poetrysmackdown

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Omar Ziyadeh, “Nobody Can Identify Their Own Remains, and I Am Unable to Identify My Own” (tr. from Arabic by Alice S. Yousef) [ID’d]

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–Palestinian poet and editor of Mizna, George Abraham.

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For the general strike: consider making a piece of art for Palestine. It can be writing, drawing, filming, music — anything. Make a little zine about your feelings, your thoughts. Write a poem about your grief. Paint a picture of the way you wish the world looked. Surround yourself with Palestinian music and let it inspire you. It doesn't have to be big, even a doodle is enough. They're afraid of your, our, voices, so speak in whatever way that rings truest to you.

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Hiba Abu Nada, from I Grant You Refuge (trans. Huda Fakhreddine)

Hiba Abu Nada was a novelist, poet, and educator. She wrote this poem on Oct. 10th, 2023. She died a martyr, killed in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on Oct. 20th, 2023. She was 32 years old.

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just for context, this article isn't recent (written after the escalation in 2021), but it's just as worthwhile now.

Growing up in Gaza is inspiring for anyone, but especially for poets – life here is poetry blown into pieces and scattered all over the place. In the weddings, there’s poetry, in times of war, in the eyes of an old man sitting in front of his small shop, mourning the death of his child, in the tears of a lover whose fiancée was murdered along with her entire family while she was sleeping in her house, in the blueness of Gaza’s shores, which carries me to where I want to be and brings me back to who I was, in the flames of bombs falling on the heads of Gazans; heartachingly and heartwarmingly, this place can definitely make you a poet.

“There is no outlet in Gaza but poetry, it is the only medium that takes our souls wherever we want to go,” says 22-year-old Maha Jaraba, who is from the al-Nusairat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. ... "We are in the midst of dark, in the midst of bleakness, there is just a small window for light to get through, into our chests, and to release our sense of outrage or to get rid of the stumbling blocks there is only writing poetry,”

Omar Moussa is a 23-year-old poet, journalist and member of the Gaza Poets Society who lives in Jabalia Camp, the largest refugee camp in Gaza. ... Omar believes there is no way to escape a place like Gaza, even by writing poetry. “If we see poetry as a gate to escape Gaza, that would seem a luxury that the people of Gaza don’t have. Reality is reality – you just cannot skip that, and writing poetry is just to swindle this reality. Here, there is death, rubble, and a tiny little life, but amidst the concretions of reality there is a flower growing, and it is the flower of poetry.”

#palestine #free palestine #poetry #not a poll

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some informal thoughts

hello! hope the holiday season has been kind to all of you. and i hope all my jewish followers had a lovely hanukkah! anyways, since i said a few months ago that i’d pick poetry smackdown back up sometime around this time of year, i thought i should make a post. the gist of it is that i’m still quite busy, i have a break that’s about three weeks shorter than I was planning on, and i don’t currently have the mental bandwidth required to read, contemplate, and sort through poem submissions in a way that does justice to them, even if i were to recruit some friends to help out. since running a tournament format requires at least five weeks of continued engagement once it’s underway, and since i’m not at capacity to offer that right now due to the change in my schedule, i’m gonna have to bow out for now. sad bc i was looking forward to it!

my hope is that i’ll have some more time over the summer to hunker down with it, in which case you’ll be hearing from me. it’ll frankly depend on the kind of job i land in for the summer, but i find that my unemployed spirit can typically keep me doing stupid shit regardless of workload...to a point. i don’t want to make any promises because i don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up just to let them down again LOL. i do admit the amount of exposure the first tournament got has made me feel like more of a perfectionist this time around, doubly because i don’t feel that i’m very suited to being a public online presence (even a relatively quite small one)—i’m bad enough at responding to emails for my own real life responsibilities, let alone tumblr asks for the silly responsibilities i invent for myself lol. that’s not to say i no longer want to do it, or i don’t enjoy it, or even that i don’t feel capable of making a really interesting bracket—just that if i am working to put something new together, and if people are taking the time to submit poems they care about, then i don’t want to half-ass it.

