I have recently fallen in love with poetry chapbooks. I love how you can read them in one sitting (or, like me, in bed before turning in for the night), and I love how the compact, themed format packs a gut-wrenching, mind-expanding, heart-squeezing punch, in just a handful of poems.
Keep This to Yourself (Button Poetry, 2020) is one such chapbook that packs such a punch—well multiple punches, actually—as in it, McCadden documents and explores the loss of her brother to an opioid overdose. The poems are gorgeous and haunting in their depictions of that loss and grief, the family unit, and the drug epidemic at large.
The second poem in the collection, a prose poem called “Portraits of the Family as a Definition” is absolute genius. The numbered entries riff off of the dictionary definition of the word “soon” to convey the pain and grief of a family struggling to understand addiction and overdose.
The church bells ringing meant that another of his friends would be buried soon. Soon we will all sit down to dinner. Soon after the last time they gave him the money, he came clean.
And so on with soon the poem moves, through examples of how this word infiltrated the family’s lives and understanding of her brother’s troubled life.
I love the poem “The Mother Talks to Her Son about Her Heart,” which made me cry. I admit, it doesn’t take a lot to make me cry (a good friend once said I cry if the wind blows), and I am a sucker for poems about motherhood, but this poem begins steady and gets heavier and heavier until you cannot help but burst just as the mother’s heart surely burst when her son died. In this persona poem, we meet an adoptive mother with a heart condition, who gives us metaphor after metaphor of her heart’s holes and flaws, its mendings and stitchings:
In the lumber yard of the heart, the materials are strange—Teflon, like I said, for the hole and a valve from a cow to seal the doorway. Over and over, I shore this place up.
How her heart was closed but also open, “like a summer cottage” where “the light is bright and warm.” How, talking to her son: “You were supposed to come home.” But, of course, he never did. I won’t spoil this poem by giving away the amazing ending here.
Other notable poems include the ones called “reverse overdose” one through six, which are scattered throughout the collection. They are nuggets of insight that really bring into focus her brother’s life and struggles, but from reverse (think The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is ironic because Button is the name of the poetry publisher). If read together as a standalone group of poems, though, they tell the tight, brief story of her brother’s life in reverse of his addiction. I have never seen anything quite like this in a chapbook; it is almost like a chapbook within a chapbook: a micro-chapbook!
In addition to the subject matter and styles covered, McCadden is masterful with her language. Her similes and metaphors are fresh and sharp—sharp as grief comes on a windy day, sharp as my favorite line in the book, from the poem “Losing”:
I keep / a jar of nails like a bouquet of denial.
Oof. This poet’s broken heart and fine, fine writing. I urge you to read this small but mighty book. You will be moved. Probably to tears, like me. But isn’t that the point of poetry? To punch you, to make you feel? We need poets like McCadden to turn trauma into art, to make us grieve for not only her brother, but for the 72,000 lives lost to the opioid crisis.
Kerrin McCadden is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2014), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Vermont Book Award. An NEA Fellow and Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award winner, her work has also been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, The Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Arts Endowment Fund. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and recently in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at Montpelier High School and is the Associate Director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place. She lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
Samantha Kolber has received a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Vermont Poetry Society prize, and her manuscript “Jewel Tones” was a semifinalist with the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s 2019 First Book Prize. She received her MFA from Goddard College and completed post-grad work at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. Originally from New Jersey, she lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books and is the Poetry Series Editor at Rootstock Publishing. You can find her poems in many journals, anthologies, and online. Her chapbook, “Birth of a Daughter” is forthcoming September 1, 2020, with Kelsay Books.
Samantha Kolber has received a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Vermont Poetry Society prize, and her manuscript “Jewel Tones” was a semifinalist with the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s 2019 First Book Prize. She received her MFA from Goddard College and completed post-grad work at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. Originally from New Jersey, she lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books and is the Poetry Series Editor at Rootstock Publishing. You can find her poems in many journals, anthologies, and online. Her chapbook, “Birth of a Daughter” is forthcoming September 1, 2020, with Kelsay Books.
