceasefire. That's not the same as creating peace. And peace can only come when we really listen to each other. To feel ostracized by the poetry community and the intellectual community was very painful. Fortunately, last summer, as well as this past summer, I was a fellow at the Yetzirah conference. Yetzirah is an organization of Jewish American poets, although we're starting to branch out. And this kind of in-gathering of like-minded people gave me so much strength. So this dilemma, I can't talk about it, because we just can't take the trauma. We can't take hearing one more thing about it, but not talk about it…it's a compulsion to talk about it, and that's a way to process trauma. And that was the same with this poetry, this particular book. I feel in many ways, it just kind of blew through me, and it was at the same time it blew through me, created this container in which I could express myself, and it actually held me together for that year. I mean, still, in many ways, the writing does that, but not as immediately and acutely as I felt that year. Manya Brachear Pashman: This book has been praised as not being for the ideological but for the intellectually and emotionally engaged. So it's not it's not something that ideologically minded readers will necessarily be able to connect to, or is it actually quite the opposite? Owen Lewis: Well, it's very much written from the gut, from the experience, from in a sense, being on the ground, both in Israel and here in New York and on campus, and trying to keep a presence in the world of poetry and writers. So what comes from emotion should speak to emotion. There are a few wisps of political statements, but it's not essentially a politically motivated piece of writing. I feel that I have no problem keeping my sympathies with Israel and with Jews. I can still be critical of aspects of the government, and my sympathies can also be with the thousands of Palestinians, killed, hurt, displaced. I don't see a contradiction. I don't have to take sides. But the first poem is called My Partisan Grief, and it begins on October 7. I was originally going to call the bookMy Partisan Grief, because I felt that American, Jewish, and Israeli grief was being silenced, was being marginalized. And I wanted to say, this is our grief. Listen to it. You must listen to this. It doesn't privilege this grief over another grief. Grief is grief. But I wanted ultimately to move past that title into something broader, more encompassing, more humanitarian. Manya Brachear Pashman: And did that decision come as the death toll in Gaza rose and this war kept going and going and the hostages remained in captivity, did that kind of sway your thinking in terms of how to approach the book and frame it? Owen Lewis: Yes, but even more than those kind of headlines, which can be impersonal, the poetry of some remarkable Palestinian poets move me into a broader look. Abu Toha was first one who comes to mind Fady Joudah, who's also a physician, by the way. I mean his poetry, I mean many others, but it's gorgeous, moving poetry. Some of it is a diatribe, and you know, some of it is ideological, and people can do that with poetry, but when poetry really drills down into human experience, that's what I find so compelling and moving. And that's what I think can move the peace process. I know it sounds quite idealistic, but I really think poetry has a role in the peace process here. Manya Brachear Pashman: I want to I want to unpack that a little bit later. But first, I want to go back to the protests that were roiling Columbia's campus over the past year and a half, two years. What was it like to be, one, writing this book, but also, teaching on campus as a Jewish professor? Owen Lewis: Most of my teaching takes place up at the Medical Center at 168th Street. And there I have to say, I didn't feel battered in any way by what was happening. I had a very shocking experience. I had a meeting that I needed to attend on, or that had been scheduled, I hadn't been quite paying attention. I mean, I knew about the encampments, but I hadn't seen them, and I come face to face with a blocked campus. I couldn't get on the campus. And what I'm staring at are signs to the effect, send the Jews back to Poland. I'm thinking, Where am I? What is this? I mean, protest, sure. I mean we expect undergraduates, we expect humans, to protest when things really aren't fair. But what did this have to do…why invoke the Holocaust and re-invoke it, as if to imply the Jews should be punished? All Jews. And what it fails to account for are the diversity of Jewish opinion. And you know, for some Jews, it's a black or white matter, but for most thinking Jews that I know, we all struggle very much with a loyalty to Israel, to the Jewish people, to the homeland and larger humanitarian values. So that was quite a shock. And I wrote a piece called “The Scars of Encampment,” in which I say, I can't unsee that. " And I go to campus, and, okay, it's a little bit more security to get onto campus. It's a beautiful campus. It's like an oasis there, but at the same time, I'm seeing what was as if it still is. And in a way, that's the nature of trauma that things from the past just roil and are present with almost as much emotion as when first encountered. Manya Brachear Pashman: So did you need to tune out those voices, or did that fuel your work? Owen Lewis: No, that fueled my work. I mean, if anything, it made me feel much more, a sense of mission with this book. And a commitment, despite criticism that I may receive, and no position I take is that outlandish, except to sympathize with the murdered on October 7th, to sympathize with their families, to resonate with what it must be like to have family members as hostages in brutal, brutal conditions. Not knowing whether they're dead or alive. So I really felt that the Jewish voice must be heard, not because it's more right or less right, but it's there. The suffering is there, the grief is there, and human grief is human grief. Manya Brachear Pashman: Owen, if you wouldn't mind reading another poem from the collection. Of course, many of us remember the news out of Israel on Thanksgiving Day 2023, right after October 7th. And this poem is titled, “Waiting for the Next Release, Reported by the New York Times, November 23 2023”. Owen Lewis: Waiting For the Next Release, Reported N.Y. Times, Nov. 23, 2023 Maybe tomorrow, if distrust doesn't flare like a missile, some families will be reunited. How awful this lottery of choice; Solomon would not deliberate. Poster faces always before my eyes, Among them, Emma & Yuli Cunio. Twins age 3, Raz Katz-Asher, age 4, Ariel Bibas, another four year old. What do their four year old minds make of captivity? What will they say? What would my Noa say? What will the other Noas say? Remembering Noa Argamani, age 26, thrown across the motorcycle to laughter and Hamas joy. I have almost forgotten this American day, Thanks- giving, With its cornucopian harvests, I am thinking of the cornucopian jails of human bounty. (What matter now who is to blame?) Manya Brachear Pashman: Really beautiful, and it really captures all of our emotions that day. You have children and grandchildren in Israel, as I mentioned and as you mentioned in that poem, your granddaughter, Noa. So your grief and your fear, it's not only a collective grief and fear that we all share, but also very personal, which you weave throughout the collection. In another poem, “In a Van to JFK”, you talk about just wanting to spend one more hour with your family before they fly off to Israel. And it's very moving. But in addition to many of the poems, like the one you just read, they are based on and somewhat named for newspaper headlines, you said that kind of establishes a timeline. But are there other reasons why you transformed those headlines into verse? Owen Lewis: Yes, William Carlos Williams in his poem Asphodel, says, and I'm going to paraphrase it badly. You won't get news from poems yet, men die every day for wanting what is found there. And I think it's a very interesting juxtaposition of journalism and poetry. And I mean, I'm not writing news, I'm writing where my reflections, where my heart, goes in response to the news, and trying to bring another element to the news that, you know, we were confronted. I mean, in any time of high stress, you swear off – I'm not watching any more TV. I'm not even gonna look at the newspaper. And then, of course, you do. I can't talk about Israel today. I can't not talk about it. I can't read the paper. I can't not read the paper. It's kind of that back and forth. But what is driving that? And so I'm trying to get at that next dimension of what's resonating behind each one of these headlines, or resonating for me. I mean, I'm not claiming this is an interpretation of news. It's my reaction, but people do react, and there's that other dimension to headlines. Manya Brachear Pashman: That seems like it might be therapeutic, no? Owen Lewis: Oh, totally, totally. You know, I'm very fortunate that having started a career in medicine, in psychiatry, and particularly in child and adolescent psychiatry. I always had one foot in the door academically. I spent, you know, my life as, I still teach, but I'm very fortunate to have, maybe 10+ years ago, been introduced to a basically a woman who created the field of Narrative Medicine, Rita Sharon. And now at Columbia in the medical school, we have a free-standing Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, of which she's chairman. So I've had the fortune of bringing psychiatry and medicine and writing together in a very integrated way. And yes, writing is therapeutic, especially, I could say in medicine, which has given itself over to electronic medical record keeping, but our whole society is moving towards the electronic. And what happens when you sit and write, and what happens when you then sit and read, you reflect. Your mind engages in a different way that is a bit slower than the fast pace of