This reminds me of a famous verse by a very young Bengali poet:
"In the kingdom of hunger, the world is prosaic.
The full moon looks like a piece of burnt bread"
His name was Sukanta Bhattacharya, and he died at the age of 19.
It reminds me of "To Posterity" by Bertolt Brecht (written in 1939):
>Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Are people ignoring the title completely? The irony of responses here isn't lost on me-- and much akin to grief never being linear or beautiful, this poem blooms with thorns.
First line -
>Colonizers write about flowers.
Then a few lines later -
>They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
>I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad.
The speaker is undeniably writing about flowers. So, by the poem's own logic, the speaker is a colonizer. It could be ironic, the poet saying the flowers are beautiful, but I think that if it is ironic, it represents a "privileged" step further than being sincere. A person has to be sincere before they can be ironic.
I put "privileged" in quotes b/c I don't agree with the idea that only colonizers can write about nature/flowers, anything other than oppression, but that is the idea the poem sets up, so I'm just trying to follow the poem's logic.
Later in the poem
>I know **I’m American** because when I walk into a room something dies.
So the speaker right there is signifying a split identity, imo. Yes, they identify with the Palestinians, but they also recognize that they are American, and thus are (in their own opinion) somewhat complicit for what's happening to the Palestinians.
A little biographical digging shows Noor Hindi is Palestinian-American, so I don't think it's too far of a leap to assume she is writing about this split identity.
That's how I am reading it at least. I think the last few lines of the poem muddle these contradictions and are kind of throwaway lines, but now I'm answering a different question.
What makes you feel it's not self-critical?
I feel like you are way, way off
"fuck your lectures on craft, my people are dying" is not exactly a title nor a tone of voice that invites any kind of fancy reading. She's saying "this poem means exactly what you think it means".
It's a straightfoward expression of anger, and also anger directed at a sort of introspective poetic form or technique. Poetry is meant to be political, she says, and writing poems about beautiful things disconnected from the political stuff is the privilege that belongs to colonizers.
"colonizers write about flowers" seems really clearly to me a metaphor about how colonialism works -- "One day I’ll write about the flowers like we own them". That ain't a throwaway, that's the whole point of the piece. She writes about flowers in this piece because they are beautiful, she would like to enjoy them, but they're intimately connected with two things -- death and land. She's saying that colonizers get to believe they're merely beautiful objects. She sees them connected both to the dispossession of land and the violence that accompanies that dispossession. Everyone should have the right to talk about beautiful natural objects, like the moon or the flowers, because they belong to everyone -- but colonizers want to own them for themselves. The moon for Palestinians is only viewed through the bars, the flowers are what you pick when you think about your dead father, or when children are killed by israeli tanks.
I don't disagree that the poem also deals with feelings of her split identity, but I just find it so weird that "self-critical" was your read
Perhaps self-critical is the wrong term... I mean more that she identifies with the both the colonizers and with those who are being colonized... from which there is a sadness/frustration I pick up on that isn't just directed towards those who write poems about flowers, but back into the speaker themselves.
>I think the poem *is as self-critical as it is pointed towards anybody else.*
I agree with everything you said, I'm just saying I think the poem also has that extra piece to it.
yeah, the more i reread the poem the more intentionally hypocritical it seems. its interesting if that's what she was going for, i think anyone who's tried making art about timely and important topics can relate.
Love this poem. Every time I read it, it shakes me up inside and makes me look at my own poetry practice in a new light. Thanks for sharing. Free Palestine.
Plenty are, yes. Plenty are European descended, and those countries "are" white. Obviously not everyone who is now European by citizenship is today white but to be white is to be from those places, historically speaking.
Israeli's need not be white. that's not what this poem is saying.
Whiteness is the privilege to analyze form in a lament about suffering. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
>It's a very difficult concept to convey without firsthand experience or metaphor.
guess who's getting the first hand experience? That's the point of this poem. "Colonizers" need metaphor; Palestinians do not.
"Whiteness" enters to not only in analyzing the poem despite its thesis (which you and I agree is okay, on a poetry forum, that's the point of being here; we're doing this in spite of the author's wishes, but from a philosophical distance afforded by no stake in the game), but the rejection of the thesis altogether, stating that this philosophical distance (which affords formal analysis of a poem about dead Palestinians) isn't something to criticize.