It’s fitting that I needed to sit outdoors amid squirrels and finches and summer humidity, to sweat a little, as I embarked on this review of Nickole Brown’s chapbook, To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a prayer, praise song, and plea that calls on readers to recognize our connection with and responsibility to “the animals with whom [we] share this land.” *
It’s perhaps fitting as well that I would sketch its trajectory while eating potato chips and sipping Sweet Baby Jesus porter. Nickole, who first discovered poetry in a summer workshop midway through high school, describes the surfeit of verse in her childhood this way: “I was raised on the literary equivalent of grease and plastic—if you don’t count the King James, there wasn’t anything to read in the house but Cosmo or maybe a potato chip bag or two.”* That early absence hasn’t stopped her from becoming an accomplished poet, editor, and teacher; her Southern, often hardscrabble childhood providing a wellspring of experiences and insights integral to her success.
I first learned about Nickole’s poetry from poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar Brown who suggested I read Sister, back then in its original edition from Red Hen Press (2007). In this first collection, Nickole navigates the terrain of childhood sexual abuse through a conversation in poems that she’s been unable to have directly with her sister due to the distance between them. It’s a journey she describes as a novel-in-poems but that reads more like a collective memoir-in-poems.
To Those Who Were Our First Gods reflects several stylistic throughlines from Sister and Nickole’s subsequent book, Fanny Says, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother. As was true in those poems, the speaker in First Gods is in constant conversation—with the Lord, with Samson, with Mary Oliver, with the animals she yearns to hear speak to her, and with the readers themselves. This is illustrated in these opening lines of the chapbook’s longest poem, “Against Despair, The Kid Goat,”
Reader, meet the two women who sunk everything they had into taking in broken animals—
This poem combines Brown’s engaging practice of embodiment with what she refers to as “an oral culture of bossy, storytelling women who always had something to tell you or something to tell you to do,” * her speaker leading the reader through the sacrament of imagining their own bodies in the motions of these two women.
Thus the reader is directed “to be / those two,” and “to try, / to always try, despite the odds.” The poem continues, “Reader, I want you tired, every joint / in your body stiff and worn.” And after the kid goat has a seizure, it directs, “Now, use your arms” then “push together the furred slits / of his lids,” and later, “Now, get on your knees”, say his name (Peanut) while you “stroke his scrawny / goat neck.”
The yearning, so much a part of Brown’s poetry and often amplified by repetition, is also here, as it is at the end of the first poem, “A Prayer to Talk to Animals”:
Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow on the air I taste but cannot name. I want to open my mouth and know the exact flavor of what’s to come. I want to open my mouth and sound a language that calls all language home.
The concept of home is another throughline that persists from Brown’s earlier work. “But now [she’s] writing about animals, who, because of us, increasingly either don’t have a home left or find that home spoiled. *
My favorite poem, the one that made me grin and blush, then stop reading so I could call friends to read it to them, is the middle poem of the nine in the chapbook: “Self Portrait as Land Snail.” As the speaker describes the options the land snail has for both solitary and companion procreation (the latter being the better option, the speaker asserts), Brown’s distinctive voice rises from the page:
I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried—this is no metaphor but scientific fact—a telum amoris—literally, aweapon of love—
[…]
Cupid’s got nothing on this mollusk congress, and because you know how snails go, the foreplay is slow— slow, slow, slow—my kind of sex—
This poem is deftly placed at the fulcrum of the manuscript.
To Those Who Were Our First Gods also provides plenty to study in terms of structural elements. There’s the effective and moving narrative arc, the first poem expressing a yearning to speak to animals book-ended by the last poem which asks instead to understand animals and speak for them.
There are a range of forms, from poems in a single verse, familiar vessels for the prayer and elegy they convey, to ones organized in sections, and a poem in couplets. This latter form is perhaps symbolic of the contrasting styles of the two lesbian poets in conversation within its stanzas: Mary Oliver with her quiet reverence of nature and Nickole who “speak[s] in a queer, Southern trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, and in desperate need of saving.” *
But don’t let me mislead you into thinking that To Those Who Were Our First Gods offers only more of the same distinct voice and accessible, engaging poetry you’ll find in her previous books—although that would be reason enough to click “Add to Cart.” There is something new here too: a heightened sense of immediacy, an urgency that pulses from the lines. With this work, Nickole Brown has moved from subjects long known—her sister and grandmother, her Southern upbringing— to a territory she was warned against when she was growing up, that of the animal and wild.
When sharing this chapbook’s origin story with Jen Sammons at Oxford American, * Brown explained that soon after she revealed a long-held wish to have “gone into environmental conservation and worked to save animals,” her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, pointed out that it wasn’t too late for her to fulfill that wish. Nickole started her study by reading books and observing animals at a nearby zoo “from a comfortable remove that’s not too unlike reading”—this from “a girl who left behind her body and became a book, and never had . . . gone outside much until [she] was forty.”
