Taking The Time To Re-Discover Poetry, After Its Extinction: Reflections On Finding Words Against All Odds

Interview with Nasser Rabah, here.

Very intimidating to speak of poetry without a license—ie not being part of that culture. But the poetry coming out of Gaza is something that needs a different name.

One wonders: How can there be any poetry coming out of Gaza, leave alone poetry of a quality long extinct in the English language. One of the countless casualties of the western trans-humanist epoch, peaking with “Covid,” was human expressionism.

Can it be posited that poetry is the only real enemy of trans humanism?

You may recall, whether I was “right” or “wrong,” how strongly I reacted to this little girl’s poetry, and the remarkable juxtaposition of:

”They killed my mother;

I used to be beautiful.”

Not having a ‘license,’ I wondered if people who understand and/or work with poetry were equally struck, and if so, what could result anyway? As the girl, who name is Rehab, says: They killed her mother. What does anything else amount to, ever, after the loss of a mother?

These are the questions I’m wondering about. “Poetry” vs. Last words Before Words End—something like that.

Nobody can ever quantify, prove, or disprove poetry, but the Russians under Stalin fought valiantly to preserve its powers. Stalin himself famously, paradoxically, helped immortalize Russia’s poets by way of his thin-skinned and obsessive persecutions.

The Russians committed their poems to memory, generally, passing them down to younger generations, or to be eventually written down and published in the west.

Irina Ratushinskaya, in a labor camp, used a needle to write her poems on bars of soap, that could be rubbed away if detected. Also on cigarette paper.

“Little by little, life was transformed into a constant wait for death.”

—Anna Akhmatova, My Half Century

We all seem to be in some kind of run up to this, except globalism favors the slow, multi-directional kill with no apparent executioners. So no, I do not think Gaza is altogether separate and unique; I think we are all in a globalist kill-mill, but it takes far more brutal form there. The idea that people who “saw through” Covid can not even identify Gaza as the very next NWO project after Covid—run by the same Anaconda—is truly mind-boggling, to me. But that’s reality: The “support Israel” OP trapped countless “conservatives,” Christians, and even, to my abject horror, AIDS dissidents and vaccine fighters. Our roads parted—there’s nothing to say. It’s not political, it’s spiritual, or maybe even simpler than that. Daryll Cooper once posted these simple words on X:

”It’s still grown ups killing kids.”

Conservatives seem to think, or fear, that it’s Marxist virtue signaling to “support Palestine,” but they used to be the ones who objected to(unlike so many factions of the western left) communism’s killing fields. In addition, a Soros driven, NWO world socialism OP is Trojan-horsed inside the support Palestine movement. “They’re funneling us,” as one of you wrote in the comments section yesterday.

Prior to 2023 I would have assumed everybody I “knew” opposed child sacrifice.

I have digressed.

Bottom line is that globalism has an opposite. The opposite of globalism is beauty—and it can still be found in the most unlikely places.

Our friend Ammiel Alkalay—polyglot, poet, author, teacher, translator— has made himself into one of the human bridges between Gaza and the “west,” where, if we were not so bombarded, traumatized, and distracted, we would long since have paid attention to his phenomenal and unpretentious labors of love in this field.

He is too humble to bring it up, unless you ask him; But he does sometimes send me his essays, from The Middle East Eye. Here is the latest one, Cowardice and Complicity: Washington’s Special Relationship With Israel

Now to the poetry; This is one poet, and one collection, Ammiel, who speaks Arabic (and many other languages) translated, with two colleagues.

I went looking for poems by Nasser Rabah, and those I found, happily, were translated by Ammiel. I found them extraordinary, which is what prompted this writing. Here are three—the first one is called “Early Absence.”

You can hear Ammiel read it, here.

Here’s another, “Nocturnal Spirits:”

Link with Ammiel’s reading here.

Here’s a third, “Water Thirsty For Water:”

Link here.

Reflections On The Culture Of Poetry In The West

I “love poetry” but have no formal relationship to its circles, and have always believed that all poetry “circles” would be closed to me, due to my unsophisticated political stripes, AIDS denialism, hostilities of the western “left,” etc. I was pre-occupied, for some 35 years, with the thrashing whale that was AIDS Inc and became the Covid Reich, and had only time to understand a few strands of poetry that felt non threatening to me: Tranströmer, Harry Martinson, the Russian Acmeists (Tsvetaeva, et al,) heart-on-sleeve Yevtushenko (“You who are so revoltingly normal, you are abnormal from birth”) and maybe a few poems by Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, or, Robert Frost. Americans of my generation, if they spoke of poetry at all, seemed to insist upon beginning and ending with poets like Allen Ginsburg or Charles Bukowski, who felt …threatening to me, even when I could see in some cases, the case for their talents.

But I also sensed, always, “the anaconda.” The big agenda: Anti-family, traumatized hyper-sexuality, hatred of women, debauchery, and so on.

Ginsburg being part of the pedophile agenda, was out of the question. (He sought, but failed to secure, Tranströmer’s approval.)

I’ve cited in the past, Mickey Z’s definitive article on the matter, which also exposed Beat hero and worshipped wife killer William Burroughs, and here you can read the standard intellectual poetic apologia, revealing precisely the trail of Gods that alienated me so many years ago.

My love of poetry was an undernourished stub of a plant, just another form of what felt like non belonging.

One rare moment when I transcended it was when Lewis Lapham* commissioned me to write about Tranströmer, after he (at long last) won the Nobel Prize, in 2015.

That article, “An Artist In The North,” is here.

(*Why I have failed to write any kind of appreciation after his death, for Lewis Lapham, is due to my refusal to face how I feel about it. I still intend to break through this unprocessed grief and try to describe how what an ally he was, for me, though he invited me to pilot the very article that would crash my career, and life, through no fault of his. His memory lives on in my eldest cat Lewis, named after him.)

Speaking of grief.

It’s been many years since I was able to grieve anything. This has been the state of things since 2020. Our vanished world would have to be resurrected first, the sounds of our friends and loved ones returned, to break up this dead silence, where we turn to “social media” to find contexts for thought and expression.

We were not even allowed to bury our dead—literally. Now we know why this timeless ritual is so essential. My father, who died in 2020, had no burial—and online memorial services do not mobilize grief, for the record. But we did all we could, and now we live in a milky aftermath, as if they had amputated all that came before 2020—like a continental shelf carrying all our feelings and memories. How is it people fail to recognize the same spirit beast behind it all?

I don’t know.

—Marwan Makhoul

—Refaat Alareer, “I Am You.”

Both poems quoted here.

We have every right to emphasize what we all think “matters.”

Serious question: Is it just me, or has the “west” altogether stopped producing poets? Maybe I am just not in the circles where I would know about them, if they did exist.

It seems to me we are fed a steady diet of hatred, ugliness, and reductionist AI language—somehow trying to demonstrate at all times that we feel nothing, but think well.

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