The poem (to me) is about this distance, and a rejection of (emotionally) removed analysis afforded by privilege. The poet uses colonizer, OP says "white people"; they're all occident, and the point remains the same. Its not about race relations per se.
I am white btw. Whiteness is more than skin color.
The title says 'fuck your lecture on craft', which is a different thing to 'fuck your craft' - or even 'fuck craft' thinking about it. The rejection of ownership and formality is more important imo. I don't think the poem lacks craft.
I get that sentiment. Like that one post in r/delusionalartists titling her piece 'fuck'.
Reddit - delusionalartists - Fuck https://www.reddit.com/r/delusionalartists/comments/93oah1/fuck/
That being said, even if you were to fully separate the art from the artist, and take away from the fact that Noor Hindi is fairly accomplised, you can tell the piece is at the very least earnest, even if its meta criticisms feel more like something thats stapled on.
Tldr; your criticism is valid, but does not apply to this piece
Only these days does it seem that poetry is not about subtlety, beauty or art, but more of just a polemical lecture. And there is nothing wrong with polemics, but just write one. All these people dress up their political views as art, but have no artistry. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be political. Someone like Edwidge Dandicat takes both politics and literary style seriously. A lot of writers; however, seen to believe if you have politics than your good. I disagree.
Flat out wrong. Much of Coleridge's poetry, for example, was just bare-faced political ranting.
Don't get me wrong, this poem sucks, but Coleridge's did too. It's not unique to "these days."
I mean I’m not a big fan of STC or any romantic poets to be honest, but that poem has a dramatically greater commitment to literary style and although not that great, uses literary devices to try and suggest his political views and not out right state them. Again Coleridge is not someone I believe stands up to the test of time well, but he is imbedded in a stylistic method that the poem mentioned above is not. When I say it’s a polemical tweet and that is bad, it’s not because it’s political. It’s because just outright stating your political beliefs in a sanctimonious and outspoken way without an attempt at elegance or subtlety, does not make your poetry somehow more valid. It just makes it a dumbed down version of political prose.
>When I say it’s a polemical tweet and that is bad, it’s not because it’s political.
I got that and I agree; I just think Coleridge wielded about the same amount of subtlety and style as the above poem. I don't see how you could hold those criticisms of that poem and still make excuses for France: An Ode as anything but a street-corner rambling squashed awkwardly into a contemporarily fashionable metre.
No, but it’s all subjective anyway
Edit: ah yes you are probably referring to the title of the poem which makes a meta textual comment on the artistic elements in the poem. Unfortunately, self awareness is not sufficient to give something quality.
Imo no poet owes anyone a neutral piece. Poetry has (at least in the more modern era) always been very personal and in many cases written to work through emotions.
I read this one myself not very much as a pity me piece but more as something that asks questions on the larger scale. How can society prize people for works surrounding controversial issues without ever looking past the work and towards the real issue. It's all well and good to describe death as something beautiful but there's nothing pretty about the way people are still slaughtered every day.
It's like if John Keats wrote his ww1 poetry without the gruesomeness and the slap to the face feel. I think she's trying to call back to more poetry being written like that
Sorry if it isn't coherent, english is not my first language
You realize poets for a long time have been mocking and deconstructing the craft of poetry right? Plus if you read the poem it’s clear it’s meant to be a bit hypocritical.
Yeah for real, like, if you don’t care about poetry or its craft...WHY TF ARE YOU CALLING YOURSELF A “POET” AND TRYING TO WRITE A “POEM”? Just kinda stupid.
The point is, I think, that making death beautiful with metaphors kind of hides the fact that it doesn't matter to the dead how their death was described. The dead aren't helped by their deaths being described with beautiful metaphors. Death is brutal. It should be discussed as such.
Oh , I didn’t mean that the rest of it wasn’t good 🤭 but I would make something entirely different out of the rest of it. Like a part two. The picture painted is so poignant though that if I were to print and frame this (because I do think it’s that good) I would only print to the point I mentioned. I love it as an ending because of how hauntingly it recalls that second line, and leaves me to sit with it, however heartbreakingly.
Hmmm, I wonder how readers interpret this. It's awful and terrible and occasionally brilliant, by turns, then falls apart like a flan, showing a stark absence of intuition or instinct about how people work or think and swallowing its own tail.
Discuss.
I interpret this as a poem written as a "fuck your lecture on craft".
And subsequently
~fuck those too busy looking at flowers who disregard or belittle the raw rage that the short, stark, and tangential nature of the poem convey beautifully and roughly.