It was not until she immersed herself in the sweaty, smelly, mucky, heart-wrenching, yet rewarding work of volunteering at animal sanctuaries and wildlife rehabilitation centers that these poems surfaced. I suspect that an earlier Nickole Brown, before coming into her sexual identity and fully into her own body—gifted poet though she already was—would not have written these poems with the same intensity she achieves in To Those Who Were Our First Gods. I’m glad she wrote this chapbook when she did and can’t wait to read her related essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies—and whatever comes next.
Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years. Currently, she teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville where she periodically volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Title: To Those Who Were Our First Gods Author: Nickole Brown Winner of the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize 2018 Finalist for the Julie Suk Award ISBN 978-1-931307-39-0
Wendy DeGroat is the author of Beautiful Machinery (Headmistress Press) and is currently revising a documentary poetry manuscript about Grace Arents, a Progressive-era philanthropist and educator, and Grace’s companion, Mary Garland Smith. Wendy’s poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, Commonplace, the museum of americana, Rogue Agent,Rust + Moth, The Wild Word, and elsewhere.She is a librarian and mindfulness teacher in Richmond, Virginia, where she also curates poetryriver.org (a resource site for documentary poetry and for diversifying the poetry taught in high school and undergraduate classrooms), encourages writers to find inspiration in quirky historical artifacts found in libraries and archives, and serves as a small-group facilitator for Living the Richmond Pledge, a workshop that empowers participants to take an active role in ending racism in their communities.
Wendy DeGroat is the author of Beautiful Machinery (Headmistress Press) and is currently revising a documentary poetry manuscript about Grace Arents, a Progressive-era philanthropist and educator, and Grace’s companion, Mary Garland Smith. Wendy’s poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, Commonplace, the museum of americana, Rogue Agent,Rust + Moth, The Wild Word, and elsewhere.She is a librarian and mindfulness teacher in Richmond, Virginia, where she also curates poetryriver.org (a resource site for documentary poetry and for diversifying the poetry taught in high school and undergraduate classrooms), encourages writers to find inspiration in quirky historical artifacts found in libraries and archives, and serves as a small-group facilitator for Living the Richmond Pledge, a workshop that empowers participants to take an active role in ending racism in their communities.
Issam Zineh is a Los Angeles-born, Palestinian-American poet and scientist. He is author of the forthcoming chapbook “The Moment of Greatest Alienation” (Ethel Press, Spring 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Clockhouse, Fjords Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Nimrod, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Poetry Café (https://thepoetrycafe.online). Find him on Twitter @izineh.
Zeina Hashem Beck’s 3arabi Song is a collection of 17 poems of deep intimacy. The individual poems come together as an exploration of grief and joy. There is a tremendous sense of place and our relationship to it: longing, homecoming, comfort, exile, return. There is a specific version of discovery in this work. It is not quite sudden revelation. It is more closely what song often reveals as completely understood truth, if not yet articulated until that exact moment of utterance.
The collection opens with “You Fixed It,” a kind of ode that introduces key themes which appear throughout the remainder of the book. These issues—familial intimacy; private and collective sorrow; a distinct and simultaneously equivocal sense of identity (for example, in terms of relationship to one’s country); a very particular kind of steadfastness; the power of music to sustain (and subvert)—are only some of the vast richness that gets treatment throughout this engaging book.
These ideas are quietly but fully on display as the poem lists the ways in which the unnamed “you” overcomes the most existential of difficulties (often disguised as the domestic and the mundane). It is no accident that the first challenge is fundamentally one of orientation:
And if the compass broke you fixed it, fastened the pencil to it with a rubber band
The struggles of daily living accrue, and it is in the how of this accumulation where Hashem Beck’s genius lies—the musical coexistence of beauty and struggle brought to bear on the page (and through the spoken word). The poem’s ending is the point of departure for everything that comes in later poems:
and if your sorrow hardened you fixed it by dipping it in sea water, and if your country hardened, if your country hardened you fixed it by dipping it in song.
