sun 19 nov

Days are clustered like bombs. The pace of work is faster than the pace of writing. To escape the feeling of constantly catching up I sit in a cold shed and write the dates. A whirl of activity and a news feed of trauma and doom.

Sunday 19 Nov

We invite neighbours in for a street meeting discussing next steps solar, insulation and song. The talk is of flat rooftops and due diligence but moves onto flying above the city as we plot out the final scenes of the bread and roses song video and persuade people to get involved in a low fi green screen shoot. Making space for joy and poetry amid and above the pragmatic.

Today the Poetry Editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anna Boyer resigned stating:

“The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”

A poetry shaped hole of refusal and reclamation.  

A crack in a news cycle of complicity and cover.