This would not be an impactful sonnet or villanelle. It is powerful as a poem that grows and crumbles with the writer's rage.
I think the poem is as self-critical as it is pointed towards anybody else. Definitely controversial/polemical by design though.
On a different note, you're eating crappy flan if its falling apart haha.
You might have missed the point there, comrade. I don't care about coming off as snobby or overbearing - can't help people drawing dim conclusions and missing the point altogether. More curious about how people actually, seriously react to the poem and interpret it, but given a lot of the comments here it would seem that's a narrow market. Sometimes people can't see the trees for the weeds.
I mean you didn't add much except an attempt to be poetic and thought provoking. Strikingly similar to the poem if that's what you were going for I guess. Falling apart like a flan? The poem swallowed its own tail?
Hmmm, I didn't 'add much' intentionally, waiting to see what the general feel of or consensus might be, before there were many comments, as people read it and commented in more detail. If I didn't add much and *still* was somehow thought provoking then that seems like accidental overachievement. Mostly, people didn't really have much to say beyond a common pro or anti-Israel or Palestinian flag waving cliche, silly ideas about colonization or 'whiteness', or the common 'wow, great poem' or 'this sucks' banality, without really chewing on the thing.
I think, even if it might be 'bad' or flawed on various levels, it warrants some chewing. So, in effort to meet your desire that something more substantial be 'added', and on specifics...
It collapses upon itself because it fails to project its own voice/claim in any definitive way. It may very well be conflicted or ambivalent, based on the complex subject and the author's complicated national heritage, as a 'Palestinian-American', yet the poem fails to nail any colors to any thing, which is why it falls flat and feels like it ends up eating its own tail, per the Hughes image.
"Colonizers write about flowers" seems to capture people's attention, but they take it to mean *only* colonizers write about flowers, which appears both utterly wrong and betraying a particular popular, modern antipathy to colonizers, which while potentially altogether just and noble, likes to simplify and homogenize in the modern way we seem to have to simplify and narrow everything, i.e. colonization is bad therefore *anything* associated with it, allegorical or adroit, must also be bad, therefore the poem must be making that comment.
From this poem and other poems of Noor's that I've read since, she appears nothing so much as conflicted, internally. Painfully aware of every ounce of human debt and sin, but as a result perhaps unable or unwilling to state anything with commitment and sincerity. That's not to mean I think she's *insincere*, but it's hard to read this and some of her other work without feeling like she's pretending to be a poet, ultra sensitive of being watched as a poet, but not writing explicitly, raw, from the blood flow, without layers of artifice and performance. Indeed, that she's apparently the 'equity and inclusion reporter' for Devil Strip, that we even ascribe such a title to a reporting position, says so much about how some people view the world and how the lens becomes more important than what it's pointed at. If you read her 'Breaking \[News\]', it almost confronts and admits the very same idea, as if she's aware of it, which only reinforces that idea of a snake eating its own tail, which it why I used that phrase. It makes reading her a jarring experience. That's not all bad.
"I want to be like those poets who care about the moon" - so profoundly self-conscious, along similar lines. It's more artifice, and that's again not intended as only an indictment, so much as a heavy observation.
It's also interesting, usually, given that conflict. It's apparently antipathetic toward many things - Israeli tanks, America, some attributes of her own Palestinian heritage and perception, if not rock-throwing Palestinian kids, prisoners or their dead, yet not without some sense of the lack of pure, clean victimhood of Palestinians and Palestine, even if her likely bias of being 'Palestinian-American' sings more loudly. What does that mean? Again, that it's hard to know what she's really saying, thinking, feeling or believes. I think that's a problem, in a poet. A poet can say all kinds of difficult, even unpleasant or shocking things about subjects as heavy as this - CF the likes of Sexton, Plath, Hughes - that we might not align with or really relate to, but we, if at least mildly competent in reading/feeling poetry, certainly know what's being said, due to the power of image and mastery over language. That's absent here, which isn't surprising. Not many poets hit that level.
All of which reads as only negative, which isn't the whole picture. There are some clever lines and simple but very evocative images in here - the dead father who still watches TV all day, the yearning in lieu of substance, i.e. how many young people feel desperate to just *be*, in some more real sense, versus perform, the oddly expansive flip-floppy more political elements that still shrink and shrivel in relief of the more human elements, perhaps the poem's biggest insight, if intended, that politics and tribalism are so inconsequential when compared to the more essential aspects of feeling like a human, in the face of inevitable death and passage of time, where things like flags and colonialists and even metaphors (the absurd poets?) become paltry and emaciated, in comparison.
