One of the bits of poet wisdom I return to again and again, probably since I was about nineteen and read this somewhere, is the response Mahmoud Darwish gave in an interview when asked to speak about the role of the poet. He said, "the role of the poet is to write the unseen." I've carried this with me for years—its meaning has expanded and spread out multidirectionally. To me the notion of "writing the unseen" is linked to another of my deepest values around poetry & art making in general, and that is what June Jordan and so many others have called 'truth telling.' So writing the unseen, & truth-telling are for me linked to a practice of bewilderment & curiosity. Study. Wonder. Imagination. As a poet I am always asking myself (asking the poems) to help me look closer. To apprehend the world around me & inside me with deep attention to both the infinitesimal & the gargantuan, the tiny pebble stuck in the tread of my shoe right alongside the indescribable histories of sorrow, loss, ecstasy, joy that we carry into & out of this world.
Janan Alexandra is a Lebanese-American poet and MFA candidate at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. You can find her work in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Mizna, and elsewhere.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Janan, what poems have you brought for us today?
elementary arabic
i.
i am beginning to learn
i am studying alone
after 30 years of exposure
at home
to words & sounds
like sunlight
sculpted perfectly
inside the morning
in my mother's throat
a tray of coffee & dates nearby
another kind of history there
on the starry kitchen counter
language & family bits
powdered sugar
sweetness in what is
sifted finely
passed & scattered
through thin mesh
like names
hardly visible
slid off a map
in quick white dust
when we came to America
my mother kept records
an archive locked
in her jewelry box:
somebody's teeth
a clutch of hair
fastened
wrapped in paper
around a silence
the small sukuun
our lips made
little roundness
hanging circles in the air
keyhole, doorway
a shapely absence
we peered through
iii.
each year i find
i am looking for my own likeness
in the old jewelry box
among the objects i visit
the year before
which i have touched
gold earrings
house keys
pink cotton wool
an old watch
mismatched buttons
my whole life
turning a key like a secret
clicking open & shut
in the language of children
we are broken plurals
glossed at the root
by which i mean
we are made beautifully
split origins tell a story
of a past which helps us
remember a future
to understand what is here
in the hand
a gratitude for beginning
this excellent tongue
a careful & daily search.
dream, or, poem to the tongue
There at a family table with a long cloth scroll
an Arabic newspaper embroidered in red & gold.
& in each thread a kind of time & in each time a pair
of hands folded on the marble table hauled by sea.
& you too will haul things, the carpets who lived
in a silver trunk slung now over the sunny banister.
& you too will enter what was only ever half-given,
this house of inheritance, field of dispersal. It's alright.
In a room of windpipes restless & dry as your sleep,
your mother will always be your mother. You have
saved her voice in the telephone, you have held it
in your hands like the blue & white eyes of her one
favorite mug, so these will always be your hands
& you will learn how to speak from the throat & the gut,
in the language that knows how to measure the thickness
of blood & knows how to say & how to say you bury me—
You've been listening to the poetry of Janan Alexandra on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