electronic communications and instant communications and instant thinking. And now with AI, instant analysis of any situation you want to feed data from. So that's sorely lacking in the human experience. And the act of writing, the act of reading has huge therapeutic values, huge salutary benefits for humans in general, but particularly in times of stress. In a lot of work on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, finding an outlet, an artistic outlet, it doesn't have to be writing, but that's often a way of transcending the trauma. And medicine is filled with trauma. People trying to come to terms with acute illnesses, chronic illnesses. Doctors and caregivers trying to come to terms with what they can and can't do. And you know, we're coming up against limitations. But how do you make peace with those limitations? And it's not that it's a magical panacea, but it's a process of engagement, not only with the subject, but with yourself in relation to the subject. Manya Brachear Pashman: I mean, I imagine dialogue is really the healthiest way of conversation and speaking through and interacting with a topic. And so I would imagine poetry, or, as you said, any art form, responding to news reports, it makes that a two way conversation when you're able to process and it's not just the headlines shouting at you, you're actually interacting and processing it by writing and reaction, or painting and reaction, whatever you choose to do. Owen Lewis: Exactly. Manya Brachear Pashman: You have said that poetry can serve a purpose during times of war. Is this one of the purposes to to be therapeutic or are you talking more in terms of what statesmen could learn from it? Owen Lewis: Well, yes, of course, what statesmen could learn from it, but it's human nature to want to take sides. I mean, that's kind of just what we do. But I think we can always do better than that. So I'm really talking about the people. I mean, there are also many Jews who are so angry at Israel that they can't listen to the story of Jewish grief. They should be reading mine and others poetries from this era. I wish the Palestinian poets were. I wish the Palestinian people. I mean, of course, in their current situation, they don't have time when you're starving, when you're looking for your next glass of fresh water. You don't have time for anything beyond survival. But once we get beyond that, how long are these positions going to be hardened. I mean, I think when the people of all sides of the dilemma really listen to the others, I mean, they're, I mean, if, unless as Hamas has expressed, you know, wants to push Israel into the sea, if Israel is going to coexist with the Palestinian people, whether they're in a nation or not in a nation, each has to listen to the other. And it's, you know, it's not one side is right, one side is wrong. It's far too complex a history to reduce it to that kind of simplicity. And I think poetry, everyone's poetry, gets at the complexity of experience, which includes wanting to take sides and questioning your wanting to take sides and moving towards something more humanitarian. Manya Brachear Pashman: You said earlier, you recommend Abu Toha, Fady Joudah, two Palestinian poets who have written some beautiful verse about– tragically beautiful verse–about what's happening. But there have been some really deep rifts in the literary world over this war. I mean, as you mentioned before, there was a letter written by authors and entertainers who pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions. Some authors have refused to sell rights to their books to publishers in Israel. So why not reciprocate? And I know the answer. I think you've already addressed it pretty well. What's wrong with that approach? Owen Lewis: In any conflict, there are at least three sides to the conflict. I mean, claims to nationhood, claims to who shoved first, who. I mean, you don't entangle things by aggressively reacting. I mean, if we learned anything from Mahatma Gandhi, it's what happens when we don't retaliate, right? And what happens when we go the extra mile to create bridges and connections. There are a host of people in Israel who continue to help Palestinians get to medical facilities, driving them back and forth, working for peace. I mean, there's a Palestinian on the Supreme Court of Israel, and well, he should be there. You know, that's the part of Israel that I am deeply proud of. So why not retaliate? I think it entrenches positions and never moves anything forward. Manya Brachear Pashman: So have you gotten any negative feedback from your writing colleagues? Owen Lewis: Some cold shoulders, yes. I mean not nothing overtly. I haven't been slammed in a review yet. Maybe that's coming. But when I publish pieces, I tend not to look at them. I had an oped in the LA Times. I've had some other pieces, you know, that precipitates blogs, and I started to read them. And the first blog that came off of the the LA Times oped was, God, is he an opportunist, just taking advantage of having a daughter in Israel? And trying to make a name for himself or something. And I said, You know what, you can't put yourself out and take a position without getting some kind of flack. So occasionally, those things filter back, it's par for the course. Manya Brachear Pashman: Right, not really worth reading some of those. You included Midrash in this book. You also spelled God in the traditional sense in the poems. Why did you choose to do that? Owen Lewis: Well, I felt it honors a tradition of Jewish writing. It mean we have yud, hey, vav, hey, you know, which in English comes down as Yahweh, but it's unpronounceable. The name of God is unpronounceable. And, you know, yud, hey, vav, hey is just a representation. It isn't God's name. And there's a tradition that the name of God, when it's written down, can't be destroyed. And it's a way of honoring that tradition. Millennium of Jewish writers, you know, it's similar to say Elokim, instead of Elohim when the text is written. To sort of substitute. We know what we're talking about, but really to honor tradition, to pay respect and sort of to stay in the mind frame that, if there is a God, he, she, they, are unknowable. And somehow it creates, for me, a little bit of that mystery by leaving a letter out. It's like, G, O, D, seems more knowable than G-d. It's leaving that white space right for something bigger, grander, and mysterious, for the presence of that right in the word itself. Manya Brachear Pashman: And what about including Midrash? Owen Lewis: That's a very interesting question. You know Midrash for me, when you steep yourself in traditional Midrash, there's stories that exemplify principles and they fill in gaps. I mean, some of the most important. I mean, we have this notion of Abraham breaking the idols of his father before he left. No. That's Midrash, thats not in the Torah. And yet, nine out of ten Jews will say that's in the Torah, right? So, it kind of expands our understanding of the traditional text. But it also very much allows a writer to creatively engage with the text and expand it. It's like a commentary, but it's a commentary in story, and it's a commentary in terms that evoke human responses, not necessarily intellectual responses. So frankly, I think it's every Jews' responsibility to write Midrash. That reinvigorates the stories, the texts, and the meanings, and then we write midrashes upon midrashes. And you know, we get a whole community buzzing about a single story. Manya Brachear Pashman: Which is very much what you've done with this collection, you know, writing poetry in response to news stories and engaging it in that way. It's very Jewish response, I would argue. Do you observe Tisha B'av? Owen Lewis: You know what I do. You're gonna laugh. My grandmother always warned us, don't go in the water on Tisha B'av, the sea will swallow you up. So I'm a big swimmer. I love swimming. I don't swim on Tisha B'av, because I hear my grandmother's voice, I'm going to be swallowed up. Manya Brachear Pashman: If you could please wrap up this conversation by sharing a poem of your choice from your latest collection. Owen Lewis: A poem I love to read again starts with a headline. 2000 Pound Bombs Drop, Reported N.Y. Times, Dec,, 22 2023. In Khan Younis, the call to prayer is the call of a dazed Palestinian child crying baba, standing at the brim of a cavernous pit of rubble biting his knuckles–baba, baba . . . It's so close to the abba of the dazed Israeli children of Be'eri, Kfar Azza. There is no comfort. From his uncles he's heard the calls for revenge– for his home and school, for his bed of nighttime stories, for his nana's whisper-song of G-d's many names. His Allah, his neighbor's Adonai, cry the same tears for death and shun more blood. No miracle these waters turning red. Who called forth the fleets of avenging angels? By viral post: Jewish Plagues on Gaza! A firstborn lost, then a second, a third. What other plagues pass over? Hail from the tepid sky? From on high it falls and keeps falling. Though we've “seen terrible things,” will you tell us, Adonai, Allah, tell us– do You remember the forgotten promise? From the pile once home of rubble stone, a father's hand reaching out, baba, abba crushed by the load. We know the silence of the lost child . . . G-d “has injured us but will bind up our wounds . . .” Mothers Look for us, called by the name yamma, calling the name imma. Our father of mercy, not the god of sacrifice. Our many crying heads explode. Manya Brachear Pashman: Owen Lewis, thank you so much for talking to us about how this book came about and for sharing some of these verses. Owen Lewis: Thank you so much. Manya Brachear Pashman: If you missed last week's episode, be sure to listen to my conversation with Israeli comedian Yohay Sponder on the sidelines of AJC Global Forum 2025. Hear how his Jewish identity shapes his work, how his comedy has evolved since the Hamas terror attacks, and what he says to those who try to silence him.