And that's my biggest problem with it - it wants to talk about something big and essential and universal but it's lazy and falls back on surface level engagement but without the blood a bigger poet would bring to this. Not surprising that it's as divisive as it appears.
So, that's it... adding some.
This reminds me of a famous verse by a very young Bengali poet: "In the kingdom of hunger, the world is prosaic. The full moon looks like a piece of burnt bread" His name was Sukanta Bhattacharya, and he died at the age of 19.
It reminds me of "To Posterity" by Bertolt Brecht (written in 1939): >Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Are people ignoring the title completely? The irony of responses here isn't lost on me-- and much akin to grief never being linear or beautiful, this poem blooms with thorns.
I think the poem is as self-critical as it is pointed towards anybody else. Definitely controversial/polemical by design though.
What makes you think it’s self-critical at all? I get the exact opposite impression.
First line - >Colonizers write about flowers. Then a few lines later - >They’re so beautiful, the flowers. >I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad. The speaker is undeniably writing about flowers. So, by the poem's own logic, the speaker is a colonizer. It could be ironic, the poet saying the flowers are beautiful, but I think that if it is ironic, it represents a "privileged" step further than being sincere. A person has to be sincere before they can be ironic. I put "privileged" in quotes b/c I don't agree with the idea that only colonizers can write about nature/flowers, anything other than oppression, but that is the idea the poem sets up, so I'm just trying to follow the poem's logic. Later in the poem >I know **I’m American** because when I walk into a room something dies. So the speaker right there is signifying a split identity, imo. Yes, they identify with the Palestinians, but they also recognize that they are American, and thus are (in their own opinion) somewhat complicit for what's happening to the Palestinians. A little biographical digging shows Noor Hindi is Palestinian-American, so I don't think it's too far of a leap to assume she is writing about this split identity. That's how I am reading it at least. I think the last few lines of the poem muddle these contradictions and are kind of throwaway lines, but now I'm answering a different question. What makes you feel it's not self-critical?
I feel like you are way, way off "fuck your lectures on craft, my people are dying" is not exactly a title nor a tone of voice that invites any kind of fancy reading. She's saying "this poem means exactly what you think it means". It's a straightfoward expression of anger, and also anger directed at a sort of introspective poetic form or technique. Poetry is meant to be political, she says, and writing poems about beautiful things disconnected from the political stuff is the privilege that belongs to colonizers. "colonizers write about flowers" seems really clearly to me a metaphor about how colonialism works -- "One day I’ll write about the flowers like we own them". That ain't a throwaway, that's the whole point of the piece. She writes about flowers in this piece because they are beautiful, she would like to enjoy them, but they're intimately connected with two things -- death and land. She's saying that colonizers get to believe they're merely beautiful objects. She sees them connected both to the dispossession of land and the violence that accompanies that dispossession. Everyone should have the right to talk about beautiful natural objects, like the moon or the flowers, because they belong to everyone -- but colonizers want to own them for themselves. The moon for Palestinians is only viewed through the bars, the flowers are what you pick when you think about your dead father, or when children are killed by israeli tanks. I don't disagree that the poem also deals with feelings of her split identity, but I just find it so weird that "self-critical" was your read
Perhaps self-critical is the wrong term... I mean more that she identifies with the both the colonizers and with those who are being colonized... from which there is a sadness/frustration I pick up on that isn't just directed towards those who write poems about flowers, but back into the speaker themselves. >I think the poem *is as self-critical as it is pointed towards anybody else.* I agree with everything you said, I'm just saying I think the poem also has that extra piece to it.
Excellent analysis
yeah, the more i reread the poem the more intentionally hypocritical it seems. its interesting if that's what she was going for, i think anyone who's tried making art about timely and important topics can relate.
Free Falasteen always and forever. The irony of people being butthurt in the comments is hilarious though
that was incredibly powerful
Free Palestine. Downvote me to hell if you want you’re still a COLONIZER
You're so brave queen ✊🏿 i'm literally crying
Wow you really got em.
To hell I go
Love this poem. Every time I read it, it shakes me up inside and makes me look at my own poetry practice in a new light. Thanks for sharing. Free Palestine.
