Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis

13/05/2020

So thrilled to see Yael Segalovitz's translation of Aviva-No by Shimon Adaf (Alice James Books) on this list! I featured this book, and Yael's brilliant translation of poem #26, in episode 3 of .

The BTBA today named 15 finalists for its fiction and poetry prizes.

15/03/2020

Episode 7: Vahni Capildeo - Living Absences

Oscar Wilde’s 1887 novella The Canterville Ghost features an American family that has moved into a British estate that is haunted by a ghost. Of the new residents, the narrator observes: “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except of course, language.” The ghost tries his best to terrify the family, but they prove difficult to rattle. Perhaps this is because, as one of the American characters remarks, “we have no ruins and no curiosities.”

When I first moved to Oxford, I was awestruck daily—like Wilde’s Americans— by the visible traces of its deep history. In fact, just a short walk from my office in central Oxford, you’ll find yourself at the site of a partly ruined medieval castle. The castle mound was built in the early 11th century and incorporated the tenth-century Saxon structure St. George’s Tower, which you can still climb today. You would be hard pressed to find any material evidence of the 10th and 11th centuries in the United States. Much of it was erased and replaced by colonial history. It will take another century for Wilde’s Americans to understand this. By comparison, such remnants are commonplace in Oxford, and in England generally. But these traces too only represent the past that is allowed to remain visible.

Vahni Capildeo, who was born in Trinidad and studied at Oxford, explores the layered, polyphonous histories of the places we inhabit and pass through in their recent book Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Capildeo’s book opens with a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the items in the Ashmolean Museum’s permanent collection, part of their book’s rich investigation into the material and immaterial persistence of the past. Last December, I met with Capildeo in London to talk about history as a reckoning of erasures, translation, and roses.

Poem read in this episode:

“Heirloom Rose, for Maya” from Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018) https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784105549

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-7-living-absences-0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Castle

In this conversation with Trinidadian Scottish poet Vahni Capildeo, author of Venus as a Bear (2018), we explore the layered, polyphonous histories of the places we pass through and inhabit.

15/03/2020

Episode 8: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh - Death Leaves Signs

The final episode of the series features the work of the Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Yousif is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where he is writing about conceptualisations of time and containment in Arabic and English “Refugee Literature.”His poems and translations in both English and Arabic have appeared in numerous journals, including Modern Poetry in Translation and An-Nahar, one of Lebanon’s leading daily newspapers.

As writer-in-residence for the Refugee Hosts Project, he contributes poetry, translations, and essays that draw from his childhood in and visits to Baddawi camp. Located in North Lebanon, Baddawi camp has been home to Palestinian refugees since the 1950s and in more recent years to refugees from Syria. In this episode, recorded in Oxford, we discuss writing the camp, poetry’s ways of seeing, and the signs that death leavesin the camp to remember, revisit, and translate.

Over the past six months, I have enjoyed meeting poets from around the world to discuss how they write about crisis. It has been deeply rewarding for me, not only as someone who teaches and writes about poetry, but also as someone who turns to poetry in difficult times. Thank you for listening and being a part of this conversation.

Poem read in this episode:

“In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds” (https://refugeehosts.org/2017/05/17/in-arrival-feet-flutter-like-dying-birds/)

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-8-death-leaves-signs

https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/yousif-m-qasmiyeh

https://refugeehosts.org/writer-in-residence/

This episode, the final one of this season, features the work of Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, author-in-residence at Refugee Hosts.

13/03/2020

Episode 6: Tahel Frosh - The .01 Percent

In 2011, a series of protests spread across Israel sparked by rising housing costs, the increased cost of living, and a widening gap between rich and poor. The makeshift tents that covered Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard became one of the iconic images of this protest, lending it the sobriquet “the tent protests.” Israeli poets, like Tahel Frosh, were notably active during this period, organizing public readings and distributing their poetry online and for free.

