For almost 7 years, my friend D.J. Markey Funk and I had been holding on to this idea–until now. Though I did perform it at Cafe Tav (a mobile cabaret cafe), with music, this is a whole new world. Together as Euterpe, “We are the Music Makers” is my first spoken word song. Let me know what you think! Should we do it again?
When you’re finished, check out Markey Funk on Bandcamp. The dude’s prolific.
I know, I know, I haven’t been around. But I’ve been studying poetry, falling in love lyric essay, being awaken at night by the muse. But now that the semester– and my first year of studying poetry– is over I’m getting busy again. Before I could fully get my foot out the door of the university and into summer vacation (and on the same day that I had a test in American Literature!) I had my first radio interview on “Let’s Get Lit” the TLV1 FM program with journalist and author Ilene Prusher. I was so nervous and as soon as I was done, I started obsessing about how I should have said everything differently! But instead of talking about it, how about you just listen and tell me what you think:
Let’s Get Lit: Babbling towards Baghdad
“American-born, Jerusalem-dwelling poet and polyglot Shoshana Sarah brings us inside the world of her multi-dimensional, multi-lingual poetry. She talks about “Poets of Babel,” a Jerusalem group she founded, and reads from her work.
Plus, a short review of Baghdad: The City in Verse, an anthology of 170 Arabic poems, most of them appearing in English for the first time, in a collection translated and edited by the University of Haifa’s Reuven Snir.”
I don’t know if any of you have noticed but I’ve been updating pages on my site with photos and videos of poetry readings and performances…drop menus! (It was exciting for me because it took me forever to figure out how to do it. You can remain unimpressed. I’ll understand.)
Just to give you a look, I’m posting here below one of my favorite pages “Poets of Babel Readings” (Found in the drop menu of “Poetry Readings (Video)”).
Enjoy! (And check out all the pages & drop menus!)
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Below are the public poetry readings I’ve given at Poets of Babel. To read more about Poets of Babel, see videos, photos and the Poets of Babel Facebook page, see here.
Poets of Babel 1 Year Anniversary at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, May 30, 2013
“Maïté ”
Poets of Babel #14 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, June 24, 2013
“אין גן עדן בגן שלנו” (“There is no heaven in our garden”)
Poets of Babel #15 at Avram Bar, July 21, 2013
“Babili/Home”
(Poem starts at 0:52 after introduction in Hebrew)
Poets of Babel #17 at Hanal’e (The Han Theater Coffee Shop), September 16, 2013
“To the Soldiers of Fortune”
Space or מרחב/Merhav in Hebrew, is a multilingual poetry journal based in Tel Aviv that I felt I had to get in touch with the moment I discovered them. I wrote one of the editors, “I’m a multilingual poetry club. You’re a multilingual poetry journal. Let’s get married!” While we haven’t ‘gotten married’ yet, I had the pleasure of getting 3 pieces published in their August issue, two poems (“Tom” and “Dareen,” in English) and an article (“The Babel in Us” translated into Hebrew, if you’re interested, I’ll post an English version).
Last week, Yekum Tarbut/ יקום תרבות (rough translation: “Culture will rise”), a website for culture in Israel, wrote about Space’s Launch of the August Issue Event that took place at the Cheetah Gallery in Tel Aviv called “Going Out Into Space.” Here’s the article (in Hebrew) where they mentioned me, Poets of Babel and sport a photo they asked for when I told them that I recited poetry at Cafe Tav (just in case you were wondering why I’m in costume and no one else is). So here’s what I really looked like at the Space poetry reading/launch event:
For more cool photos from the event, see Space’s album from the event. The 3rd issue of Space is available for purchase at Indibook. Enjoy!
I’ve got almost a month of events to catch you up on! But we’ll do this in chronological order. If you haven’t seen it on Poets of Babel’s Facebook page, here are the videos from the poetry readings June 24th, 2013 (Late, I know! But when you see the rest of what I’ve been doing, you’ll understand!)
Tuvit Shlomi, Dutch (By the way, here is a very interesting article about Tuvit)
Emmy Raviv, English
Gilad Meiri, Hebrew (Gilad Meiri is a prominent Israeli poet, read more about him and his organization Poetry Place)
Talea Azzam, Arabic (Notice how he says Babel/Babili!)
Isabelle Cohn, German
Natan Perchikov, Russian
How about a round of applause? For the rest of the photos from the event, click here.
Since my first poetry slam, I’ve been getting busy with poetry, doing more readings this year than ever before, EVER.
This event is from June 3, 2013 at Tmol Shilshom, a bookstore cafe restaurant in Jerusalem, made famous for being a place where “Israel’s best known writers read from their works.” These days, it is a common location for literary events such as the Young Writers’ Evening organized by Jerusalem Village.
I actually joined the event quite last-minute, but I was glad I did as I met a new poet and friend there (you’ll see her in later Poets of Babel videos) as well as learned what else is going on in the English speaking Israeli poetry scene.
Here are my videos of the reading:
“There”
“Rhyme & Reason”
“Talitha kumi”
As Open As the Sky... 