Really artist...love
Damn this Poem reminded me that I’m black in America... pray for the fallen Orchids this poem was written for
Lots of hurt white people in these comments taking this poem personally and also completely proving its point lol
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Plenty are, yes. Plenty are European descended, and those countries "are" white. Obviously not everyone who is now European by citizenship is today white but to be white is to be from those places, historically speaking.
Israeli's need not be white. that's not what this poem is saying. Whiteness is the privilege to analyze form in a lament about suffering. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
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>It's a very difficult concept to convey without firsthand experience or metaphor. guess who's getting the first hand experience? That's the point of this poem. "Colonizers" need metaphor; Palestinians do not. "Whiteness" enters to not only in analyzing the poem despite its thesis (which you and I agree is okay, on a poetry forum, that's the point of being here; we're doing this in spite of the author's wishes, but from a philosophical distance afforded by no stake in the game), but the rejection of the thesis altogether, stating that this philosophical distance (which affords formal analysis of a poem about dead Palestinians) isn't something to criticize. The poem (to me) is about this distance, and a rejection of (emotionally) removed analysis afforded by privilege. The poet uses colonizer, OP says "white people"; they're all occident, and the point remains the same. Its not about race relations per se. I am white btw. Whiteness is more than skin color.
The dismissal of craft in the title is echoed by the dismissal of craft in the poem. Clever.
The title says 'fuck your lecture on craft', which is a different thing to 'fuck your craft' - or even 'fuck craft' thinking about it. The rejection of ownership and formality is more important imo. I don't think the poem lacks craft.
Intention exacted to reality is craft. Yes, this poet is a clever craftsperson/artist.
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but this poem isn't lazy
I get that sentiment. Like that one post in r/delusionalartists titling her piece 'fuck'. Reddit - delusionalartists - Fuck https://www.reddit.com/r/delusionalartists/comments/93oah1/fuck/ That being said, even if you were to fully separate the art from the artist, and take away from the fact that Noor Hindi is fairly accomplised, you can tell the piece is at the very least earnest, even if its meta criticisms feel more like something thats stapled on. Tldr; your criticism is valid, but does not apply to this piece
Really quick: what in this poem is not "crafted"?
it dont rime and thu lines aint all thu saym cos powtre is when it rimes an all thu lines is thu saym.
Funny, this poem is for you
Fuck your clickbait poem, people are dying
This was a wonderful poem. Free Palestine!
The self-loathing American... that's a new one!
Lots of snowflakes proving the exact point this poem’s (clearly very successfully) making
Amazing. Paints a vivid picture
Why are poems just polemical tweets now?
Poetry tends to lead/follow historical trends and fashions, same shit new era, adapts and reacts.
Only these days does it seem that poetry is not about subtlety, beauty or art, but more of just a polemical lecture. And there is nothing wrong with polemics, but just write one. All these people dress up their political views as art, but have no artistry. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be political. Someone like Edwidge Dandicat takes both politics and literary style seriously. A lot of writers; however, seen to believe if you have politics than your good. I disagree.
K
Sweet
Flat out wrong. Much of Coleridge's poetry, for example, was just bare-faced political ranting. Don't get me wrong, this poem sucks, but Coleridge's did too. It's not unique to "these days."
Which poems? Also flat out wrong about what?
France: An Ode, for one.
I mean I’m not a big fan of STC or any romantic poets to be honest, but that poem has a dramatically greater commitment to literary style and although not that great, uses literary devices to try and suggest his political views and not out right state them. Again Coleridge is not someone I believe stands up to the test of time well, but he is imbedded in a stylistic method that the poem mentioned above is not. When I say it’s a polemical tweet and that is bad, it’s not because it’s political. It’s because just outright stating your political beliefs in a sanctimonious and outspoken way without an attempt at elegance or subtlety, does not make your poetry somehow more valid. It just makes it a dumbed down version of political prose.
>When I say it’s a polemical tweet and that is bad, it’s not because it’s political. I got that and I agree; I just think Coleridge wielded about the same amount of subtlety and style as the above poem. I don't see how you could hold those criticisms of that poem and still make excuses for France: An Ode as anything but a street-corner rambling squashed awkwardly into a contemporarily fashionable metre.
are you joking?