A few years later, in 2014, Tahel published her debut collection Avarice to wide acclaim. In Hebrew, the word for “avarice” is “betsa,” which derives from the root meaning “to break off, cut and tear apart.” Its relation to plunder, greed, and violently ill-gotten gains recurs in a number of biblical texts, but in later Hebrew texts it also refers to the breaking of bread before a blessing and to the idea of compromise, like in the English idiom “splitting the difference.”In this episode, which we recorded in Oxford, Tahel and I revisit the making of Avarice and the questions that it raises about the value of poetry and the complicated role that money plays in our lives.

Poem read in this episode:

“Dark Country” (Erets afela) from Avarice (2014, Mossad Bialik), English translation by Adriana X. Jacobs. https://arcade.stanford.edu/dibur/money-so-much-money-reading-tahel-frosh’s-avarice

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-6-01-percent

https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/28007/Tahel-Frosh

In this episode, Israeli poet Tahel Frosh talks to us about her debut poetry collection Betsa (Avarice, 2014), financial crisis, and the value of culture.

11/03/2020

Episode 5: Diana Khoi Nguyen - The Cut Out

Many fine books of poetry came out in the United States last year, but one that stood out in particular was Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing), which was a finalist for the National Book Awards for Poetry. About the book, the poet Terrance Hayes has written, “These poems sing to and for the ghosts of identity, history and culture; they sing like a ghost who looks from the window or waits by the door.”

Like Shimon Adaf’s Aviva-No, which featured in episode 3, Diana’s book also addresses the death of a sibling. And like Adaf, Diana also searched a way of writing about her grief. This seeking prompted a series of formal experimentations, many of them taking shape around the image of the family photograph.

Ghost of acknowledges that grief can be incredibly isolating, and that one’s grief is not always translatable or comparable to another’s. At the same time, the poems of Ghost Of also explore how the grief state can open up a wider dialogue with the past—and with the voices that lie both within but also outside of the frame of our family pictures and memories. And it is in that space that we can connect with the grief of others and where we can share our losses. Diana is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver and on the eve of her winter break, we connected over Skype to talk about the perseverance of eels, technologies of printing, and how poetry allows for the possibility that our dead will remain present with us in one form or another.

Poem read in this episode:

“A woman may not be a safe place” from Ghost Of (2018, Omnidawn Publishing) https://aaww.org/a-woman-may-not-be-a-safe-place-two-poems-by-diana-khoi-nguyen/

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-5-cut-out

https://www.omnidawn.com/product/ghost-ofdiana-khoi-nguyen/

In this episode, I talk to US poet Diana Khoi Nguyen (Ghost Of, 2018) about the perseverance of eels, technologies of printing, and how poetry allows for the possibility that our dead will remain present with us in one form or another.

09/03/2020

Episode 4: Laura Sims - Survival Takes Time

Although zombies are still typically encountered on the big and small screens and in novels, this episode will continue to explore the fascination that zombies hold for poets, and particularly in today’s poetry, which is showing signs of a serious zombie turn. In this episode, I travel to New Jersey to talk to the US poet and novelist Laura Sims (https://www.laurasims.net), whose most recent poetry collection, Staying Alive, was published in 2016 by Ugly Duckling Presse—and inspired the name of this series. She’s also an unabashed fan of the popular zombie show The Walking Dead, and readers of her series Walking Dead Love Songs will find traces of its characters and ever-winding plot there. Zombies typically can’t do more than feed and groan and roam, so Sims’s poems focus, as most zombie texts do, on the living and their survival. In her words, “Survival/ Takes time.” But while the living race against the clock to salvage what is left for them to rebuild their lives, zombies, on the other hand, have all the time in the world.

In this episode, I travel to New Jersey to talk to Laura about our favorite zombie show, the role of art—if there is a role for art—in the post-apocalypse, and her bestselling debut novel Looker, which was published in late 2018 by Scribner.

