Thanks again for reading.
So you talked about with Textu, how it kind of came out
of a period where you just sounded like there
wasn't any other way to write than just
find these short moments.
And so how has that kind of played out,
now that you're done with that?
How does that change what you're doing,
or has it not changed it at all?
I'm not sure I can do many Textus anymore.
I think I'm fed up with them.
And I think it a nice--
I mean, not to sort of, pardon my self-inflation,
but it was for me, a moment where,
it's sort of like an artist or a painter,
you go through a phase.
And so this is my Textu period, compared
to Picasso's Blue Period.
So, you know.
I'm actually writing prose now, and I'm
writing normal length poems.
I'm not so sure.
I mean it was a--
I don't think I can return to it, because I realized
that spending the 12 months that I
did writing those poems, entailed
a physiologic addiction to the sort of Pavlov
reaction between me and the digital screen.
And also sharing it with friends who
enjoyed receiving the vibration, or the lit response,
and then they read something that is not,
I'll meet you at 7:00 PM around the corner or whatever.
And so it actually became a very--
I mean, it was sort of like learning,
as if I was conducting a bizarre anthropological experiment
on what learning form was like in ancient times.
I mean, the first time.
So I could tell that I was forming a grid in my mind
that could respond to character count sound.
So I began to compose--
I began to compose sentences, or phrases, or couplets,
these are all written in couplets.
And I would know before I, sometimes
in my mind driving to work, what the character
count would be like.
And a few occasions, ironically enough,
the one poem for William Carlos Williams,
called "Spring and All" came out exactly 160
from the first time.
Which I thought, again, I was in deep trouble at that point.
But yeah, so I don't think I can go back to it again.
And what kinds of responses did you get back to those texts
that you sent?
Pleasant ones, yeah.
I didn't stand up in between.
So I think it threw people off.
Anyone else have questions?
There was one there, too.
Do you think of the Textus as improvisations?
Or more as compositions that were typed and revised
on the spot, and then sent?
Yeah sometimes they were revised more than on the spot.
And sometimes they were spontaneous.
And some of the spontaneous ones I
had to toss because they sounded cheesy to me.
So this is, I wrote a lot more than what I ended up keeping.
So I think that I would say it's just,
they're the same as writing any other book and the process
of some came out the way they came out,
and some required a lot of work, and some didn't.
And some required some cut and paste,
and some required just changing an 'and' to an 'or.'
I use an ampersand, for example, and I
decided to make that through.
And sometimes I will always be one character short,
so I'll change an 'and' to an 'or,' and move on, which is
an interesting arbitrariness of meaning.
And then you'll have critics who will write a whole essay
on the meaning of 'and' and 'or'.
Apparently I didn't find that to be terribly meaningful.
[LAUGHING]
Somebody here had a question.
Change your mind?
It's a big room.
We studied your work in our poetry class,
and I know a few of us were big fans and curious
of the poem "Siblings."
and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that.
How about I'll just read it?
OK.
"Siblings"
My sister tones up her soul when she laughs, try it
and you might break a rib or two.
Once I made her laugh a stream of gold
that shot down between her feet, and with a roast beef knife
in hand, my brother took off running after me.
Maybe he just loved to hear my girly scream,
maybe it's true I was the one who pushed him off the ground
floor balcony when we were toddlers,
and shattered his elbow.
The one the surgeon broke, and re-broke,
left deformed and mentionable.
To beat him to the bathroom door wasn't enough.
You had to shut it behind you, turn
and hold force against force without doubting how much of it
there really was on the other side.
Is that OK?
Are you happy?
[LAUGHING]
I'm just wondering how much your personal sense of humor slash
irony, slash realism you feel enters into your work.
I see it and I've never heard you read before
and then I can see it while you're reading,
and that may be arbitrary, but I'm curious.
No, I appreciate that.
One gets tired of the stereotype of the angry Arab.
You'd be surprised how often I hear it, said
in intentional and unintentional ways.
So I think that it also goes back
to the same thing I said about the--
that our sort of troubled approach to reading the Arab
speak of the body.
It's the same thing, and you either want--
you're not entirely sure what kind of morose satire
there is, because that's troubling.
So it's really an interesting experience socially,
to be a poet into the realm.
And so recently, for instance, Kaveh Akbar
had an interview with me, and we were talking,
and he just talked to me about how much humor there
is in the poems, or satire.
And I thought it was interesting because nobody--
everybody wants to ask me about politics and medicine
and healing and whatever.
My wife doesn't think I'm funny, but you know.
So I'm not so sure, is that your question?
Yeah, I mean it's--
but thank you for the remark though.
I appreciate it.
At least I have faith in my attempted--
I mean there is an interesting moment, I think,
for this where--
there is this moment where, Farid
was talking about Richard Pryor and relating to other poets
earlier who are interested in Richard Pryor.
There's an interesting moment where even
satire in the public sphere is really a sort of,
falls down an algorithm, what kind of satire
is accepted or expected from certain kinds of people.
And so a certain deep satire is not expected easily,
I don't think so, from an Arab American to put it bluntly.
And it's not negotiated in conversation at that level.
So I either have to be like a safe,
stand up funny; anything else, you're not entirely sure.
So maybe part of it is that I am lending this
to you because you see me in front of you in the flesh.
I'm not so sure if you spent too much time with the book
itself, without knowing anything about me,
or read some of the interviews, or I'm really pissed off.
You don't know what to make of what
you suspect as satire, because you're not
able to get past that.
We've got time for well, I see so many hands.
We'll do two more.
Oh they don't have to go home.
[LAUGHING]
Why are you in a hurry?
Let an Arab speak for God's sake.
[LAUGHING]
Just said what you have about the safe satire.