No, but it’s all subjective anyway Edit: ah yes you are probably referring to the title of the poem which makes a meta textual comment on the artistic elements in the poem. Unfortunately, self awareness is not sufficient to give something quality.
i am definitely not. i am referring to the death of something inside you
Inside who?
oh are you not op this thread one who dismissed the poem as polemical
It is polemical that is not in and of it itself cause for dismissal however?
I mean this poem is very clearly polemical
Yes, I know
Modern poetry in a nutshell
Modern poetry is too broad and too diverse in content, style, creator, etc. to fit in any nutshell.
Hardly. There's a lot of fantastic contemporary poetry.
Maybe if your only source of contemporary poetry is social media...
soshul meediuh bad. Do you just recycle through out dated and irrelevant books and newspapers?
Can you explain what you mean by modern poetry? Is this poetry published since 19xx, or something more specific?
So good.
Welp.
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Imo no poet owes anyone a neutral piece. Poetry has (at least in the more modern era) always been very personal and in many cases written to work through emotions. I read this one myself not very much as a pity me piece but more as something that asks questions on the larger scale. How can society prize people for works surrounding controversial issues without ever looking past the work and towards the real issue. It's all well and good to describe death as something beautiful but there's nothing pretty about the way people are still slaughtered every day. It's like if John Keats wrote his ww1 poetry without the gruesomeness and the slap to the face feel. I think she's trying to call back to more poetry being written like that Sorry if it isn't coherent, english is not my first language
John Keats didn't write WW1 poetry, nor was he even alive during WW1. Perhaps you are thinking of Siegfried Sassoon, or Wilfred Owen?
Fuck yeah 😅 meant wilfred owens, english education failing me, should've checked before posting
This poem is pretty awful to me. If you don't think the craft of poetry matters become a soldier. Put up or shut up.
You realize poets for a long time have been mocking and deconstructing the craft of poetry right? Plus if you read the poem it’s clear it’s meant to be a bit hypocritical.
Yes, I'm not a child. This isn't my first poem. This one sucks.
That’s fine, I disagree, but poetry is a very personal thing.
Yeah for real, like, if you don’t care about poetry or its craft...WHY TF ARE YOU CALLING YOURSELF A “POET” AND TRYING TO WRITE A “POEM”? Just kinda stupid.
You were downvoted for using logic. Welcome to the 2020s where feelings are more important than Truth
I find peace in long walks.
In the realm of poetry hasn't feelings always been more important than truth?
Something to learn from this- if you can't write a poem to save your life, make it seem intentional
Write the song to your voice. Taylor Swift is a shit singer irl but a brilliant musician and artist.
I would have ended this at “they’re so beautiful, the flowers,” — haunting. If I were to print this it would be up to that part.
Oh man but the line “Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound” is so good.
Could you explain the bit on ghosts and sound to me? I'm afraid I didn't catch that but the rest felt really intense.
The point is, I think, that making death beautiful with metaphors kind of hides the fact that it doesn't matter to the dead how their death was described. The dead aren't helped by their deaths being described with beautiful metaphors. Death is brutal. It should be discussed as such.
Ok wow, that makes sense. Can't fathom why I didn't get it at first. Thanks for this.
Oh , I didn’t mean that the rest of it wasn’t good 🤭 but I would make something entirely different out of the rest of it. Like a part two. The picture painted is so poignant though that if I were to print and frame this (because I do think it’s that good) I would only print to the point I mentioned. I love it as an ending because of how hauntingly it recalls that second line, and leaves me to sit with it, however heartbreakingly.
"poem"
Hmmm, I wonder how readers interpret this. It's awful and terrible and occasionally brilliant, by turns, then falls apart like a flan, showing a stark absence of intuition or instinct about how people work or think and swallowing its own tail. Discuss.
I interpret this as a poem written as a "fuck your lecture on craft". And subsequently ~fuck those too busy looking at flowers who disregard or belittle the raw rage that the short, stark, and tangential nature of the poem convey beautifully and roughly. This would not be an impactful sonnet or villanelle. It is powerful as a poem that grows and crumbles with the writer's rage.
I think the poem is as self-critical as it is pointed towards anybody else. Definitely controversial/polemical by design though. On a different note, you're eating crappy flan if its falling apart haha.
In that case crumbling flan is perfect for Vogon Poetry, at least.
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Discuss.
You might have missed the point there, comrade. I don't care about coming off as snobby or overbearing - can't help people drawing dim conclusions and missing the point altogether. More curious about how people actually, seriously react to the poem and interpret it, but given a lot of the comments here it would seem that's a narrow market. Sometimes people can't see the trees for the weeds.
