Poetry Editor’s Note

[poetry]

This is somewhat about poetry—how the poetry of a people plays a vital part in countering the propaganda of a militarized state and its allies that normalize the flattening of human life, in a figurative, and horrifically, literal sense.

Dr. Refaat Alareer was a beloved teacher who taught poetry's revolutionary potential to his students; after his targeted assassination, Alareer’s poem, pinned to his Twitter profile at the time he was killed, went viral online and was translated into over 40 languages.

“I don’t know what became of his body after the bombing of his house,” Mosab Abu Toha wrote of Refaat Alareer, “whether his glasses got smashed, whether his soft fingers were clinging to a pen or a flower he asked the world community to send to Gaza.”

What does it take for our figurative speech to become literal? To die along with a collective is a mercy is a comforting Palestinian proverb about collective disaster, Fady Joudah writes, one first heard as a child.

“To live the experience of collective death in real time, however, is, despite my words, unspeakable,” he wrote. “For this Palestinian proverb to become a Palestinian reality devoid of metaphor is a definition of genocide.”

Within the Palestinian liberation movement, poems have served as tools of resistance, documenting cruelties inflicted under the recurring violence of occupation; forming vessels to carry memories, hopes, and dreams into the future, to live past the writer, who has sometimes already eulogized themselves.

“Poetry can't stop a bullet. Poetry won't free a prisoner. And that's why we need to do the political organizing work as well,” George Abraham said in a recent interview. “But if we can't imagine a free liberated world in language, how can we build one?”

[software]

This is somewhat about software—how the experience and witness of mass death is instantiated technological infrastructure.

We witness, unfolding on our newsfeeds, unprecedented death. Through the actions of the state, informed by a “Gospel” of artificial intelligence (with all of its biases and imprecision), Palestinian lives are fungible: within the mythos of data-driven decisions, they are targeted indiscriminately. There are other distinctions made, of poets, journalists, and others whose voices travel too far.

“The Israeli killing of the family of Jazeera reporter Wael Dahdouh on October 25 was not part of indiscriminate madness,” Joudah wrote. “They know how to assassinate. One pundit on Israeli TV said of the incident, ‘Today we knew what the target was. Tomorrow is a different target.’”

Summer Farah, who shared her work with us for this issue, also reminds us in Electric Literature: “This work is, in fact, a matter of life-or-death; literatures can set the stage for the attempted annihilation of a people, and it is our responsibility to point to it.”

So this is somewhat about poetry and about software—both tools unto themselves, formed by the hands that use them. An AI system can manifest from the desires of a state; poems can manifest from the experiences of a people. Poems prophesize; targeting software streamlines the dropping of bombs into a question of not if, but upon whom and how often.

If we lose sight of the systems of dehumanization that circulate words and ship code that set the conditions for the killing of a people at scale, if we overly fixate on a piece of software rather than the apparatus it is but a tool of, we have been distracted from the human choices responsible for the killing of entire families.

Software then, in its laundering of responsibility, can function as propaganda.

And whether indiscriminate or targeted, with intention or without care, bombs fall, people die.

[repose]

What’s the use of poetry? Jorge Luis Borges famously retorted, “What’s the use of death? What’s the use of the taste of coffee? What’s the use of me? What’s the use of us?”

At the time of writing, February 8, 2024, AP News reported a Palestinian death toll of 27,840 people.¹ We are sending this magazine into the world as we enter the fifth month of a war on Gaza aided and armed by the United States, whose formation is also contingent upon the displacement and elimination of an entire people, and the fifth month of the call for permanent and immediate ceasefire. We hope that by the time you read this, through collective action, these conditions [future perfect tense] will have become / [prophetic perfect tense] became true.

We don't know what will have happened by the time you read this. In conversation with Jacob, I’m reminded of the sustained responses to fast and slow violences (beyond literature, there is the longstanding organizing pre-dating October 7; countless protests; blockades of transportation, shipping, and manufacturing infrastructure; South Africa’s genocide case in the ICJ), the need to keep trying in the face of low odds that we mistake for deterministic inevitability. In the space of indeterminacy is possibility, outcomes still unfolding and affected by how we act.

What are the conditions that construct what we know to be luck, chance, probability? And when we talk about tools: surveillance software, state propaganda, revolutionary poems, methods of e-sim distribution, missiles, strategies of families splitting up to shelter in separate locations, or otherwise, who wields these tools, and how do they shape these conditions?

[response]

If there are things we can take away from crafting and experiencing poetry and software alike, it is that we can still act in the face of perceived inevitabilities. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives,” Audre Lorde wrote. “It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”

Without protecting and tending to our desires, hopes, dreams, which emerge from our interconnected shared and differing pains, we give up the range of possibilities for our futures.

As Mahmoud Darwish asked in his “Penultimate Speech,” “Won’t you memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?”

How will we pool our mis/fortunes, and coordinate across our varied capacities and positions to change them? What seems to be the stochastic mysteriousness of what moves us may lie in the simple fact of how we have more in common than we had imagined, in, as I heard articulated by the School for Poetic Computation, our shared desires for futures that refuse the perpetuation of “violent dispossession that has brought us together in this way.”

“…it’s me who seeks to build with others through my writing, by inviting them in with my words,” Farah wrote.

Poetry is a kind of technology, a social infrastructure of vessels (media, if you will) that are of the writer, giving form to feelings that are indisputably y/ours. These vessels, poems, are also of its future readers, too. When we listen closely, we hear the churns of their internal dream logics, how they might meet and transform our own.

And when you are transforming, what will you build?

Notes

Footnotes

1. By figures, this war is unprecedented on many fronts. In December, Branko Marcetic laid out statistics in Jacobin, enumerating the numbers of journalists, medics, UN workers killed; a rate of destruction approaching that of carpet-bombed German cities in World War II; a death rate of women and children that surpasses that of past wars. The number of Gazan children killed by Israeli forces from October 7 - December 28, 2023 (8,663, reported by AP News) surpasses the amount of children killed in past world wars, as recorded by Annual Reports of the UN Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict and aggregated by Save the Children (in 2022: 2,985 children were killed across 24 countries; 2021: 2,515 in 22 countries; 2020: 2674 in 22 countries). ↩

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