my second admission is something like this. I made the original bracket as a celebration of poetry and our relationships to it. yes it was silly and competitive, and the poems were very tumblr, but still, celebration was the intention—I wanted to have conversations about poetry. I stand by the bracket format as a fun and valuable way to foster conversations about poetry, but truthfully, the poems i’m wanting to have conversations about right now—the poems that we should be talking about right now—are ones that i'm not comfortable putting in a bracket. I reblogged The Baffler’s Poems from Palestine collection on here earlier, and Najwan Darwish’s “Who Remembers The Armenians?”, which I still often find repeating through my head when I'm traveling from one place to another, walking home or riding the bus. I came across this beautiful thread recently where people have been translating Dr. Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die” into their own languages (this just makes my translator's heart sing!!!!!!). @havingapoemwithyou has been posting some great poems from and for Palestine as well—check out their tag here.

There's always more to add, and I'll be posting more on here as I come across it, but that's what I feel anyone should be focusing on right now when it comes to poetry. i think poetry can be an escape but it should never be a distraction. does that make sense? i wouldn't be against doing a one-off poll here or there, but it feels weird to be making a tournament for poetry right now, or anytime soon. i feel like what free time i have right now is still best utilized helping my friends with organizing in the real world. and god, a bit off-topic but while I'm talking, fuck poetry foundation—I have so much respect for all the poets keeping up the boycott, because while i think it's a simple decision, it's not always an easy one (Aurielle Lucier discussed that here).

anyways, if you read all of this, thank you for your time!! I could go on and on, but really this was just meant to be a message telling y'all that there won't be another tournament for a while lol. even so i'll be trying to use this small silly platform as best i can until palestine is free because that's the absolute least i can do.

#not a poll #also i'm closing my ask box for now because i know i don't have the bandwidth to answer anything rn. sorry :( #but feel free to reply here with your thoughts and any resources and i'll do my best to respond #or even messages might be fine. something about the ask format just gives me anxiety sometimes lmao #cannot stress this enough i am so so so bad at responding to things #even when i want to or enjoy doing it

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refaat alareer - "let it be a tale"

A Palestinian poet who was martyred by an Israeli air strike on 7th of December.

Translation by (@tameeolivefern)

Poem in English and Arabic:

إذا كان لا بد أن أموت

فعليك أن تحيا

لتقص قصتي

لتبيع أشيائي

لتشتري قطعة قماش

و بضعة خيوط

(لتكون بيضاء بذيل طويل)

حتى طفل في مكان ما في غزة

يحدق بالسماء

ينتظر اباه الذي غادر على عجل

بلا أن يودع أحدًا

حتى جسده

حتى نفسه -

يرى الطائرة الورقية طائرتي التي صنعتها

تحلق عاليا

و يظن لوهلة أن ملاكًا عاليا

يُعيد الحب

إذا كان لا بد أن أموت

لتجعلها تحضر الأمل

لتجعلها قصة

If I must die,

you must live to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze-

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself-

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up

above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

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to any poets and writers on here: the poetry foundation pulled a review of an anti-Zionist poetry collection because they didn’t wanna “take sides” so writers are calling the poetry foundation and the editors of poetry (magazine) to take an anti zionist stance and support the academic and cultural boycott of israel in a petition linked here. the link to sign is at the top of the document.

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A series of poems from Palestine, curated by the poet and translators Fady Joudah and Lena Tuffaha.

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#briefly interrupting my poetry smackdown hiatus to share

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hey just checking - are u going to be doing the sequel on the same blog (poetrysmackdown)? bc most of the time i unfollow poll blogs after the polls are over (as they're usually dead by then anyways)

yes sequel will be on the same blog! won't be for a couple months though

#ask #not a poll

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Hello! Just saw your post about maybe doing another one of these over the winter holidays, and accepting submissions. If it goes through, would you consider taking commentary, like @art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament?

