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Giacometta Fritchman
Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize
From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.
Several years ago, aided and abetted by Literary Twitter, I started gathering poems with joy in mind. It was 2017, and I needed more joy, and so did you. We all still need it. So here is a slightly updated and revised compilation of those poems shared by readers and writers in a very long thread. I\u2019ve linked to some; others you\u2019ll have to hunt down yourself online and in print. Feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments, and we\u2019ll keep this work-in-progress going.
Since the process of my work is pretty transparent, I figured it only made sense to encourage other people to try out the method themselves, so I started a Tumblr blog, NewspaperBlackout.com, a place where people could learn about the blackout poems and share their own:
But the best is still seeing the poems out in the world, and seeing folks make their own attempts. Last year we had an art show in Denton, Texas, and part of the show was dedicated to a poem-making station where people could pick up a newspaper and make their own:
John Shoptaw teaches poetry and ecopoetry in the English Department of UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. His Times Beach won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Arion, Oxford Public Philosophy, and elsewhere. His poetry is being anthologized in Treelines, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and The New Sent(i)ence. Artist Jenny Holzer incorporated a poem of his in her installation at the Salesforce Transit Center. His Near-Earth Object is now out from Unbound Edition Press. The foreword, by artist and author Jenny Odell, appears online in The Paris Review.
Jessica Fisher is the author of Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Inmost, which won the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her latest collection, Daywork, was published in 2024 by Milkweed Editions. She is the co-editor of The Addison Street Anthology, with UC Berkeley Professor Robert Hass. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, and she is currently an associate professor of English at Williams College.
If you require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact Coordinator Camille Santana Considine at poems-...@berkeley.edu or 619-708-2181 at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.
"Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty: In one poem, a 'nightingale departs the wet earth' two stanzas before the 'sound of a drone / intrudes.'"-The New York Times
Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson spent most of her life in quiet isolation, preferring to devote her energy entirely to writing some of the greatest poems of all time. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy, which was was co-founded by her grandfather Noah Webster in in 1814. After completing her studies there, she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which she graduated at age 17 and returned home to Amherst to continue writing. Although her formal education was brief, it laid the foundation for her lifelong engagement with literature.
Beneath her reputation as a quiet and reserved artist of words, Dickinson had a playfulness about her that often came alive in her pithy poetry. Tell all the truth but tell it slant is the ultimate ode to her use of slant rhyme, which gave most of her poetry a unique rhythm and sound, and this one is no different. Embedded in poems like this is also hidden philosophy and double entendres designed to leave readers thinking and guessing.
Peter Orlovsky was best known as Allen Ginsberg's lover andcompanion of almost three decades, from about the fifties to theseventies. What is less well known is that he was a wonderful poet inhis own right. His work has appeared in numerous magazines andantholologies.
Orlovsky was the kind of natural voice W.C.W. believed Americawould one day sound. I remember him praising Peter's first poem:"Nothing English about it -- pure American." That was twenty years ago.Now, twenty years hence, Peter has voiced a volume of poems, pureAmericana, and unlike any American sound. Bucolic and sexual, thesepoems are replicate of his farmer produce (organic and natural) and ofhis love for the male and female of his heart's desire.
He hails the human asshole asdivine -- He offers humankind an anatomical compassion for that bodiypart long maligned, shame-wracked, and poetically neglect.
Keep it clean in between is a golden define of self-respect. Theangel without wings is with asshole a reality. The angel with wings isa painted thing, a dream. The dual asshole: bucolic and sexual. Whatcomes out, he believes, aught benefit the fields not the seas, aughtfertilize not pollute -
What goes in, he lauds as a variable ofsex not solely of homosexual kind -
The lovers of callipygian joy areuniversal.
Peter is an original; a refinedspirit ... regard: 'neath his poetic capote nothing primitive holdsclaim - An agricultural romantic, the Shellean farmer astride hisPegasusian tractor re-poems the earth with trees of berry and roots ofhoney; whose dirtian hands scribe verses of soy, odes of harvest; whosehymns to redolent shovels of manure nourish the fields that so nourishus, both in body meal and thc cosmetics of soul.
"My biography was born July 1933. Grew up with dirty feet& giggles. Cant stand dust so pick my nose. Trouble in school:always thinking dreaming sad mistry problems. Quit high school inmiddle of last term & got lost working in Mental hospital old man'sbed slopy ward. Love pretzles & cant remember dreams anymore. Willsomebody please buy me mountain with a cave up there. I dont speack anymore. Wanted to be a farmer went to high school for that & workedhard, hard, I tell you, very hard, you'd be amazed. Did weight liftingwith bus stops. Got to enjoy burnt bacon with mothers help. Stare at myfeet to much & need to undue paroniac suden clowds. Enjoy moppingfloors, cleaning up cat vommit. Enjoy swinning underwater. I want themoon for fun. Getting to enjoy blank mind state, especially in tub.This summer got to like flies tickleing nose & face. I demand pissbe sold on the market, it would help people to get to know eachother.I.Q. 90 in school, now specialized I.Q. is thousands."
I've seen "Frist Poem" spelled "First Poem" a couple of times.One web page I've come across, which appears to have copied thecontents of this page, "corrected" the title of this poem. I didn'tlook to see if other "corrections" were made.
Peter couldn't spell. Or, let's look at it another way. Thisis how Peter spelled. I'm assuming that most publishers of his workattempted to keep his own spellings intact. I believe Peter's spellingrendered his thoughts accurately.
Once, in Peter and Allen's apartment I was leaving a messagefor Allen, who was away. Peter was writing down my message whichhappened to contain the words "two thieves". Peter wrote down "twothives" and I said, "No, it's spelled T - H - I - E . . . " etc.Another visitor who happened to be present almost leapt for my throatsaying, in effect, "How dare you correct Peter's spelling?" This, in myopinion, is going too far.
Gregory Orr has taught English at the University of Virginia since 1975. He is the author of nine poetry collections and the recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Orr lives in Charlottesville, Va., with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr. Nubar Alexanian hide caption
When I was 12 years old, I was responsible for the death of my younger brother in a hunting accident. I held the rifle that killed him. In a single moment, my world changed forever. I felt grief, terror, shame and despair more deeply than I could ever have imagined. In the aftermath, no one in my shattered family could speak to me about my brother's death, and their silence left me alone with all my agonizing emotions. And under those emotions, something even more terrible: a knowledge that all the easy meanings I had lived by until then had been suddenly and utterly abolished.
One consequence of traumatic violence is that it isolates its victims. It can cut us off from other people, cutting us off from their own emotional lives until we go numb and move through the world as if only half alive. As a young person, I found something to set against my growing sense of isolation and numbness: the making of poems.
When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what's inside me -- the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory -- and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning.
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