3arabi Song not only rewards through its language and imagery, but in its poetic forms. The collection’s five ghazals skillfully contend with ancestry and remembrance (“Ghazal: The Dead”), displacement (“Ghazal: This Hijra,” “Ghazal: Back Home”), and personal and national identity (“This Country: Ghazal for Abdel Halim Hafez,” “Ghazal: Samira Tawfiq Sings a Love Poem”). Hashem Beck beautifully memorializes the renowned Arabic singer and actress Sabah (“…Not mourning with a ‘u’.” Yes, the thing that shines.”) in “Pantoum for Sabbouha,” one of several poems in which she pays tribute to divas of the Arab world, including Fairuz, Umm Kulthum, and others:
I imitated the walk, the hands back then, the way she dared to say batata. ‘I had no fear of age, of death,’ she could’ve said in an interview, ‘No fear of men.’
3arabi Song is enhanced by, but not beholden to, the traditional forms. Perhaps two of the most interesting poems in the collection in terms of both content and structure are “Listen” and “Naming Things.” In “Listen,” we find ourselves part of a family dealing in real-time with the possibility their son and brother has been killed by an explosion at the local mosque. The imagery is stunning:
It explodes, the mosque, this Friday, the laundry, the domes of boys’ arms, the sumac … The Chiclets in the street.
… The sea, still. The children, the figs almost bursting.
Additionally, the power of the poem generates in no small part from its form. Centered on the page, the poem’s two sections appear as two hourglasses stacked upon one another, each mirroring the other, each section narrowing to a point and expanding again. The composition excellently serves as visual metaphor for the pinpoint focus that can occur during the instant of tragedy, while symbolizing the disintegration of time and the vacillation and alternative realities we create during times of trauma to avoid acceptance.
In “Naming Things (for refugees, September 2015),” Hashem Beck deals with the issue of our times, the “our” being at minimum the global diaspora, a population that continues to grow predominantly due to ravages of endless war and the climate crisis. Formally, this long poem centered on the refugee crisis connects its stanzas through repetition. Lyrical power and drama are amplified by this approach (below are the first and last lines of the initial stanzas):
Angels— we saw them on the railway,
[. . .] on their wings.
Wings—
[. . .] about our cat
Cats—
[ . . .] refuge refuse bins
Country—
It also uses English, written Arabic, transliterated Arabic, and “Arabizi”, which reinforces the inextricable relationship between the multiple cultures and sensibilities in these poems:
My hips— are heavy are child-bearing child-killing are lover do not fit those train windows these fences this escape this
Ra7eel— so much in my 3arabi depends on ra7eel on
3awda— a5 ya baba
And while not radically experimental in form, “Naming Things” is innovative in how it brings together formal elements and languages to create an unrelenting litany of harmony and disruption that undergirds the subject matter.
As I read and re-read 3arabi Song, I found it to be so many things simultaneously. I wondered about the collection’s origin story, its idiosyncrasies, its original reception, and its relevance several years after publication. I had a chance to sit down with Zeina Hashem Beck virtually to exchange on some of these questions.
Title: 3Arabi Song Author: Zeina Hashem Beck 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner Cover art by Yazan Hallwani ISBN: 978-1-931307-30-
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her second full-length collection is Louder than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017). She’s also the author of two chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Dubai. www.zeinahashembeck.com
Issam Zineh is a Los Angeles-born, Palestinian-American poet and scientist. He is author of the forthcoming chapbook “The Moment of Greatest Alienation” (Ethel Press, Spring 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Clockhouse, Fjords Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Nimrod, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Poetry Café (https://thepoetrycafe.online). Find him on Twitter @izineh.
“As I read and re-read 3arabi Song, I found it to be so many things simultaneously. I wondered about the collection’s origin story, its idiosyncrasies, its original reception, and its relevance several years after publication. I had a chance to sit down with Zeina Hashem Beck virtually to exchange on some of these questions.” —Issam Zineh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Issam Zineh: 3arabi Song is a work of deep relevance. There is an authority that derives from lived experience. Can you talk about your experience in originally putting this collection together?
Zeina Hashem Beck: Most of these poems came to me after August 2013, when two mosques exploded in my hometown of Tripoli, Lebanon, and my cousin was shot on the street. He didn’t survive. I was also watching what was happening in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. So first came some poems of grief, but I didn’t want the collection to be just about that. I find a lot of joy in Arabic music, and back then I listened to it as a kind of balm, and that’s how the music poems originated.
IZ: One of the noteworthy aspects of this collection is that there are multiple points of entry for the reader. I feel like you might have very different relationships with these poems depending on, for example, whether or not you grew up with Arabic culture. Can you comment on this generally – how you think the work might be deferentially experienced based on the presence or absence of cultural points of reference the reader brings to the poems?