Thanks for running such a fun tournament :)

yep! I'll have a section for it in the form. and no problem! <3

#not a poll #ask

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THE FINAL SMACKDOWN.

Big congratulations to "The Two-Headed Calf" for a solid win over "How to Be a Dog" (and to our Third Place competitor, "Wild Geese")!

Thank you to all who participated. I had a lot of fun with this and I hope you guys did as well! I've said it before but I had no idea this would get as big as it did, and it's been truly heartening to see this many people engaging with poetry and getting excited about it. I'm personally grateful to all the folks I got the chance to discuss poems with, and everyone who challenged me to see these poems in a new light. Whether you were introduced to new poems or reunited with old ones, whether you voted with the majority or against it, I hope you got something out of this as well.

As promised, here is the grand stats spreadsheet. The smackdown with the highest turnout was the semifinal matchup "The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin vs. "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver with 17,449 votes! In second place, Round 1: "Poem" by Langston Hughes vs. "A Meeting" by Wendell Berry with 16,690 votes.

Unfortunately my real-life responsibilities have hit me like a truck and I don't have time to do a whole post dedicated to reviewing more of it, but I hope y'all might share any insights you have below! I also included the word count stats on the "summary" page, as suggested in this ask by @puddinginthemix. Nevertheless, they don't seem to demonstrate a concrete trend in one direction or the other—the mean word count difference technically gives a slight edge to longer poems in competition, but with such an insane standard deviation as to render the whole thing silly.

On the topic of a sequel.

After some deliberation, I've decided I would love to do another one of these focusing on poems that are lesser-known on Tumblr! In a perfect world I would just jump right in again, but it's quickly becoming clear to me that I will not have time to sort through/pair submissions and then run the thing while balancing work and school in the upcoming semester. With that in mind, my plan is to run it over the winter holidays so I'm able to give it more of my attention. That said, I've already made the submission form, and I'm tempted to release that ASAP so that I can use any downtime in the fall to read, review, and structure things thoughtfully. I also just figure it'll get a higher volume of submissions if I release it now. I know it's probably not ideal, but would people be cool with me opening submissions earlier, even if it means there'll be a significant time gap between submission and competition? If so, I'll get that out no later than Tuesday, and likely keep it open for a few weeks (unless it gets, like, seriously swamped lol).

Lastly, I've still got some asks I need to get through.....they're still on my mind. I'll do my best to respond to everyone within the next week!

Thank you again to everyone who participated, it's been such a joy!

#poetry smackdown #stats

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do you have any tumblr poetry blog recs by any chance?

Ah not too many unfortunately! If you're not following @apoemaday and @havingapoemwithyou then you should be. But really most of the folks who I personally reblog from are personal blogs that post a lot besides poetry, so I don't wanna put them on blast. Anybody can feel free to drop suggestions below though!! :)

#ask #not a poll #recs

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Did you find that shorter poems were more likely to win? This was my impression based on casual observation!

Good question! Requires a bit of number crunching, so I'll look into it when I'm doing my stats review at the end. I think it's definitely likely, though if that's the case, "How to Be a Dog" would again be an outlier—I'm pretty sure it's the longest poem in the competition, and yet it made it all the way to the finals!

#ask #not a poll #stats

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that sheep poem is nice but is the assumption that we are voting based on subject matter? that isn't how I judge poems or what resonates for me with two headed calf

Huh? I don't think so, I think it was just someone who saw a parallel between the two poems and wanted to make a recommendation. Ultimately the two poems are getting at different things, but it's cool to compare them. They're both using the image of a creature destined by its strange body not to live long. How does a creature like that see the world? What can it tell us? How do the different origins of these two creatures—one given a second head by an abnormality in the womb, another the product of an inter-species conception hearkening back to myth—inform the meanings of their respective poems? What do they share, and how do they diverge? Just because that isn't how you typically judge poems doesn't mean your understanding can't potentially be enriched by the conversation!

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