Poems read in this episode:

“Walking Dead Love Song #32” (The New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/152382/walking-dead-love-song-32

“When the train” (Conjunctions 67) http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/laura-sims-c67

“The city teems” (Staying Alive, UDP)

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-4-survival-takes-time

https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/staying-alive/

http://www.laurasims.net/books/looker/

Interview with US poet Laura Sims, author of Staying Alive (2016) and Looker (2018)

07/03/2020

Episode 3: Shimon Adaf - A Language for Grief

Shimon Adaf grew up in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which lies in close proximity to the Gazan border. He began writing and publishing poetry at a young age, and his first collections of poetry, The Monologue of Icarus and What I Thought was Shadow is the Real Body, were published in 1997 and 2002 to wide acclaim. His parents had immigrated to Israel from Morocco, and this background, as well as his religious upbringing, resonates in his early poems. But Adaf resisted the expectation of readers and critics that he draw exclusively from his Mizrachi, or North African roots. As he once put it, “I felt that they wanted me to put some couscous and harissa into my poems, and here I am writing about Greek mythology and not Sderot.”

In 2004, Shimon published his first novel, and for the next several years, he continued to publish short stories and novels, many of them showcasing his ability to work within various genres, notably science fiction and fantasy. Readers of his poetry would have discerned a strong affinity between his poems and these new narratives, and Adaf certainly has spoken of their “convergence,” as he puts it on several occasions. In an interview with the writer Lavie Tidhar, Adaf described his understanding of poetry in terms that draw from science fiction: “For me,” Adaf says, “poetry is about what you can't do with words. You stretch your capabilities of expression and they are not enough, dark enigmas are floating in space, like alien fleets, beyond your reach.”

It appeared that he had made a decisive shift to prose, but then in 2008, a catastrophic personal event—the suddenly death of his beloved, older sister— brought him back to poetry.

In this episode, which we recorded in Tel Aviv, Shimon revisits the circumstances that shaped the composition of Aviva-Lo (Aviva-No, 2009, Dvir Press), his third collection of poetry, published in 2009. The title refers to his sister, whose name was Aviva, but Aviva also refers to spring-time Hebrew, which carries with it associations to renewal and rebirth, which the “no” of the title appears to negate. But “no” can also be understood as a declaration of refusal, a rejection of Aviva’s death. Indeed, while the poems of Aviva-No acknowledge the finality of death, they simultaneously explore the possibility of an afterlife in poetry. With references to Patti Smith, King Lear, and the rituals of Jewish mourning, Shimon shares with us how he found, through poetry, a language for his grief.

This episode features a reading of poem number 26 in Yael Segalovits’s English translation. Segalovits’s translation of Aviva-No is forthcoming with Alice James Press.

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-3-language-grief

https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/3179/Shimon-Adaf

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/the-convergence-between-poetry-and-the-fantastic-a-conversation/

https://www.alicejamesbooks.org/bookstore/aviva-no

Interview with Israeli poet Shimon Adaf, author of Aviva-Lo (Aviva-No, 2009).

05/03/2020

Episode 2: Sasha Dugdale - We Grow out of the Past

Episode 2 of Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis features the work of British poet, editor, and translator Sasha Dugdale.

I first became acquainted with Sasha during her tenure as editor of Modern Poetry in Translation (http://modernpoetryintranslation.com). In that time, Sasha oversaw the production of a digital archive of the journal as well as an anthology titled Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe Books, 2016), which she co-edited with Peter and Helen Constantine. Her own translations from the Russian include the works of the poets Elena Shvarts, Marina Stepanova, and Marina Tsvetaeva. And like other poets who translate, echoes of these poets find their way into her own poems.

Last September, I traveled to Brighton, a coastal city in southeast England, to talk to Sasha about the ghosts that inhabit her third collection, Red House, published in 2011 by Carcanet Press. In this episode, we talk about the experiences that shaped this collection, specifically Sasha’s longtime engagement, through translation, with Russian-language poetry and her reflections on the breakdown of the Soviet Union. We address the possibility of translation to offer an afterlife to past voices and texts, as well as Sasha’s current interest in “deformations” of the ballad form as a continuation of her work in poetry and translation.

[Correction: In the podcast, I refer to the anthology Dugdale edited as “Cataclysms of Crisis.” The correct title is “Centres of Cataclysm.”]