I'm curious as to how other Arab poets view
your departure from anger and traditional paths of emotion.
This is where I have to go into my zen mode.
Yeah, there is no traditional anger really.
And I don't think that there is any less
variety in Arabic poetry as there
is with any other language.
I must have misstated myself.
You had said earlier, that the expectation that an Arab
would be angry.
It's not an expectation by Arab American poets, or Arab poets.
It's an expectation by the mainstream American culture.
But the fact that you're using satire and humor in a way
that's not traditional.
It's not that it's traditional, or not.
It's not clear cut.
Right?
Which sort of asks the reader questions
of the reader's own complicity about those feelings.
It's not my problem, I mean she thinks I'm funny,
so I'm glad for her.
So.
You might have to marry her.
No I don't think so.
She wouldn't want that.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Thank you for your reading.
I was sort of, I was thinking about a moment
in your translation of Darwish's State of Siege,
when he said, forgive me because I need to paraphrase it.
I mean, I don't remember it either.
Something like, after the siege we'll
be able to feel all of our personal concerns.
They'll come out.
And I guess I was just wondering, thinking
about that kind of in connection to what you were saying
about sort of insisting on bringing
in other kinds of experience, or what you pointed out
about maybe white America's expectation of what
we would find in Arab poetry, or poetry by Arab-American poets.
That there would always be--
that it would be about being under siege, maybe.
Yeah, I guess I just wonder if you could talk a little bit
about how you read that moment in the Darwish poem
in connection to what you were saying.
Is that a kind of resistance?
That insistence on bringing in other kinds of experience,
making room for that?
So going back to humor in Palestinian culture,
there is this sentence now, "goddamn the occupation".
And it's often said to sort of blame everything.
So you walk into dog shit, and it's goddamn the occupation.
So I think that Darwish, in a sense, during a time of war,
when he wrote State of Siege, was
sort of referring to that, but in a less
funny way in a time of war.
He was saying that people don't even
have the time to attend to their own,
as he wrote in an earlier poem in this book,
to their silken boredoms, which were quite efficient in here.
And it's a human thing, and it's a human right.
And he was just commiserating with a collective
about a simple human emotion.
I mean in a sense, you could think of it
the same way that, as a parent, you
know regardless of whether you are, or not,
that you're unable to enjoy small moments
with your children because, in this case,
goddamn the institution.
You have to go to work, and this,
and you're worried about-- just these things take you away
from smaller concerns.
And you want to have a spat with your five-year-old
for God's sake, but you can't.
Or enjoy whatever it is, and you can't because goddamn
the institution.
So I think that I would urge a parallel reading
at those levels as opposed to sort of just always focusing
on the particularity of the Iraqi or the Palestinian.
In part, not because the particularities
are not different, but I think in part because we really
are quite removed from them.
And I think maybe it's a different approach
to-- if you're either going to know about it without pitying
the other, without bringing the other
only as a human being who's only a subject to your image
of victimhood and suffering, then
maybe you can bring them into your own life
and understand the parallels that you have on a daily life
that they're exactly imperfectly equal to our own imagined
sufferings, or not so imagined.
I don't need the mic.
[INAUDIBLE]
I've been drinking.
I'm very interested in the--
all of your work is beautiful, and that
was a beautiful reading, but I'm interested in the last poems,
where the white body becomes an object of desire and framed
that is an inversion of an orientalist power dynamic.
And I'm wondering if you could talk, one,
broadly about your relationship to whiteness
as identity formation.
You talked about silken boredoms.
And there's also silken desires and what
we desire can also help constitute who we are.
Yeah, you asked that as one of the last questions.
Thanks.
[LAUGHING]
What's your personal and poetic tactical
and silken relationship--
Tyler you need to invite me to give a talk on this thing.
I think about--
I've been thinking about the, I actually attended a lecture
by Spivak, and in the middle of the talk she said something.
I don't know who in the audience knew
that it was, I'm sure she did, that
was Dick Gregory who said it, which
is, she was talking about race and so then she
said, well white is not a color, it's an attitude.
And my relationship to whiteness is a very interesting one,
in the sense that I certainly can't
claim that it's a color issue for me,
because I'm not too brown, and I'm not hairy.
But there was this moment, for instance,
when I was with Doctors Without Borders, where
I didn't have any illusions that in that setting,
even though I come from a family of refugees,
that I wasn't going to say, Oh, I am one with you.
I realized I was just a privileged, white doctor,
I need to shut the F up, and just
help those people as best as I can,
without pretending that I'm one with the people.
And so there are elements of variance I think,
that made me question my relationship to power,
and the power that I hold as a person who comes
from a privileged position.
Perhaps that my parents provided, or afforded me,
in their own struggles.
So I think it's an interesting impurity, if you will.
And I think there are better minds who have spoken to this.
There's no such thing as purely white, or purely west,
or purely east.
And I think in the sense that what I mean, simply
for me, I mean, for me to talk about my relationship
to the white body is to simply, actually leave
this underlying conversation that somebody needs
to bring up, and discuss the depth of the impurity, which
is a beautiful thing.
Instead of focusing on the illusion of purity,
which I think just sadly, doesn't happen that easily.
And I think that for me, for this person,
I can't really be sort of a wise, sage sagacious person
about it, and say, well I'm going to speak
to a collective wisely.
I think that before wisdom reaches any of us,
hard work has to be done.
And to deliver wisdom on page, like a proverb, or a fortune
cookie, is just a terrible thing for poets to do, I think.
Yeah, I think this notion of impurity
is really at the heart of my conversation with whiteness,
as a good thing.
All right, so we're going to set up that talk.
So, everybody stay tuned.
Thank you so much.
[CLAPPING]