Kontexts huskatolik uttalar sig om påvevalet. Mireya har också noterat homofobin som flödat genom riksdagen den senaste veckan i samband med att en viss säkerhetsrådgivare fick avgå. Elina har varit på ett samtal med poeten Fady Joudah och tagit med sig några lärdomar. Finns där poddar finns! Klippt av Joel Zettergren. Jinglarna är gjorda Gerald Lombano.
The conversation is in English, after a short introduction in Swedish. Den palestinsk-amerikanska poeten Fady Joudah gästade Kulturhuset Stadsteatern för ett samtal om sin nya diktsamling "[…]". Joudah är en av USA:s viktigaste poetiska röster, med flera prisade diktsamlingar bakom sig. Fady Joudah (född 1971) har gett ut sex hyllade diktsamlingar. Han har översatt Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan och Maya Abu Al-Hayyat från arabiska till engelska och är en av grundarna till Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Han bor i Houston och arbetar som läkare. Johannes Anyuru är en av Sveriges mest hyllade poeter och romanförfattare. Hans senaste böcker är "De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar" (2017) och "Ixelles" (2022). I samarbete med Angereds bokmässa. Från 7 maj 2025 Jingel: Lucas Brar
Today I have the honor and the pleasure to speak once again with celebrated poet and physician, Fady Joudah. The last time Fady was on the podcast was in November, 2023, shortly after the outbreak of war in Gaza. At that point we spoke about the impossibility of, even then, quantifying the genocide. Today we focus on the politics of language—in particular, the distinction Fady Joudah makes between Palestine in English, and Palestine in Arabic. We speak too of the need for and limitations of solidarity, and finish with a reading and discussion of one of Fady Joudah's most remarkable and stunning poems, “Truth is Never Finished.” 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. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”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 and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.
Fady Joudah is an esteemed Palestinian Poet/Activist. And we had a great long conversation with him about poetry and resistance, conditions in Gaza, the difficulty of describing the Palestinian struggle in English, the failure of the west to defend Gaza, and much more. And we finished with Fady reading and deconstructing some of his poetry for us. Bio// 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. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”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 and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.—————-Outro- "Green and Red Blues" by MoodyLinks//+ Fady Joudah: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fady-joudahFollow Green and Red// +G&R Linktree: https://linktr.ee/greenandredpodcast +Our rad website: https://greenandredpodcast.org/ + Join our Discord community (https://discord.gg/vgKnY3sd)+Follow us on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/podcastgreenred.bsky.social)Support the Green and Red Podcast// +Become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast +Or make a one time donation here: https://bit.ly/DonateGandR Our Networks// +We're part of the Labor Podcast Network: https://www.laborradionetwork.org/ +We're part of the Anti-Capitalist Podcast Network: linktr.ee/anticapitalistpodcastnetwork +Listen to us on WAMF (90.3 FM) in New Orleans (https://wamf.org/) This is a Green and Red Podcast (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott (@sparki1969). Edited by Isaac.
In this episode of the Sumud Podcast, we are honored to host Dr. Fady Joudah—a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician whose work bridges the worlds of healing, resistance, and storytelling. A doctor of both medicine and metaphor, Dr. Joudah masterfully intertwines themes of exile, memory, and steadfastness (sumud) in his poetry, offering a deeply reflective exploration of Palestinian identity and survival. From his upbringing as the son of Palestinian refugees to his work as a poet and physician, Dr. Joudah discusses: ➡️ The nature of sumud (steadfastness) and what it means to resist ➡️ The power of language in shaping Palestinian identity and resistance ➡️ Poetry's role in documenting struggle and inspiring hope ➡️ His personal journey of navigating exile, medicine, and art Dr. Joudah's literary and humanitarian contributions have made him one of the most vital Palestinian voices today. His translations of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan have brought Palestinian literature to wider audiences, ensuring that the stories of his people remain undeniable, unforgettable, and unerasable.
Even though Palestinian-American Fady Joudah's poem is sparingly titled “[...],” an ellipsis surrounded by brackets, this work itself is psychologically dense. Through crisp lines and language, it wrestles with the nature of human ambivalence — about things like fear, desire, disaster, liberty — and it finds certainty only in the shaky universal ground of that ambivalence.Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published five other collections of poems, including Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children, where he works as a physician in internal medicine.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We're pleased to offer Fady Joudah's poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig's weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. Order your copy of Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig) wherever you buy books.
This week on Black & Published, Nikesha speaks with Palestinian-American poets, Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Fady is a physician, in addition to being a poet. His latest collection [ . . . ] chronicles the beginning of the genocide in Palestine in late 2023 and was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry.Lena is a poet, essayist and translator. She's also the co-founder of the Institute for Middle East understanding. Her latest poetry collection, Something About Living won the 2024 National Book Award for poetry. In our conversation, we discuss what the protest slogan "From the river, to the sea," truly means. What they would write if they weren't living through and didn't feel compelled to be a witness to constant war and genocide. And how they're helping their children survive and thrive as full Palestinian people who happen to be living in the empire.Mahogany Books Mentioned in this episode:Rate & ReviewThanks for listening, family! Please do us a solid and take a quick moment to rate and/or leave a review for this podcast. It will go a long way to making sure content featuring our stories and perspectives are seen on this platform
The brothers welcome National Book Award for Poetry Finalist Fady Joudah (@fadyjoudah) for a searing and intimate discussion of Palestine in English versus Palestine in Arabic, about writing poetry in a time of genocide, about the limits and hubris of solidarity, about the necessity of common decency in the face of horror, and about the meaning of Palestinian love confronting the Israeli inferno of annihilation. Featuring a powerful reading of "Dedication" from his latest book [...] published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Watch the episode on our YouTube channel Date of recording: November 6, 2024. Follow us on our socials: X: @MakdisiStreet YouTube: @MakdisiStreet Insta: @Makdisist TikTok: @Makdisistreet Music by Hadiiiiii *Sign up at Patreon.com/MakdisiStreet to access all the bonus content, including a live conversation with Samir Makdisi*
The Spark is hosting its annual book-as-gifts- guide. We spoke with Catherine Lawrence, co-owner of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Travis Kurowski, (Ph.D) an assistance professor of creative writing at York College of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Blatchley MLIS, Executive Director of Cumberland County Library System. The Midtown Schloar Bookstore recommendation can be found here. The Cumberland County Library Systems recommendations can be found here. Travis Kurowski Recommendations list below: NONFICTION Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music By Rob Sheffield I just ordered this book because I am in love with a woman who is the biggest Taylor Swift fan I have ever met. As it happens, I have only recently realized the most obvious thing about Swift's music: It's mostly about heartbreak. Our American Shakespeare of longing and distance, of regret and revenge, Swift's oeuvre is analyzed from first album to last by best-selling Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield in this new book. From the publisher: “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is the first book that goes deep on the musical and cultural impact of Taylor Swift. Nobody can tell the story like Rob Sheffield, the bestselling and award-winning author of Dreaming the Beatles, On Bowie, and Love Is a Mix Tape. The legendary Rolling Stone journalist is the writer who has chronicled Taylor for every step of her long career, from her early days to the Eras Tour. Sheffield gets right to the heart of Swift and her music, her lyrics, her fan connection, her raw power.” The Message By Ta-Nehisi Coates Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book