JOE HALL

I haven’t been reading much since the election. Other kinds of action have filled that space. The exceptions have been The Yerbamala Collective’s scalding pamphlets (which I want to slip into the back and front of every textbook). And, yesterday, a handful of poems from Sibling Rivalry Press’ If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (digital copy here). Some of the poems that kept me up:

from RE Katz’ quickly metamorphosing “A Controlled Fall”: “Do porn or get out alive/do porn to get out alive/do a lively porn to come out/come out alive/come out now/come out national/national come out of poor day.”

from Michael G. Federspiel’s “Here”: “Family is two wolves standing side-by-side / Each with one paw mangled–but touching.”

from Jocelyn Marshall’s “For Them”: “Do not____ this doesn’t include me when / You do not get to _____ you don’t / count, and she / does.”

This is also to say that the election has changed my relationship to poetry. I had a whole stack of books I’ve been meaning to read, and I’ve put that stack aside because those books don’t feel relevant right now. So let me know what you’re reading that meets the urgency of this moment. I’m hungry.

Also, hey why don’t you support the Buffalo #25?

Hoping to get back to semi-regular posting. We’ll see.

After several years of learning how to do scholarship, I’ve finally published an article, and this article recently became available online. It’s title: “Shared Sorrow, Shared Abundance: Water-Waste Flows In Palestinian Literature.” It extends work I did in Jim Holstun’s seminar on the literature of Israel and Palestine and combines it with work I’d also been doing on necropolitics and material studies. I’m acutely aware of the article’s limits but hope its work can contribute in a small way to more sensitive reading and continued discussion  of the works of Palestinian authors  Anton Shammas, Sahar Khalifeh, and Taha Muhammad Ali as well as the Palestinian literature that continues emerges under Israeli occupation and apartheid. Political action is necessary as well. Here in New York, for intellectual workers, protesting Cuomo’s BDS Blacklist is an urgent matter.