Poetry: An Acquired Taste

It usually happens in April as April is National Poetry Month, but this year it happened in March: Poets speak at Inprint's Margaret Root Brown Reading Series in Houston. 

Listening to poets is a surreal experience. It is like listening to someone speak in a foreign language. You get the gist of what is going on, from the context, from a random known word, and you get the emotional feeling of what is being said, from facial expressions, hand gestures, but you feel like a small child listening to a group of nuclear physicists. Add to that the fact that the two poets who spoke at Inprint are multilingual, with Carmen Giménez Smith speaking English and Spanish, and Fady Joudah speaking English and Arabic as well as speaking Medical-Talk (he is a physician by profession). 

The result: a beautiful, fun, almost mystical experience.

Fady Joudah

From "Palestine, Texas" by Fady Joudah

“I’ve never been,” I said to my friend who’d just come back from there. “Oh, you should definitely go,” she said. “The original Palestine is in Illinois.” She went on, “A pastor was driven out by Palestine’s people and it hurt him so badly he had to rename somewhere else after it. Or maybe it goes back to a 17th century Frenchman who traveled with his vision of milk and honey, or the nut who believed in dual seeding.”

“What’s that?” I asked. “That’s when an egg is fertilized by two sperm,” she said. “Is that even viable?” I asked. “It is,” she said, “on rare occasions, though nothing guarantees the longevity of the resulting twins.” 

She spoke like a scientist but was a professor of the humanities at heart. “Viability,” she added, “depends on the critical degree of disproportionate defect distribution for a miracle to occur. If there is life, only one twin lives....” 

From“Palestine, Texas” in Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Fady Joudah. 

 Carmen Giménez Smith

From “Be Recorder” by Carmen Giménez Smith

when my children found out
the tooth fairy wasn’t real
it was the death of innocence
and the beginning of a new world
they’ll recall in their old age

as the days when we had
to begin to start over even
the hope myths keeping
us afloat revised to include
the bodies we used as ballast

 not the end of innocence

but the beginning of futurity

rousing the earth to avenge

our bodies her munitions

From “Be Recorder” in Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by 

Carmen Giménez Smith.

After the reading, the two poets had a conversation on stage with Jasminne Mendez. 

(Probably because I didn't understand a lot of what was going on, I became strangely fascinated with the moderator's earrings. Here is a closeup. Who is that face on her earrings?)

You can listen to Fady Joudah speak with Lupe and Jasminne Mendez here. (I love how Jasminne Mendez dreams of becoming a yoga instructor or a librarian. Side note to her: Do it, Jasminne!) An episode with Carmen Smith should be posted at Ink Well shortly.

For more wordless photos, go to Wordless Wednesday.

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