of nonfiction takes a risk in being human. I've been following Coates since his days reporting for The Atlantic where he made national attention making a persuasive case for reparation. Since then, he's published a best-selling works of fiction and nonfiction, even written for Marvel Comics. This latest book from Coates is an analysis of how myths and stories shape cultures and nations, from Senegal to the ongoing war on Gaza. From the publisher: “In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.” Lovely One: A Memoir By Ketanji Brown Jackson The election was hard for everyone—every national election has been in recent memory. Memoirs from people behind the scenes in spaces shaped by such elections have always been popular, more recently they seem to be a source of sustenance. I cannot see the new memoir by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first black woman and first public defender to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court—as anything else. From the publisher: “With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family's ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America's highest court within the span of one generation.” FICTION The Vegetarian By Han Kang 2024 Nobel winner for Literature, Han Kang also won the 2016 Booker Prize for her most widely read novel, The Vegetarian, a short novel I read in a gulp years ago when it was first translated from the Korean into English by Deborah Smith. The power of The Vegetarian is ineffable, which is an odd thing to say for a book—that it is beyond words—but that is the power and experience of great art. A perfect introduction to Kang's work. From the publisher: “Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman's struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.” All Fours By Miranda July There has been no other book I've heard about as much this year as filmmaker and fiction writer Miranda July's latest novel All Fours, about what happens when we ignore our desires—by which I mean, ignore our very selves—and the confusing struggle it might be to ever find ourselves again. The conversations I've had about this book have been as rich and meaningful as the book itself, conversations I hold dear and have changed me forever. From the publisher: “A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.” Playground By Richard Powers Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his previous novel The Overstory, arguably the single most important American novel ever published about our relationship to the environment, all told through the lens of our human relationship to trees. Powers's latest novel, Playground, is about artificial intelligence and the ocean. And I expect nothing less. From the publisher: “Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can. COMICS Future By Tommi Musturi I saw this book while browsing with my daughters and close friends at Lost City Books in Washington, DC—a bookstore I cannot recommend enough for its curation, display, and overall artistry in the selling of books—and it actually took my breath away. I saw it from across the room, huge and bold in color and design. Almost the shape and size of a small board game, this absolutely thrilling collection of Mutsuri's is so stunning it feels unbelievable it exists and, more than that, was somehow published. It's an atomic explosion of creativity fracturing the very medium of comics. Few art experiences in the world give such a rush. From the publisher: “A graphic, genre-mashing magnum opus from one of the most restlessly creative voices in comics. Tommi Musturi's Future traps the reader into a web of stories happening in different timespaces, providing perspectives on the possible futures of mankind through imaginary future worlds, current events, historical references, utopias, and ideals. Future is a mash-up of the familiar and the terribly alien: quotidian existence, sci-fi spectacle, utopian fantasy, AI dystopia, and other worst-case scenarios. Richly philosophical and allegorical, Musturi gives us alcoholic magicians, guerrilla art squads, mutant reality television hosts, and incel archaeologist-astronauts, among many others. Weaving between a variety of styles in illustration and narration that transform and reflect our constantly changing reality, Future is an impassioned graphic novel for our times that renews the medium of comics—a vital and multifaceted work of art.” Here By Richard McGuire Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Robin Writing, Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel Here is almost made small by calling it a graphic novel. It is, certainly, a work of fiction, and so technically then a graphic (comic) novel (fiction), but it's also one of the strangest and most beautiful works in the comics medium ever made. Every page of the book is a drawing of the same corner of the same room across 300 million years of history. Yes, the same space, variously drawn, across 300 million years. And seeing that space across time, stories do emerge, but only in the same way they do in the reality within which we all exist—because we construct them. Since the first pages of the book concept were published in 1989, its impact has rippled throughout the comics world, and continues to. From the publisher: “From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision: the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.” POETRY By Fady Joudah There are few contemporary issues as important as the well-being and fate of the Palestinian people, and few voices in American literature as important and prominent in this area as Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. The book's strange title, […], is a pictogram, a symbol evoking meaning: silence, perhaps, or erasure. The brackets for what has been omitted, the internal ellipsis for all that remains unsaid. Joudah wrote the poems in […] between October and December 2023, a time of much suffering, ceaseless since. From the publisher: “Fady Joudah's powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, ‘I am unfinished business,' articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah's survivance, […] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But ‘Repetition won't guarantee wisdom,' Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language ‘before [our] wisdom is an echo.' These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us ‘Wonder belongs to all.'” Wrong Norma By Anne Carson I've been following Canadian poet Anne Carson's career since I picked up a copy of her wildly experimental and stunning 1998 book, Autobiography of Red—" richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is”—while living for a summer at the home of potter Jim Romberg in southern Oregon, details that may seem insignificant, but that's not how art works on us. Carson is one of the world's—the world's—most experimentally stunning poets who somehow still reaches the depth of human emotion. A classicist who has translated the Greek Tragedies for the stage, along with the most stunning book of Sappho's poetry I've ever read, Wrong Norma is a sampling of the same erudition and emotion we have for decades expected from the poet. Oh, and she's incredibly funny. I haven't read this book yet, but I will, because I agree wholeheartedly with the late Susan Sontag about Carson: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.” From the publisher: “Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: ‘Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong.'”Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Den palestinsk-amerikanska författaren och läkaren Fady Joudahs poesi ges nu ut för första gången på svenska. Diktsamlingen [] har Gaza som utgångpunkt men varför med en titel som inte går att uttala? Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Fady Joudah, som lever i Houston i USA, är läkare, författare och översättare. Han har gett ut sex böcker, men nu kommer den första på svenska, diktsamlingen […]. Fady Joudah har skrivit dikterna under det han kallar "utplåningens tid", själv har han förlorat 120 anhöriga, vänner och bekanta i de israeliska bombningarna av Gaza. P1 Kulturs litteraturkritiker Daniel Sjölin har läst […] som översatts av Athena Farrokhzad och Johannes Anyuru.NY MUSIKTEATER OM KONSTNÄRSPARET BAUERI dag, den 20 november, har det gått precis 106 år sedan konstnärsparet John och Ester Bauer dog. De drunknade tillsammans med sin lille son i samband med en fartygsolycka på Vättern. Nu på fredag är det urpremiär för musikteaterföreställningen Ester och John Bauer - och då står en av Johns släktingar på scen; sångerskan och musikern Lisa Bauer. I hennes liv har den här berömde konstnären alltid funnits med. Hör Jens Möllers reportage!WIENER WERKSTÄTTE – HANTVERKSLYX FRÅN BÖRJAN AV FÖRRA SEKLETPå Millesgården i Stockholm pågår just nu en utställning med hantverkskooperativet Wiener Werkstätte, som var verksamma mellan 1903 och 1932 i Wien. De började då staden var en huvudstad och kulturell smältdegel i ett kejsardöme med över 50 miljoner invånare och som 1932, när Wiener Werktätte stängde, var ett litet land med 5 miljoner invånare med minimal framtidstro. Nina Asarnoj tog med sig redaktionens främste Wienentusiast Gunnar Bolin till utställningen.MÖT SKAPARNA AV TV-SERIEN HELIKOPTERRÅNETPå fredag är det premiär för den nya Netflixserien "Helikopterrånet" som handlar om ett av de mest spektakulära rånen som genomförts i Sverige. Serien bygger på en bok av Jonas Bonnier, samt samtal med rånarna som genomförde kuppen mot värdedepån i Västberga i Stockholm, då de kom över 39 miljoner kronor. Björn Jansson har träffat seriens manusförfattare Ronnie Sandahl, och regissören Daniel Espinosa.ESSÄ: THOMAS STEINFELD OM SURREALISMEN SOM FIRAR 100 ÅRDet första surrealistiska manifestet skrevs 1924, men rörelsen överlevde sig själv och återfinns inom konst och reklam. Men även inom politiken, där den dock bytt sida, konstaterar författaren och kulturskribenten Thomas Steinfeld i dagens OBS-essä.Programledare: Jenny TelemanProducent: Maria Götselius
