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:
“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.”
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:
Pico Iyer asks: “Where is home?” I say: “Home is Babel.”
In this amazing TED talk (I know, I know, ALL TED Talks are amazing, but this one is special!) Pico Iyer just articulated everything I already knew but am just beginning to coherently express about myself. I am debating whether or not to tell you to watch the video Pico Iyer Where is Home first or later. You decide. But if you are a citizen of the world or a citizen of Babel like me then you will feel finally and completely understood, it will feel scientific even.
It’s all the more powerful that I saw this after writing and performing my latest poem “Babili/Home” , my first macaronic language poem, mainly in English with touches of Hebrew, French, Russian and one phrase in Ukrainian. It’s about home. It’s about who I am. It’s an idea I’ve been trying to iron out since I wrote “Multicultural is the New Multiracial” for the Mixed Race 2.0 project (forthcoming) on ‘blackness’ (the African-American brand) coupled with the elusive feeling of detachment from it after (and honestly even before) living within another culture and disdane with having to be defined all of the time. Or what I wrote in “The Babel in Us” (Hebrew) in the multilingual, Tel Aviv based poetry journal “Space”. about how everyone is a little macaronic these days, multilingualism is everywhere and needs places to be expressed which is why I created Poets of Babel.
Speaking of multilingual or macaronic poetry, there are a couple of poets who I know would dig this talk. You should check them out too. One, I’ve mentioned often, Antoine Cassar, the author of the first macaronic poem I read and loved, “Merħba,” as well as the lingual adventures of the book Mużajk(Mosaic), or the powerfully open-hearted poem “Passaport” , which brought tears to my eyes with the line:
“no one to brand you stranger, alien, criminal, illegal immigrant, or extra-communautaire, nobody is extra, …”
Another poet I just met over the summer at a ‘Mini International Poetry Festival’ in Tel Aviv, is Johannes CS Frank, the author of Remembrances of Copper Cream, a trilingual poetry book, in English, German and Hebrew, which is simultaneously as cosmopolitan as it is a visceral authentically Jerusalem experience, right down to the copper highlighted sketches,
“a full scale model of the universe”
“Merħba”and Remembrances of Copper Cream both appear in the photo above.
You know what, just watch Pico Iyer’s video, & my poem “Babili/Home” and then reach out to me. If you’re a citizen of Babel, not just multicultural or multilingual but have been haunted by the feeling that you basically belong nowhere specifically but to so many places at the same time, collage people, mosaic people, Embrace.
As Open As the Sky... 