ZHB: This wasn’t really something I thought about as I wrote 3arabi Song—I just followed the poems which came in waves, if I recall correctly. I simply needed to write these poems, so I wrote. Once I was closer to publication, I chose to include a “Notes” section in the end, to give a little bit of context to some of the pieces, as well as explain some words/expressions in Arabic for the reader who might not be familiar with the culture. I assume this was helpful, but I wonder now whether this was necessary; I think readers should be able to experience the poems regardless, and that they should also be able to google to know more. I’ve certainly done this for poems where the context or some references weren’t familiar to me.
Regarding reception, yes, I imagine the poems would resonate differently with different audiences. An Arab audience at a poetry reading, for example, would smile and nod in recognition, though this doesn’t mean that an audience not familiar with Arab culture wouldn’t be able to tap into the language of the poems.
IZ: There are aspects of these poems that seem like they have to be experienced to be fully appreciated. On the one hand, this book feels very local. It seems very particular to the “Arab experience”, to maybe even the expatriate or immigrant experience. On the other hand, it was selected from over 1700 manuscripts [editor’s note: 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner] , so it clearly has a universality to it. Can you talk about this balance between the “local” and the “global”? Did you have a sense that despite the specificity of the subject matter, the poems would appeal to a broad readership and resonance?
ZHB: As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t thinking about all this at the time of writing. I believe that when poems come from a true place, they resonate. Also, I’m not a big fan of universality because it usually means white; do people consider Paris, for example, a more “universal” city than Tripoli? And if so, then what assumptions lie under this? The universal is in the local.
IZ: And even then, it strikes me we have a problem of translation. I find Arabic figures of speech in particular nearly impossible to translate. There is gravity, drama, soulfulness, multiplicity to the language that is challenging to precisely capture in another language. And yet you do this in remarkable ways through context and poem notes. Talk about this linguistic challenge. Did you find it a challenge at all?
ZHB: A poem is always about some kind of translation for me, and I don’t see that as a problem, but rather a searching. And I’ve always existed between languages, so I was writing was felt real to me.
IZ: There is a video of you reading “Naming Things” during the Split This Rock Poetry Festival (2016), which completely opened this poem up for me, and by extension the entire collection. Specifically, there’s a kind of sacredness and implicit spirituality even in the common dialogue of the people that I think in some ways I took for granted growing up in an Arabic-speaking household. Then in hearing you perform, this really sort of unleashed the divine lexicon of Arabic expression. Can you talk about the importance of the spoken word in these poems? Do you think they gain something in particular from being read aloud?
ZHB: I don’t believe in divine languages. If I were to think of Arabic as divine, I wouldn’t be able to work with it. As for performing poetry, this is something I genuinely enjoy doing as a way of sharing and connecting. I also start reading a poem out loud the minute I start writing it, because I like to fill the room around me with the sounds of it. Reading it out loud is writing it.
IZ: I’m thinking of how even in conversational Arabic, there is common reference to the divine even in completely secular conversations. For example, the customary response to “How are you?” being “Thank God”. It strikes me that there is something built into the language that lends itself to certain explorations. You mentioned you have “always existed between languages.” Can you say more about how this has shaped your poetics?
ZHB: My mother language is Arabic, then comes French, then English at the age of 12. And even within the Arabic, there’s the spoken Lebanese dialect and the official Modern Standard Arabic (which was what we learnt at school, what we read in books, and even what we heard on TV in Arabic cartoons at the time). So to a certain extent, there’s always more than one language in my head and my sentences, and that’s not uncommon in Lebanon. English definitely became the language that’s easiest for me in terms of writing, and that’s probably because my university education was in English, though I think the spirit of my poems lies in how I personally use English and at times 3arabize it.
I keep wavering between almost-regret and oh-well when I think that I don’t write in Arabic, and I’ve recently been thinking about audience. Perhaps what’s important is the language of poetry, no matter what tool you’re using to reach it.
IZ: Some of the greatest musical icons of the Arab world show up in this book (Umm Kulthuum, Fairuz, Samira Tawfiq). These names are very familiar from my childhood and, I suspect, the childhoods of many but not all (perhaps not even most) of your readers. Can you talk about this construct and what you were hoping to accomplish by coming at the themes of this work from the angle of Arabic music?
ZHB: Arabic music gave me joy in a difficult time, and I found myself writing these tributes to singers I love. I don’t recall the first one I wrote, but it might have been the Umm Kulthum one. After that, I decided to continue with these tributes more deliberately, considering the singers’ lives, what their music invokes in me, and the current political moment. There’s always been a close relationship between poetry and music as art forms for me: they both sing, and they both have the capacity to move us almost immediately.