In this two-episode special, host Diana Buttu speaks with award-winning Palestinian-American writers Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who are both finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards. Dr. Joudah and Ms. Tuffaha comprise two of the only five shortlisted writers for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry, making this a foundational cultural honor for the Palestinian literary community and beyond. As Palestinians continue to endure Israel's genocide and defy cultural erasure, Joudah and Tuffaha discuss literature as a foundational tool of cultural resilience. The two notable writers also expand on the meaning of the Book Award nominations, not just for themselves but for all Palestinians and oppressed communities around the world. Ms. Tuffaha is nominated for her compelling book of poetry, “Something About Living,” published by the University Akron Press as part of the “Akron Series of Poetry.” The nominated text explores Palestinian life through the lens of the American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a multi-award-winning poet, essayist, and translator who has authored three acclaimed books of poetry, translated award-winning plays, and published a range of literary essays, chapters, and more. Thank you for tuning into This is Palestine, the official podcast of The IMEU! For more stories and resources, visit us at imeu.org. Stay connected with us: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theimeu/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/theIMEU Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theIMEU/ For more insights, follow our host, Diana Buttu, on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/dianabuttu
In this two-episode special, host Diana Buttu speaks with award-winning Palestinian-American writers Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who are both finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards. Dr. Joudah and Ms. Tuffaha comprise two of the only five shortlisted writers for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry, making this a foundational cultural honor for the Palestinian literary community and beyond. As Palestinians continue to endure Israel's genocide and defy cultural erasure, Joudah and Tuffaha discuss literature as a foundational tool of cultural resilience. The two notable writers also expand on the meaning of the Book Award nominations, not just for themselves but for all Palestinians and oppressed communities around the world. Dr. Joudah is nominated for his powerful collection of poetry, entitled, “ […].” published by Milkweed Press. Joudah's nominated work is described as an “urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.” Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.” Fady Joudah is the recipient of multiple literary awards, including the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize and more. New York Literary critics have said that Joudah's poetry “thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging conceived notions.” Along with being a multi-award-winning writer, Joudah is an internal medicine doctor. Thank you for tuning into This is Palestine, the official podcast of The IMEU! For more stories and resources, visit us at imeu.org. Stay connected with us: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theimeu/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/theIMEU Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theIMEU/ For more insights, follow our host, Diana Buttu, on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/dianabuttu
SLEERICKETS is a podcast about poetry and other intractable problems. NB: Oops, forgot to mention all the non-voting/protest voting listeners out there. I see you, too.My book Midlife now exists. Buy it here, or leave it a rating here or hereFor more SLEERICKETS, check out the SECRET SHOW and join the group chatLeave the show a rating here (actually, just do it on your phone, it's easier). Thanks!Wear SLEERICKETS t-shirts and hoodies. They look good!SLEERICKETS is now on YouTube!Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:– Leila's recommendations:- "Dedication" by Fady Joudah, who is also American but with a personal connection to Gaza, many of whose family members have indeed been killed there: 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize Reading: Fady Joudah in Conversation With Pádraig Ó Tuama (recorded here beginning at minute 50)- "Not Just Passing" and "I Grant You Refuge" by Heba Abu Nada, who was killed in Gaza: Not Just Passing: In Honor of Heba Abu Nada - Mizna; I Grant You Refuge • Protean Magazine- "My mother once said" and "The land fights, too" by Nour Khalil Abu Shammala, writing from Gaza: My mother once said | The Electronic Intifada; The land fights, too | The Electronic Intifada- "A Request," "Right or Left," and others contained in this interview with Mosab Abu Toha, who is from Gaza and some of whose experience is also recounted here: “Forest of Noise”: Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha on New Book, Relatives Killed in Gaza & More | Democracy Now!- "It Always Starts with Words" and "Four Poems" by Olivia Elias, born in Palestine and writing from the diaspora: It Always Starts with Words - Mizna; FOUR POEMS by Olivia Elias, trans. Jérémy Victor Robert – FOUR WAY REVIEW- "Gazan Despair" and "When a Missile Lands" by Yahya Ashour, who is outside of Gaza and unable to return: Gazan Despair - Mizna; New Poetry in Translation: Yahya Ashour's ‘When a Missile Lands' – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY- Poems from "Ash and Air" by Nadine Murtaja, writing from Gaza: Ash and Air: a Poetry Folio from Gaza - Mizna– Padraig O Tuama– Julie Steiner– Ep 167: Poetry Magazine, October 2024– Ceasefire Haiku by Faisal Mohyuddin– The Tea and Sage Poem by Fady Joudah– Mimesis by Fady Joudah– Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha– Brian Cox's rendition of If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer– If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer– Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeiceFrequently mentioned names:– Joshua Mehigan– Shane McCrae– A. E. Stallings– Ryan Wilson– Morri Creech– Austin Allen– Jonathan Farmer– Zara Raab– Amit Majmudar– Ethan McGuire– Coleman Glenn– Alexis Sears– JP Gritton– Alex Pepple– Ernie Hilbert– Joanna PearsonOther Ratbag Poetry Pods:Poetry Says by Alice AllanI Hate Matt Wall by Matt WallVersecraft by Elijah BlumovRatbag Poetics By David Jalal MotamedAlice: Poetry SaysBrian: @BPlatzerCameron: CameronWTC [at] hotmail [dot] comMatthew: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith
In the year since the devastating Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Even more have been injured or displaced. Still, many Palestinians across the diaspora feel that they aren't allowed to share their stories — that the fullness of their humanity is too often reduced to a few soundbites on the news, or images of people dying. So on this episode, we're revisiting conversations with Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun — two Palestinian American poets who have tried to carve out space to expand the kind of stories that Palestinians are allowed to tell.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
The queens get out their big smooth (crystal) balls to predict the National Book Award shortlist in poetry. Play along! The shortlist is announced Oct. 1. Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books: Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTES:You can find the National Book Awards longlists for fiction, translation, young people's literature, and poetry here. Watch Lena Khalaf Tuffaha read her poem "Mountain, Stone" here. You can find the text of the poem here. Check out this NY Times article, "The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson." Or check out this Lannan conversation with Carson.Here is an hour-long conversation, "Aesthetics of Return: Palestinian Poetry," with Fady Joudah and Prof. Fida Adely, moderated by Bassam Haddad.Watch Elizabeth Willis give a reading at the Univ. of Georgia in Feb. 2024.Watch this fabulous reading and interview with Diane Seuss, conducted by Ron Charles. Watch Rowan Ricardo Phillips read his poem "Boys" at the Griffin Prize ceremony.Watch Octavio Quintanilla read his poem "Exiliados"Dorianne Laux appeared on Grace Cavalieri's fabulous The Poet and the Poem series July 2024. Watch here. Watch m.s. RedCherries give a reading as part of the Fellows Reading of the Indigenous Nations Poets here.