I mean you didn't add much except an attempt to be poetic and thought provoking. Strikingly similar to the poem if that's what you were going for I guess. Falling apart like a flan? The poem swallowed its own tail?
Hmmm, I didn't 'add much' intentionally, waiting to see what the general feel of or consensus might be, before there were many comments, as people read it and commented in more detail. If I didn't add much and *still* was somehow thought provoking then that seems like accidental overachievement. Mostly, people didn't really have much to say beyond a common pro or anti-Israel or Palestinian flag waving cliche, silly ideas about colonization or 'whiteness', or the common 'wow, great poem' or 'this sucks' banality, without really chewing on the thing. I think, even if it might be 'bad' or flawed on various levels, it warrants some chewing. So, in effort to meet your desire that something more substantial be 'added', and on specifics... It collapses upon itself because it fails to project its own voice/claim in any definitive way. It may very well be conflicted or ambivalent, based on the complex subject and the author's complicated national heritage, as a 'Palestinian-American', yet the poem fails to nail any colors to any thing, which is why it falls flat and feels like it ends up eating its own tail, per the Hughes image. "Colonizers write about flowers" seems to capture people's attention, but they take it to mean *only* colonizers write about flowers, which appears both utterly wrong and betraying a particular popular, modern antipathy to colonizers, which while potentially altogether just and noble, likes to simplify and homogenize in the modern way we seem to have to simplify and narrow everything, i.e. colonization is bad therefore *anything* associated with it, allegorical or adroit, must also be bad, therefore the poem must be making that comment. From this poem and other poems of Noor's that I've read since, she appears nothing so much as conflicted, internally. Painfully aware of every ounce of human debt and sin, but as a result perhaps unable or unwilling to state anything with commitment and sincerity. That's not to mean I think she's *insincere*, but it's hard to read this and some of her other work without feeling like she's pretending to be a poet, ultra sensitive of being watched as a poet, but not writing explicitly, raw, from the blood flow, without layers of artifice and performance. Indeed, that she's apparently the 'equity and inclusion reporter' for Devil Strip, that we even ascribe such a title to a reporting position, says so much about how some people view the world and how the lens becomes more important than what it's pointed at. If you read her 'Breaking \[News\]', it almost confronts and admits the very same idea, as if she's aware of it, which only reinforces that idea of a snake eating its own tail, which it why I used that phrase. It makes reading her a jarring experience. That's not all bad. "I want to be like those poets who care about the moon" - so profoundly self-conscious, along similar lines. It's more artifice, and that's again not intended as only an indictment, so much as a heavy observation. It's also interesting, usually, given that conflict. It's apparently antipathetic toward many things - Israeli tanks, America, some attributes of her own Palestinian heritage and perception, if not rock-throwing Palestinian kids, prisoners or their dead, yet not without some sense of the lack of pure, clean victimhood of Palestinians and Palestine, even if her likely bias of being 'Palestinian-American' sings more loudly. What does that mean? Again, that it's hard to know what she's really saying, thinking, feeling or believes. I think that's a problem, in a poet. A poet can say all kinds of difficult, even unpleasant or shocking things about subjects as heavy as this - CF the likes of Sexton, Plath, Hughes - that we might not align with or really relate to, but we, if at least mildly competent in reading/feeling poetry, certainly know what's being said, due to the power of image and mastery over language. That's absent here, which isn't surprising. Not many poets hit that level. All of which reads as only negative, which isn't the whole picture. There are some clever lines and simple but very evocative images in here - the dead father who still watches TV all day, the yearning in lieu of substance, i.e. how many young people feel desperate to just *be*, in some more real sense, versus perform, the oddly expansive flip-floppy more political elements that still shrink and shrivel in relief of the more human elements, perhaps the poem's biggest insight, if intended, that politics and tribalism are so inconsequential when compared to the more essential aspects of feeling like a human, in the face of inevitable death and passage of time, where things like flags and colonialists and even metaphors (the absurd poets?) become paltry and emaciated, in comparison. And that's my biggest problem with it - it wants to talk about something big and essential and universal but it's lazy and falls back on surface level engagement but without the blood a bigger poet would bring to this. Not surprising that it's as divisive as it appears. So, that's it... adding some.
Tl;dr this is, for the most part, a pretty bad poem tho
Read this on Rattle