IZ:I came to engage with this remarkable collection reluctantly. I carried it with me throughout my house for days, assuring myself I would start reading it “today” – until today became a series of past events. In hindsight, I was nervous about what I would be asked to contend with. What would this work reveal about me – about my relationship to culture, to country, to family? Can you talk a bit about these themes in your work?
ZHB: Grief and joy. Loss and music. Exile and home.
I appreciate you describing what you went through before you started reading, and struggling with these thoughts can be a good interrogation.
IZ: Earlier this year, I came across an article in which Aarushi Punia contemplates the role of memory in Palestinian literature. Among its many functions, she writes of memory as “an act of protest and resistance.” She asserts that literature, then, “extends the resistive act of remembering and creates a sense of community through the narration of memory.” “Remembering,” she writes, “is an ethical act.” It is against this backdrop – memory (and by extension “song” as arguably the most poetic and defiant form of memory) as the difference between cultural (sometimes literal) life and death – that I entered 3arabi Song. A lot has happened in the world since the 2016 debut of 3arabi Song. Can you talk a bit about what you see as the role poetry has to play in this particular moment with respect to resistance, and even perhaps self-preservation?
ZHB: Memory is indeed important in 3arabi Song, but I would argue that in the case of Palestinian literature, it’s even more important. As a Lebanese, when I write about Tripoli, my hometown, I’m writing to remember my childhood and perhaps to mourn and celebrate certain events. But I can and I do go back to my Tripoli every year, whereas Palestinians are either incapable of going back to their stolen land or living under apartheid. Here, writing/remembering becomes even more of an act of survival and resistance, as Punia mentions, because there are forces literally conspiring to erase you. Many of the poems in 3arabi Song go beyond Lebanon, of course, so I understand where your analysis comes from, and I was certainly writing for Syria, Palestine, and Iraq to remember and resist.
As for the role of poetry, yes, I believe, in my heart of hearts, that poetry is subversive just by asking you to slow down and reconsider, reimagine. However, I’m afraid you’re catching me at a time where I’m struggling to tap into poetry. This has to do with what’s been happening in Lebanon for the past few months (a revolution started in October 2019, a major economic crisis now, attempts to crack down on free speech); I found myself overwhelmed by the news and unable to process anything through poems. I feel a little bit estranged, though I know that I’d eventually return.
IZ: Shortly after we initially connected, controversy emerged around the publisher of 3arabi Song which raised, among many issues, questions about reconciling the art itself and the platform that makes that art accessible. Would you care to comment?
ZHB: I thought a lot about whether or not to comment on this here. Shortly after you’d asked me for an interview, I learnt things about Rattle that don’t align with my values. I canceled a reading that was scheduled with the magazine and decided not to submit to it anymore. I wondered whether I should refrain from talking about my own chapbook. I wondered whether I should talk about it and not mention this at all: why shift the energy in this space that’s meant to celebrate my work, which shouldn’t be associated with Rattle’s moral failures? Weren’t many literary institutions problematic? I’m proud of my poems and shouldn’t be doing such mental labor (especially as an Arab woman living abroad) because of an editor’s decisions that I wasn’t aware of until recently. I also struggled with the fact that 3arabi Song was well-supported by Rattle when it was released. But what does it mean, when a magazine supports your work and the work of people you admire while at the same time gives space to pieces you find harmful? When it praises a poem written “for” a gay man from the perspective of the Pulse shooter, for example? I was angry I had to spend so much time troubled by this instead of writing poems or being with my kids or trying to process the goddamn collapse happening in my home country. Sadly, it seems this is a luxury that writers from marginalized communities writing in this language (or perhaps any official language) do not have. I’m not interested in idealizing or demonizing, but I ultimately decided to mention this so that other poets who don’t know, who perhaps like me come to poetry from outside the academia and the US, could consider, learn more, and decide.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her second full-length collection is Louder than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017). She’s also the author of two chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Dubai. www.zeinahashembeck.com
Issam Zineh is a Los Angeles-born, Palestinian-American poet and scientist. He is author of the forthcoming chapbook “The Moment of Greatest Alienation” (Ethel Press, Spring 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Clockhouse, Fjords Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Nimrod, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Poetry Café (https://thepoetrycafe.online). Find him on Twitter @izineh.
The Poetry Cafe 