Today's poem is In Jerusalem by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah, with special guest adrienne maree brown. Through her writing, which includes short- and long-form fiction, nonfiction, spells, tarot decks and poetry; her music, which includes songwriting, singing and immersive musical rituals; and her podcasts, including How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia's Parables and The Emergent Strategy Podcast, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas, frameworks, networks and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E. Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, adrienne shares… “For me, poetry is how I get to be my whole human self in a given moment, and really, connect to that river — I always talk about [how] there's this river of love and justice that's flowing from the beginning of time to the end and it flows through us to different degrees. We're supposed to do that kind of work, but it has to be able to hold the whole complexity of a given moment. It has to be able to hold life and death — really life and death — over and over again in a variety of ways.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
In May 2021, Palestinian American poet, physician, translator, and essayist Fady Joudah wrote two poems engaged with the violence of Israeli apartheid. Reflecting on the conundrum of where and how to publish them, he explained: “I've long been aware of the crushing weight that reduces Palestine in English to a product with limited features . . . This sickening delimitation mimics physical entrapment. The silken compassion toward Palestinians in mainstream English thinks the language of the oppressed is brilliant mostly when it teaches us about surviving massacres and enduring the degradation of checkpoints.” His sixth collection of poetry, [...], written between October and December 2023, and published in March, indicts precisely such forms of entrapment. In these lucid yet idiosyncratic poems, Joudah turns his attention to that which exceeds the narrow place of the Western gaze, spurning the market forces that reward the performance of perpetual Palestinian victimhood.On this episode of On the Nose, culture editor Claire Schwartz speaks with Joudah about publishing [...] in this long moment of anti-Palestinian racism, the dangerous desires of denying our own not-knowing, and the generative capacities of silence.Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”Texts Mentioned, and Further Reading and Listening: “My Palestinian Poem that ‘The New Yorker' Wouldn't Publish,” Fady Joudah, Los Angeles Review of Books“A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation,” Fady Joudah, Lit Hub “Fady Joudah: The poet on how the war in Gaza changed his work,” Aria Aber, The Yale Review“‘Unspeakable': Dr. Fady Joudah Grieves 50+ Family Members Killed in Gaza & Slams U.S. Media Coverage,” Democracy Now!“Aesthetics of Return: Palestinian Poetry with Fady Joudah,” Jadaliyya“Habibi Yamma,” Fady Joudah, Protean “Dear [...],” Fady Joudah, Prairie Schooner“[...],” Fady Joudah, Lit Hub“[...],” Fady Joudah, Jewish Currents“Maqam for a Green Silence,” Fady Joudah, Jewish Currents
On Nakba Day 2024 - commemorated amidst Israel's ongoing genocidal war on Gaza - FMEP is re-releasing a very special podcast produced last year in partnership with Project48. This project was created to commemorate the 75 years of the Palestinian Nakba, sharing the voices of 10 powerful Palestinian artists, sharing their works and that of other iconic Palestinian creators. Featured artists are: Ahmed Abu Artema, Hala Alyan, Suad Amiry, Zeina Azzam, Cherien Dabis, Fady Joudah, Tamer Nafar, Raja Shehadeh, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Waleed Zuaiter – reading their own work and that of other iconic Palestinian artists. Bios and links to the works of each artist can be found below. The Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) is the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land, and the destruction of Palestinian society during the creation of the State of Israel – a destruction that continues today. Learn more at: project48.com. For more programming from FMEP on the Nakba please visit: https://fmep.org/resource/nakba-resources/
Today's poem is Eid Mubarak by Fady Joudah.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… "Today's poem makes a profound commitment to carry the living and the dead in language forward into time, to record our presence, to meld the collectivity and richness of humanity into a singular vision that feels like love.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Recorded by Fady Joudah for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on April 2, 2024. www.poets.org
Today's poem is Mahmoud by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated by Fady Joudah. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Victoria Chang writes… “As an adult, one of the things I've always wondered about was the baby boy we lost to a miscarriage. He was almost three months old by the time he passed away. I still carry the hospital bracelet in my wallet, the one that says simply, “baby boy.” Some days, I still wonder about him — what he would have looked like as a teenager. He would have been sixteen years old this year. I imagine him having just received his driver's license, the loud sound of the door opening, his backpack with all of the little tchotchkes and keychains hanging from them rattling and hitting the door. I can almost hear his voice as he enters the house. Almost.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack Fady Joudah is a Palestinian poet and physician who just released a poetry collection on the genocide in Gaza. In this episode, Yousef Aljamal, Helena Cobban, and Tony Groves talk about poetry, memory, Gaza, Refaat Alareer and silence. Fady argues that the world should listen to the Palestinians and practice silence when they do. The title of his new poetry collection is something you will interpret for yourself. The book is available here: https://milkweed.org/product/2922 And here:https://www.outspokenldn.com/shop/fadyjoudah The Damien Dempsey Podcast is out now here:https://www.patreon.com/posts/patron-exclusive-99392216 If I Must Die is performed by Rachel Lynn
Please join us at patreon.com/tortoiseshack Fady Joudah is a Palestinian poet and physician who just released a poetry collection on the genocide in Gaza. In this episode, Yousef Aljamal, Helena Cobban, and Tony Groves talk about poetry, memory, Gaza, Refaat Alareer and silence. Fady argues that the world should listen to the Palestinians and practice silence when they do. The title of his new poetry collection is something you will interpret for yourself. The book is available here: https://milkweed.org/product/2922 And here:https://www.outspokenldn.com/shop/fadyjoudah The Damien Dempsey Podcast is out now here:https://www.patreon.com/posts/patron-exclusive-99392216 If I Must Die is performed by Rachel Lynn
Listen to — or read along in the episode transcript — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim poems by Palestinians and their supporters. Poetry empowers us to imagine liberation that we can then work towards, together. Some pieces explore the Nativity story through this lens: Christmas joy must break bread with pain, birthing solidarity with all oppressed peoples. Talking Points: (0:00) Ross Gay on mixing pain and joy to birth solidarity; poetry as resistance (7:11) Aurora Levins Morales on the history of antisemitism + envisioning solidarity & interdependence in “Red Sea” (12:30) Najah Hussein Musa dispelling anti-Palestinian myths in “Bethlehem” (14:42) Avery Arden — “Christ is Barred from Bethlehem” (17:48) Basman Derawi — memorializing a fun-loving friend killed in an airstrike in ”His Name Was Essa” (19:52) Hiba Abu Nada, killed in an airstrike, longs for safety in “I Grant You Refuge” (23:30) Rev. Munther Isaac & Avery Arden — Christ born into rubble (28:10) Refaat Alareer & Ibtisam Barakat — poetry helps us imagine the liberation we can then fight for (33:36) Avery Arden & Ainsley Herrick — “O Come O Come Emmanuel” rewritten for Palestine's plight Visit the episode transcript for all links to the various poems; here are some key resources: Rev. Munther Isaac's sermon "God Is under the Rubble in Gaza" Aurora Levins Morales' article "Latin@s, Israel and Palestine: Understanding Antisemitism" Fady Joudah's article "A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation" The "We Are Not Numbers" project Refaat Alareer's lecture on poetry For shareable versions of my poems / song, visit binarybreakingworship.com. This show's theme song is "Aetherium" by Leah Horn. Find more episodes & resources at blessedarethebinarybreakers.com.
Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella read poems by Palestinian poets and those of Palestinian heritage to amplify and bear witness to the range of their perspectives and the richness of these voices. We found the reading of these aloud to each other to be profoundly moving. Please see the extensive show notes for links to the poets, their books, many more we couldn't include on the show and other recent resources. In this order--Fadwa Tuqan, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeina Azzam, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Noor Hindi, Naomi Shihab Nye were featured on the show. We mentioned the following anthologies during this hour: We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (Zeina Hashem Beck and Hala Alyan, editors); & Modern Arabic Poetry (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, editor). Since recording our episode a week ago, the Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza; we want to bring attention to the story of this poem, his last. We additionally want to highlight the work of Deema K Shehabi, George Abraham, Nathalie Khankan, and Fady Joudah (also see Joudah's recent “meditation”), among many, many others. For one additional resource about poets, see the Instagram account, The Palestinian Poetry Project, poetrypalestine. The LA Review of Books recently published a small folio of writing from poets of Palestinian heritage. Vox Populi published a “ceasefire cento” solicited from poets globally. You can read it here.