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-2-we-grow-out-past
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/centres-of-cataclysm-294
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781906188023

Interview with UK poet and translator Sasha Dugdale, author of Red House (2011) and Joy (2017)

03/03/2020

Episode 1: Mike Smith - Like a Zombie Life

My first guest is the US poet Mike Smith, whose most recent collection Pocket Guide to Another Earth includes a section of zombie poems. With Brandon Nelson, Mike curates Zombie Poetry Project (http://www.zombiepoetryproject.com), which they describe as “an experiment in machine-assisted composition.” From TV shows to video games, zombies circulate widely in contemporary popular culture. But for all of their entertainment value, their appearance also coincides with and respond to times of global conflict and crisis—epidemics, migration, climate change, the global economic crisis, to name a few—and the fears and anxieties that they provoke. In this episode, which we recorded in a sound studio in Memphis, Mike and I talked about zombie poetry, why Trump’s tweets improve through zombification, and Mike’s memoir And There was Evening and There was Morning, a series of essays on family, illness, and grief.

This episode features poems that appear in Mike Smith’s Pocket Guide to Another Earth, published in 2018 by Dos Madres Press, as well as an excerpt from And There was Evening and There was Morning, also published in 2018 by WTAW Press.

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/episode-1-zombie-life
https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/pocket-guide-to-another-earth-by-mike-smith/
https://www.wtawpress.org/product-page/and

Interview with the US poet Mike Smith, author of Pocket Guide to Another Earth (2018) and And There was Evening and There was Morning (2018).

27/02/2020

Introducing "Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis":

The year 2016 brought us Brexit and the results of the US presidential election. As an American living in the United Kingdom, I was hearing from both sides of the pond that we were living in a time of crisis. But this crisis took different forms on each side, and found different forms of expression in popular culture and art. As someone who teaches and translates poetry, I was particularly attuned to how poets were responding to these events and their aftermath. As someone who loves poetry, I also find that I often turn to poetry in times of stress, conflict, and anxiety. I don’t expect poetry to bring relief or consolation, but I find there the words that I cannot say.

Each episode of Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis features a conversation with a contemporary poet and explore the relation between poetry and crisis in their work. In order, I will be talking to Mike Smith (Pocket Guide to Another Earth), Sasha Dugdale (The Red House, Joy), Shimon Adaf (Aviva-No), Laura Sims (Staying Alive, Looker), Diana Khoi Nguyen (Ghost Of), Tahel Frosh (Avarice), Vahni Capildeo (Venus as a Bear), and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (Refugee Hosts). From Denver, Colorado to Tel Aviv, Israel, our conversations will address modern crises—from the political to the environmental—as well as personal crises, like the death of a sibling or the loss of a home. I am interested in probing how poets respond to crisis and the forms and language that they use to address it. In these episodes, we also consider the question of poetry’s relevance in times of crisis, and what poetry can offer—be it wisdom, critique or consolation—to our understanding of crisis.

Bringing together works from the United Kingdom, United States, and Israel/Palestine, I am interested in how poetry engages crisis not only to alarm and warn, but also to deliver messages of resilience and sometimes even hope in the face of crisis. Post-apocalyptic, disaster, and zombie narratives hold a broad popular appeal, but underlying these stories are real, personal fears and anxieties about the present and future of humanity. In this series, I explore poetry’s engagement with contemporary events and history and how, in doing so, it wrestles with the question of its value to humanity and its very future in uncertain times.

I hope to be in dialogue with you, dear listeners, so please share your thoughts on these episodes in the comments. I’m also very interested in hearing about poets you would like me to consider for a possible season 2 of Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis.

27/02/2020

Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis is an original podcast series produced and hosted by Adriana X. Jacobs (University of Oxford), with sound editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and featuring music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund.

You can listen to the episodes via Oxford University Podcasts and iTunes.

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/staying-alive-poetry-and-crisis

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/id1460779285
For US listeners: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/staying-alive-poetry-and-crisis/id1460779285

The name for this podcast comes from Laura Sims’s poetry collection Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Press, 2016) and the Bee Gees (“Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’/ And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive”).

‎Courses · 2019