On this week's Code Switch, we hear from two Palestinian American poets who talk about what it's like to be Palestinian American in the U.S. Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun say the way their stories are told — or aren't told — has contributed to what they see as an erasure of their identities, and often of their humanity.
Today we speak with Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. We are recording this interview on Thursday, November 2, 2023, as the State of Israel expands its brutal and illegal collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza—an act of genocidal ethnic cleansing. Health authorities in Gaza report more than nine thousand deaths in a population where 60 percent are under the age of 18. The United Nations General Assembly has just overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding the “protection of civilians and [the] upholding [of] legal and humanitarian obligations.” The Assembly, also demanded that all parties “immediately and fully comply” with obligations under international humanitarian and human rights laws, “particularly in regard to the protection of civilians and civilian objects.”Fady Joudah's poetry has always addressed the situation of the Palestinians in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in diaspora, managing somehow to capture both the political and the personal, and above all the courage and humanity of the Palestinian people. We speak in particular about his recent LitHub piece, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation: Thirteen Maqams for an Afterlife.” We are honored that he made time in this period of crisis to speak with us.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. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”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 and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.
Jen Psaki provides the latest updates on the war in Israel. She is joined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, IDF spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, and Doctor Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American physician who lost dozens of family members in Gaza. Later, Jen and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides discuss his thoughts on possible negotiations to rescue hostages. Check out our social pages below:https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsakihttps://www.instagram.com/InsideWithPsaki/https://www.tiktok.com/@insidewithpsakihttps://www.msnbc.com/jen-psaki
Natalie Carter & Ellie Porras discuss Humble ISD's need to support free clinics on campus. Dr. Fady Joudah challenges the West to stop dehumanizing Palestinians. Is an insurrectionist our next Speaker --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/support
The message from Dr. Fady Joudah was profound and heartfelt. He challenges the media and others for the dehumanization of the Palestinian people. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/support
Natalie Carter & Elli Porras discuss Humble ISD need to support of free clinics on campus. Dr. Fady Joudah challenges the West to stop dehumanizing Palestinians. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/politicsdoneright/support
Project48 & FMEP proudly present a very special podcast commemorating 75 years of the Palestinian Nakba. We are honored to share the voices of 10 powerful Palestinian artists, sharing their works and that of other iconic Palestinian creators. Featured artists are: Ahmed Abu Artema, Hala Alyan, Suad Amiry, Zeina Azzam, Cherien Dabis, Fady Joudah, Tamer Nafar, Raja Shehadeh, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Waleed Zuaiter - reading their own work and that of other iconic Palestinian artists. You can find artists biographies and links to their works here: https://tinyurl.com/5ye6jsn6 The Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe") is the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land, and the destruction of Palestinian society during the creation of the State of Israel – a destruction that continues today. Learn more at: https://project48.com/ This podcast was produced by Nadia Saah for Project48 and Kristin McCarthy for FMEP, and edited by Jeffrey Carton.
Today's poem is Compassion Comes Late by Fady Joudah.
Ep 130: Allowing / Softening from the 5-part Self-Awareness August series “Allowing is also for you to move through the process of healing” - Leslieann Hobayan In part 3 of our 5-part series for Self-Awareness August, I talk about how allowing is a subtle shift from opening. What's the difference? It sounds like the same thing. Well, we might be open to receiving, but are we allowing for that love to come in? Do you feel your muscles start to contract when a message approaches or someone offers love? Can you soften those muscles? Can you allow? Tune in for more! Today's poems/ Books / Oracle / Tarot Cards mentioned: Tarot Card: the Great Severing “Oxygen” from Tethered to Stars by Fady Joudah
We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.” Show Notes Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is out from Milkweed Editions Najwan Darwish's Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books. Fady Joudah curated The Baffler's series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh's Reflection. We read Fady Joudah's poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars. And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production.
My daughter wouldn't hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn't a place to call home And you'd get to go biking She said that's how others Become refugees isn't it?
We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.” Show Notes In Palestine these days, the olive harvest is under assault from Israeli settlers. Six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil socierty NGOs have just been designated terrorist organizations. Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions Najwan Darwish's Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books. Fady Joudah curated The Baffler's series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh's Reflection. We read Fady Joudah's poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars. And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production.
A return to when Connor and Jack explored Fady Joudah's poem "Additional Notes on Tea." They discuss how the poem moves around the globe, how it interrogates history, and engages with the concept of God. Close Talking Ep. 132: Poetry and Palestine - https://soundcloud.com/close-talking/episode-132-poetry-and-palestine UNBOXED Vol 15: Poetry and Palestine - https://us2.campaign-archive.com/?u=fd945ee0dcd8acdc0e3aa0f22&id=1551facf0f Additional Notes On Tea By: Fady Joudah In Cairo a boy's balcony higher than a man's deathbed. The boy is sipping tea, The view is angular like a fracture. Surrounding the bed, women in wooden chairs. They signal mourning with a scream. Family men on the street run up the stairs and drink raven tea. On the operating table in Solwezi a doctor watches a woman die. Tea while the anesthetic wears off, While the blade is waiting, tea. The doctor says the woman knows god is sleeping Outside heaven in a tent. God is a refugee dreaming of tea. Once upon a time an ocean married a sea to carry tea around. Land was jealous. So it turned into desert and gave no one wood for ships. And when ships became steel, Land turned into ice. And when everything melted, everything tasted like tea. Once upon a time there was a tea party in Boston. Tea, like history, is a non sequitur. I prefer it black. The Chinese drink it green. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.
Poet Fady Joudah reads their poem "Equinox" from MQR's Spring 2020 issue.
On this episode, Madhuri opens the world of Bhakti poetry as she reads Mahadevi Akka's Vachanas and takes us to the world of eroticism practised through devotion. Rutika reads Fady Joudah's poem 'Mimesis' and a dialogue from Silvia Moreno-Garcia's novel 'Gods of Jade and Shadow' where she focuses on that which is often unsaid. What is? Tune in to find out. You can write to Rutika on lettersthathug@gmail.com and you can write to Madhuri on adwanimadhuri@gmail.com.
Learn about the astrology of May 17th, 2021 to May 31, 2021. In these two weeks, we move into Gemini Season, begin 2 other retrogrades and experience a total lunar eclipse. Listen to my interpretations of these energies, along with a tarot pull. And hear me recite a poem by Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (as translated by Fady Joudah).
As a part of our Arts and Culture series, CANVAS, Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the intersection of the alchemy of health and art with his profile of Fady Joudah, the physician-poet -- or perhaps poet-physician. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
As a part of our Arts and Culture series, CANVAS, Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the intersection of the alchemy of health and art with his profile of Fady Joudah, the physician-poet -- or perhaps poet-physician. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
This week, we welcome Danielle Badra to the show.Danielle was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan and currently resides in Virginia. She is the author of “Dialogue with the dead," a collection of poems in which she responds to the recovered poems of her deceased sister. She joins Tyler to talk about the difficulty of losing our loved ones and how creativity can build a bridge to connect with them once they’ve left us. In a raw and candid conversation, Danielle highlights the importance of being in touch with family and the little things in life that bring enormous meaning.About the GuestDanielle Badra received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College (2008) and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). While there, she was the poetry editor of So To Speak, a feminist literary and arts journal, and an intern for Split This Rock. Her poems have appeared in journals, papers and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021.Find Us OnlineWebsite: timfshow.comTwitter: twitter.com/TIMFShowFacebook: facebook.com/TIMFShowInstagram: instagram.com/TIMFShowSupport us on Patreon: patreon.com/timfshow The TeamThis podcast is a production of The Story Producer.Executive Producer & Host: Tyler GreeneSenior Producer: Tricia BobedaStory Editor: Katie KlocksinEditor & Engineer: Adam YoffeAssociate Producer: Jackie BallArt Director: Ziwu ZhouComposer: Andrew EdwardsShow Admin: Social Currant About UsThis Is My Family is an unapologetically full-hearted interview show about building a life with the people we love. As a gay dad in an interracial marriage, host Tyler Greene’s life is a testament to the fact that there are many ways to define family today. Each week, his conversations with guests reveal funny and heartfelt stories about how you can make a family, and how your family makes you. Join us for a celebration of the beautifully messy connections that shape our lives.
Translated from Arabic to English by Fady Joudah, and from English to Hindi by Brijesh.A Poem A Day by Sudhanva Deshpande.Read on August 23, 2020.Art by Virkein Dhar.Signature tune by M.D. Pallavi.
Asa Drake on her selections: I read two poems by Ai, "Cuba, 1962" and "Guadalajara Cemetery." I found her book Vice when I started working for the public library. I don't know how this book found its way into Central Florida, but her poems made me feel at home again in the South, where everything outside of me is beautiful and violent, and somehow means more work. Luther Hughes on his selections: For the last several years, I have suffered from depression. It kind of hit me out of nowhere. I've attempted suicide and contemplated it more than several times. "Ice Storm" by Robert Hayden is a poem I love because it exemplifies moments in my life where anything, even nature, will make you question not only beauty, but a higher power--God, really. "The Worst Thing" by Sharon Olds, even though this poem is about her divorce, reminds me of this, too, but it also pushes me to say "the worst thing." To face it with my whole heart. "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton and "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limon remind me to keep pushing. To breathe. To live. Ana Portnoy Brimmer on her selections: In Nicole Cecilia Delgado's collection, Apenas un cántaro, a graffiti credited to "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" reads: "Vivir es despedirse." To live is to say goodbye. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about departures, leave-takings, distance, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and (extra)exacerbated political crisis came into view. The poems "In Exodus I Love You More," by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah), and "Lamento Borincano," by Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado, seemed like appropriately heart-wrenching reads during moments in which goodbyes (those said, unsaid, feared, postponed, awaited, stolen, uncertain) permeate so much of our linguistic and emotional landscapes, and as we contemplate distance as a political condition. Finally, as a Puerto Rican poet and organizer of profound decolonial conviction myself, it seemed so fitting to read the work of a Palestinian and a Puerto Rican poet, side by side, both places of shared struggles, fighting against colonialism and occupation, and as voices for this meditation and moment. En la colección, Apenas un cántaro, de Nicole Cecilia Delgado, un grafiti acreditado a "la Pensión Meza, cuarto 14" lee: "Vivir es despedirse." He pasado mucho tiempo pensando en las despedidas, los adioses, la distancia, incluso antes de que la pandemia del Covid-19 y la crisis política (extra)exacerbada se volvieran realidad. Los poemas "In Exodus I Love You More", por el poeta Palestino Mahmoud Darwish (traducido por Fady Joudah), y "Lamento Borincano", por la poeta Puertorriqueña Nicole Cecilia Delgado, me parecieron lecturas apropiadamente desgarradoras para momentos en los cuales las despedidas (aquellas dichas, no dichas, temidas, pospuestas, esperadas, robadas, inciertas) forman gran parte de nuestras esferas lingüísticas y emocionales, y mientras contemplamos la distancia como condición política. Finalmente, como poeta y organizadora Puertorriqueña de profunda convicción decolonial, me pareció oportuno leer el trabajo de un poeta Palestino y una poeta Puertorriqueña, lado a lado, ambxs siendo lugares de luchas compartidas, batallando contra el colonialismo y la ocupación, y como voces para esta meditación y momento. Daniella Toosie-Watson on her selections: I don’t know how to write love poems. At least when I’ve tried, it’s been wildly challenging. I’m learning how to write intimacy and tenderness, and when I first read this poem by Ilya Kaminsky I thought it was just the perfect way to write those things. I aspire to write and craft love with this kind of subtlety and care. I chose to read the Carl Phillips poem because it articulates my feelings around sex that I’ve never been able to put to words: “into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be, that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming.” When I first read that line it was a punch to the gut. You know those poems that you wish you wrote? This is one of those poems for me. Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
Author Photo by Cybele Knowles Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Connor and Jack discuss Fady Joudah's, "Additional Notes on Tea" exploring the ways the poem moves around the globe, interrogates history, and deploys the figure of God. You can find out more about Fady Joudah, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fady-joudah Additional Notes On Tea By: Fady Joudah In Cairo a boy’s balcony higher than a man’s deathbed. The boy is sipping tea, The view is angular like a fracture. Surrounding the bed, women in wooden chairs. They signal mourning with a scream. Family men on the street run up the stairs and drink raven tea. On the operating table in Solwezi a doctor watches a woman die. Tea while the anesthetic wears off, While the blade is waiting, tea. The doctor says the woman knows god is sleeping Outside heaven in a tent. God is a refugee dreaming of tea. Once upon a time an ocean married a sea to carry tea around. Land was jealous. So it turned into desert and gave no one wood for ships. And when ships became steel, Land turned into ice. And when everything melted, everything tasted like tea. Once upon a time there was a tea party in Boston. Tea, like history, is a non sequitur. I prefer it black. The Chinese drink it green. Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.
In episode 4 of season 2 of Ink Well, hosts Jasminne and Lupe Mendez chat with Palestinian poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah about his work and his poetry collection Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance.
Welcome back, dearest. In last week's episode, we spoke to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about activism, home, language, and so much more. In this episode, Lena brought to The Poet Salon Mahmoud Darwish's “To Our Land”. She was even kind enough to read it to us in the original Arabic. LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA is an American poet, writer, and translator of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize for Arab in Newsland, and the author of Water & Salt, a book of poems from Red Hen Press published in April 2017, which won the Washington State Book Award. You can follow her on Twitter @LKTuffaha. Palestinian MAHMOUD DARWISH was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France (excerpted from the Poetry Foundation). FADY JOUDAH has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine. REFERENCES "To Our Land" by Mahmoud Darwish, English translation by Fady Joudah; Palestinian Deceleration of Independence; "A Conversation With Fady Joudah" (Kenyon Review) "Remembering Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish 10 years after his death" (The National, August 2018)
In his new poem, Fady Joudah explores questions about exile, suffering and the language of nation states.
Fady Joudah is a doctor, a poet and the son of Palestinian refugees. And in so labeling him, I run the risk of doing exactly the sort of categorizing he and his writing resist. Fady is deeply suspicious of the way linguistic habits, packaged narratives and institutional norms buttress social inequities and occasional iniquity. So what's a practicing doctor and serious poet to do? We discussed how Fady responds to the challenge in both of his vocations. Including readings from Fady's books “The Earth in the Attic,” “Alight,” and “Textu.”
Joshua Landis and Suzette Grillot discuss the 2014 State of the Union address and some of the foreign policy objectives President Obama outlined in Tuesday night’s speech. Later, a conversation about migration and identity with Iranian-American novelist Laleh Khadivi, and Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah.
Abraham Verghese, Fady Joudah, and Mark Johnson address consciousness and modes of witnessing conscience by discussing how conscientious action presents itself on a day to day basis. (November 9, 2012)
Fady Joudah and Ghassan Zaqtan discuss Palestinian poetry with Ilya Kaminsky.
Literary discussion featuring readings by poets Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa.
Literary discussion featuring readings by poets Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa.