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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

VS: George Abraham: vs. Returning

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Danez Smith: At the end of my suffering, there was a whore. It was Franny Choi!

Franny Choi: Shall I compare them to a summer’s day? Nah, they’re just Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) You’re listening to VS, the podcast where poets confront the ideas that move them.

Franny Choi: That was good.

Danez Smith: That was good. That was our most poetry-appropriate intro ever.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) I know! Well done, us. Finally, we’re poets. 

Danez Smith: Finally, we’re a poetry podcast.

Franny Choi: Oh, god. Oh, man.

Danez Smith: One sweet day, we got it right. Five seasons in. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: And yet, you still managed to call me a whore, which I think is an accomplishment.

Danez Smith: So it means that we were still us.

Franny Choi: Still us.

Danez Smith: You know, we did not lose ourselves within our assimilation into the poetry podcast industrial complex.

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES) Exactly. Yeah, well, speaking of being ourselves, being oneself, Nezzy when is the last time you’ve gone back to read [insert] boy?

Danez Smith: Oh, wow.

Franny Choi: The first book. Number one.

Danez Smith: I don’t know if I’ve sat down and read the whole thing, but I did peruse. I feel like, every time like, I’m cleaning my house, I kind of like, maybe sometimes, like I’d say, every couple of months, I’ll start reading my books. Because I always have a copy of a book kind of hanging out somewhere, especially throughout these months of Zoom readings and stuff like that. It’s just like, there’s my old tattered copy of Don’t Call Us Dead or Homie that I forgot to put back the last time I did a reading, you know? I read my old college undergrad manuscript like once a year. I clean out my grandma’s garage like once a summer, which means that I just like shift around all the shit that we all have in there. And so at some point I have to, like, move my little stack of books that I’m like, “Don’t throw these away. But I don’t want them in my house.” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: So I read what was called, “Swallow and Bury,” which was my little undergrad manuscript.

Franny Choi: Oh, my god.

Danez Smith: But I love those, because I can also really feel the presence of, like, a community voice in there, right? Of being like, this is a time when I was like, very much like coming up in slam. And like, I think there were ways in which, like, we were kind of echoing off of each other as well, too. And I can kind of read like, “Oh, I think this is when I started hanging out with Sam,” you know?

Franny Choi: Aw. I love it.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) So that always, like, sort of pleases me. And also lets me know that like, oh, yeah, now I feel like I know what I’m doing, too. And not to say that, you know, niggas ain’t still reverberating, you know? Or community, you know. But it’s just like, “Oh, look at young Nez trying on the styles.” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, totally. I mean, I love going back and thinking about what I was thinking at the time, or what I was excited by or confused by or, like, you know, disgusted or ignited by. I think that it’s like every few years that I go back and read Floating, Brilliant, Gone, book number one. Read it like I’m reading it as a reader, you know, like, starting at poem one.

Danez Smith: Oh, wow, you, like, cover to cover? 

Franny Choi: Yeah. And I try to actually read every poem. Usually, what happens is, I’ve felt distant from that person that I was, or distant from that writer that I was. And then when I go back, it’s just like re-meeting myself a little bit, you know.

Danez Smith:  Hm.

Franny Choi: And also kind of remembering that like, even though I didn’t exactly articulate what I was trying to do in the poems, like I was trying to do certain things, and I was doing a good job at certain things, even if I didn’t always know what they were, you know, or know what they were in conversation with or what the context was. I like that feeling of going back and being like, “Okay, it wasn’t as embarrassing as I thought it was,” or like, you know, like, if people meet this version of me, you know, that’s okay. What do you think you walk away from, like, those moments when you return to that old poem? Like, what do you walk away from it with? 

Danez Smith: You know, I think it’s sort of—it’s like returning to any place, right? Sometimes you can find nothing, right? You know, you sort of like, go—or not nothing, but like, you know, it’s not what you expect. I think we talked about this a little bit in the episode with Aria. You return to something—a place, a thing, whatever it is—and it’s not what you thought, expected it to be. But sometimes, you know, those things that we’re constantly returning to, like the work we’re talking about, hopefully, with distance comes a different type of acknowledgement with what was a seed there. That’s what I hear you saying, Franny. You know, it’s like, I look back at those early poems, and maybe there’s a poem in those early collections that I didn’t quite recognize at the time that I was learning so much from. Part of returning is like, sort of returning to the places that still hold the possibility of mystery for you, right?

Franny Choi: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I love that we’re talking about this, you know, both on the level of our work as poets and as artists, but also, the idea of returning to an origin point, or an ancestral space, or, you know, an earlier version of oneself, whether that’s like, literal or figurative. Like, this can be like, really profound and meaningful, even more so when exile is in the mix, when diaspora is in the mix, when colonialism is in the mix. And so, it is for all of these reasons that we are really excited to bring to you all this interview with none other than the George Abraham, whose book Birthright, which came out in 2020, like, cracked open this really beautiful space both in craft and in political thought, I think, about all of these themes that we’re talking about. So we’re really excited to share this conversation, where we talk to George about the idea of distance and exile, and what it means as an artist to create a sort of poetics of returning, in the craft itself.

Danez Smith: George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet from Jacksonville, Florida. Their debut, Birthright, from Button Poetry in 2020, the Big Other Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers RAWI, a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Boston Foundation, and winner of the 2017 College Union Poetry Slam International’s Best Poet title. Their work has appeared in the Nation, American Poetry Review, the Baffler, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, George currently teaches at Emerson College and will be a Litowiz MFA and MA candidate at Northwestern University in the fall. We are so excited to bring you all this interview with George, who is just one of our leading formalists in poetry, such an exciting young voice. If you are not familiar with George’s work, consider yourself put on. If you know about George’s work, then consider yourself about to be floored once again. So let’s get into this thing with George Abraham who is going to start us off with a poem.

(SOUND EFFECT)

George Abraham:

(READS POEM)

Heritage

Come morning, he won’t even remember my name.
Come midnight, we’ll be washed of his every trace:

the blood pooling in moonlight, staining oceans
empty of biology’s brief mimicry. I said I love him

because he too was born on the wrong side of a wall;
perhaps, in funeral quiet, this is the whitest he’ll ever be.

We thank him for his service behind a makeshift altar
& what of gratitude isn’t a thinning bloodline?

His head pillowed by flag of blood & star. In life,
he’d cook for us. He never let us leave empty-stomached.

His brother grips my hand. Asks what are you?
Transfixes his eyes on the wounds I bulleted into my own face.

All he knows of divinity was once heresy & clipped wing.

In truth, had they known of the mouths I spoke a swollen
history into, most men in my family would have wanted me

dead & I’d like to think this its own forgiveness—
into the gardener’s hands, both seed & floodwater;
the expense of every bloom, a season of winded upheaval

because who else would know better this swallow
& fang-sunk tongue? because they’ve tasted their own

pooling blood, I’d like to think my ancestors couldn’t imagine
me unwritten from their gospel—the ghosts that wear my name,

not the exiles of another heaven: inherited,
because we too lost our countries before we lost our bodies.

Every man I’ve held with pen was once capable of breaking me.
We were never meant to survive this mythos.

Forgive me. I’m running from this story, into another boy’s arms like

We were never meant to survive this mythos.
Every man I’ve held with palm was once capable of breaking me

because we lost our countries before we lost our bodies;
not the exiles of—another heaven inherited

me from unwritten gospel—the ghosts that wear my name
pooling blood; I’d like to think my ancestors couldn’t imagine

this fang-sunk tongue because they’ve tasted their own;
because who else would know better this swallow—

the expense of every bloom, a season of winded upheaval
into the gardener’s hands, both seed & floodwater;

& death, I’d like to think, is its own forgiveness—
its own history—most men like him would have wanted a family in me,

in truth, had they not known of the mouths I swelled into.
All we know of heresy was once divinity’s un-clipped wing.

He transfixes his eyes on the wounds I bulleted into my own face.
He grips my hand, asks what are you        wanting?

He cooked for me, after. He’d never let me leave empty-stomached.
My head, pillowed by stars of no flag. In life,
what of gratitude isn’t a thinning bloodline?

I thanked & serviced him behind our makeshift altar
in funeral quiet. Perhaps this is the whitest I’ll ever be—

Although he too was born on the wrong side of a wall
empty of biology’s brief mimicry, I couldn’t have said I love you like this:
our blood, pooling in moonlight, staining oceans—

come midnight, I’ll wash myself of his every trace.
Come morning, I won’t even remember his name.

* * *

Franny Choi: (EXHALES) George, I love this poem. Thank you so much.

Danez Smith: Coming through with the ill palindrome.

Franny Choi: Yeah, right. Can I ask you to talk a little bit about this palindrome form, like what led you to it? Was there a point at which it became clear that that was how this poem was going to happen?

George Abraham: Yeah! This is a poem that I think has an interesting backstory, actually. I was experiencing weird, like—I’m not out to my family, and so, calling it homophobia or queer phobia is kind of an odd thing. It’s like a, “We’re suspicious of you. And we’re letting you know that we’re suspicious of you” kind of thing at a funeral of all places. And I wrote a version of what became this poem that night, thinking—it was actually quite a little bit after, Danez, when you were reading that poem at AWP, “Waiting for some people to die so I could be myself.”

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

George Abraham: And so I was thinking a lot about that poem. And I was thinking a lot about like, just my experience of “Wow, I’m like, around the death of my family. And these are like, old, weird conservative people, that I’m just kind of feeling all these conflicted ranges of emotions” of like, Palestinian queer phobia as like an inheritance of colonial violence. Palestinian homophobia as something that America very much exacerbated and induced in a lot of these folks, I think. And the American South, too. This poem takes place in the American South, which is where I grew up, Jacksonville, Florida. Right after the funeral, I went and I hooked up with someone on Grindr. And so I was like, this is such an interesting parallel, and also a way of question mark processing.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: Yeah, it was weird. It was like an oddly tender Grindr meetup that was like, he was like, “I want to cook for you. I want to like,”—he didn’t know what was going on, but could see something was going on, and he was a very sweet human who I, like, never met again. (LAUGHS) So yeah, it was just like an interesting parallel series of moments there, going from the funeral and the funeral talked and a lot about food. And then we had food, and like, I don’t know. So there’s a lot of things going on image-wise, I was just thinking of, and consumption. And so I write the poem and feel really relieved, and I send it to a few of my friends. And my friend Bradley just kind of highlighted the entire final stanza of the poem draft. And mind you, it wasn’t in a palindrome form. It was just kind of a lyric poem. Bradley highlighted the entire last stanza, and is like, “Where is the blood?” I spent an entire year and a half thinking about that question, actually. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Where’s the blood? Hmm.

Franny Choi: A year and a half thinking about that question for this poem, specifically.

George Abraham: For this poem.

Franny Choi: Whoa.

George Abraham: And I have a weird relationship with this poem, because, I feel like this is a truth that I’ve been wanting to say for a while. And I’m also feeling like it’s not quite done. And there was this gut feeling in my, that I had that was just telling me, oh, no, this poem is not done. And I couldn’t figure out why. And then I kept on thinking about the question of “Where is the blood?”, and then I was walking one day, again, a year and a half later, having just put the poem aside for a bit and not, you know, actively thought about as much. And then I was like, wait, maybe the blood is in returning, maybe the blood is in the language itself. And I need to mimic and embody a returning in language. And this uncomfortable scene of like, the funeral scene’s exact language becomes, like, a Grindr, hookup scene’s exact language. I needed form to embody that. Like, the turn of the poem was there, but it wasn’t quite working on a level of embodiment. And so, I was like, what is a form that is predicated on returning, and that is a palindrome. I started with the image of blood. And then I’m like, I need to come back to it at some point, and not in some, like, cheesy, “the last line is the first line of the poemTM” (LAUGHING) but just in a more embodied way, in a way that’s more accurate to the memory I was trying to get at in this poem.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Well, it also seems like fully committing to this palindrome in the way that you do, it’s such a fuller commitment to returning than, just having the last line be the first line, you know? Every step away, I have to take like, each and every step back. Yeah, I love that idea of it being more embodied.

Danez Smith: Thank you for saying that the way you did, Franny, because it makes me want to ask George, you’re such a staunch and like, deep formalist, right? You’re doing forms within forms, right? There’s like, triptych sestinas, you know, there’s, like, collapsing things, right? You’re so inventive, and I wonder for you, between form and content, or let’s say form and the memories and the stories that they hold, how precious is the form to the formalist, right? Do you feel like form is really showing up oftentimes and like, guiding you towards what you’re trying to do? Or are you just trying shit? You know? It might be different answers for every work, but.

George Abraham: Yeah. I kind of think of it almost bi-directionally, that like, when I think of form, it’s not about content leading form or form leading content, but like a bi-directional kind of hug between the two of them, or entangling form and memory, entangling form and content. And I think I have about equal amount of stories of, “I have some form idea that I just want to try.” And, “Let me find the correct poem for the form.” I have a lot of stories that are like that, or vice versa. I’m trying to write into a poem content or memory or story etcetera wise, and I am going to let the content naturally lead me to a form. And if a form doesn’t exist, invent a form. Or break a form. To be devoted to form is to be devoted to form’s breakage, I think, as well.

Danez Smith: Mm.

George Abraham: There isn’t really any way for me to continue the work I’m doing without breaking open. And like, I think the Markov sonnet is a kind of nice example of a bit of both modes. In an explicit sense, there was a story about Palestinian, near Hebron in the West Bank, or, as Palestinians call it, al-Khalil, there is a vineyard in a West Bank city of Halhul. And on my way to Kundiman, actually, my first year of Kundiman, I read a news article about how settlers in the West Bank took a chainsaw and just kind of like, went to town with the grapes and the grape leaves. And then spray painted, “We will reach everywhere” on the building. And thinking about like, violence against Palestinians as something both ecological and violence to our bodies. It’s a relationship they’re in. But it’s a relationship I don’t quite have access to. It’s a relationship I view through a distance of diaspora imposed by exile, but still a proximity to Empire nonetheless. And I was reckoning with, “I need to tell this story in a poem, and I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to access a memory that is inaccessible to me. How do I access a land that is inaccessible to me? How do I access a history of trauma that is inaccessible to me?” is kind of the meta questions. So the form kind of was that level of disembodiment, kind of as Danez was saying, it is kind of an iterative poem. It’s a sonnet that’s kind of disembodied and memoryless. Every sequence of three lines reads as a cause, action, effect triplet, where the sonnet erases itself after every three lines. And so I was like, “How can I embody memoryless, but also a kind of stepping through memory, in a way that mimics how I experience history or how I experience like, trying to understand trauma against Palestinian land?” And a lot of that was inspired by my science background. The Markov chain is a memoryless probability system where, you’re trying to model a sequence of actions. And it’s an assumption that any action you’re trying to model only depends on the previous action. So one action causes the next, which causes the next, which causes the next. That’s why it’s called a chain. And it’s a mathematical simplification for modeling a lot of systems, from communication networks to biological systems. Has a lot of applications in so many domains. But I’m really interested in the idea of like a memoryless model for systems. And so I’m like, “What if I tried to make the sonnet a memoryless thing?” And you have to read every line as an isolated—you can only know what happens before and what happens to after. Nothing else causally matters. And so I think that the explicit consequences are, yeah, memorylessness. But the implicit consequences, like, the known, the embodied consequences of this form is kind of like what Danez said earlier as, it’s like an iteration process. It’s a, you’re slowly working your way through the poem. And that’s something that was a little bit unintentional with the form. That I was like, “Oh, wow”—I didn’t realize until about halfway into the poem that I’m like, “This is a kind of interesting, syntactical stagnation that comes with the form.” And this is kind of what leads me to like, thinking about the relationship between form and memory. Memory is something that’s both known and declarative versus something internal to our bodies. I think form has implicit and explicit consequences and embodiments in a poem. You can say, “Cool, I’m gonna write it’s a sestina, which means on an explicit level, I know that I have to return to these six words shuffled in different increments.” But what are the implicit consequences of that? How does it frame how you’re trying to tell a story through a sestina? If you’re trying to tell the story.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

George Abraham: How does it frame how you’re trying to access a memory through a sestina? What if you say, “Let’s throw some of the words out along the way and put a barrier up in memory”? How can a sestina reckon with that kind of a breakage in form? Every decision in form and every breakage of form has consequences that I think are both explicit and implicit. And it’s something that I have, like, come to find joy in, in form. The surprises, the macro idea influencing the implicit afterwards of writing the poem, and saying, “Oh, wow, that was a consequence of language that I didn’t quite go into searching for, but it happened. And now, I’m left with something really interesting.” And so in a way, form is a neural system of memory almost, for a poem, is how I’ve always sort of thought about it.

Franny Choi: Wow. Yeah, there were so many things that you just said, George, that I want to go into, but I want to, like, put a pin in form as neural, this sort of form of neural network. But can we go back to some earlier things that you said, so that we can kind of like, pick apart some of this, like, chain of wisdom bombs that you just dropped?

Danez Smith: Wisdom bombs. I like that.

Franny Choi: It was just like a stream of them. So, first of all, I just want to kind of go back to this Markov sonnet. The idea of form being a thing that allows you to create the sense of forgetting is so fascinating. In some ways, it makes total sense that a diasporic poetics would lead a poet to inventing forms. To have like, half a grasp on a tradition and then be like, “Well, I have to also kind of define what this is for myself,” or, you know, “because I can’t just do this.” And so, I also kind of want to ask about, like, the sonnet part of that Markov sonnet. Like, what does it mean to bring in forms that are also like, of a Western literary canon? And yeah, how do you relate to that as a poet?

George Abraham: There’s kind of two answers. There’s the kind of like, answer of how I, as a Palestinian, kind of like you’re saying, are trying to make my own way through a sonnet and through Western forms in general. But like, there’s another way that I’ve been thinking about the sonnet as a bit of a rhetorical box, almost, Like, when we think about the history of the sonnet, and like, almost every single element of the sonnet nowadays is fluid. Meter—I mean, I don’t want to turn this into a “prosody is colonialism” podcasts, but—(LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: But meter is kind of out of the, you know, window a little bit. And rhyme, again, is like, great. There are some Italian sonnets and John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry collection that I’m like, “I’m gonna use that to teach Italian sonnets instead of, I don’t know, insert random poet from 1500s.” People can and have done really great things taking Western prosody aspects of the sonnet form, but it’s a bit fluid now. And the 14 lines even, a bit fluid. sam sax’s 13-word sonnet in Kaddish. And so, what is not fluid and not negotiable is the volta. It’s not a sonnet if it doesn’t have a volta. In my head, it’s a little bit of a rhetorical game. You’re trying to set up for some big turn. That’s a rhetorical structure as much as it is a formal structure. What kind of a poem would demand that kind of rhetorical structure? What kind of a memory, if you want to try to use a sonnet to unlock a memory, what kind of a memory would demand that kind of a rhetorical structure? Or an Italian sonnet, which is a more even approach, like—

Danez Smith: Question for you, George, though, about this form, right? Because I’m thinking, right, like you’re talking about the volta is unavoidable. And we have this sonnet that we’re getting three lines at a time, and even the Markov part of the sonnet, right, is directing us towards a cause and effect. Did you make a sonnet that only voltas are possible?

George Abraham: I think that’s kind of where I was going with it!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: Again, this was maybe not the quote-unquote “intended” direction of where I went with it. But like, in a way, what if we isolate every triplet, and every triplet is a volta of sorts? And what I was kind of also trying to think about with the volta, and why the sonnet for the Markov sonnet, is like, in a meta sense, the poem’s meta volta, if you were to strip the poem of its form and view it as just a 14-line sonnet, that volta is obscured, to an extent, through the three line stepping. In a micro sense, every line as a volta kind of thing, but in a macro sense, obscuring the larger traditional thinking of a volta, of, you’re going into a sonnet expecting there to be a turn somewhere—

Franny Choi: But there’s too many turns. There’s like, lots, there’s lots of turns.

George Abraham: Yeah, you can’t know it.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

George Abraham: And that is kind of, reading history and diaspora is a little bit like that. It’s a little bit like trying to get a slice of history that we have, or historical memory that we have access to. And colonialism is the process that obscures that larger volta reckoning, that larger trajectory. And it takes like, Work, capital W, to assemble a causal chain of events, that is not memoryless, a causal chain of events where you can see the volta is colonialism, the volta is, “Here is how Western forces have systematically fucked over [insert population], or [insert geographic location],” etcetera, etcetera. That kind of process is something I wanted to imbue into the sonnet a little bit.

Danez Smith: Because Western civilization, right, the colonial project has also bombarded the people with voltas, right? Like, that is what colonialism is, right? Turn after turn after turn. Yeah. Wow. So really to turn the tools. I think you are a formalist who’s interested in turning, let’s say, the tools of your oppression into the tools of your craft, I think, because you’re also playing around with like, erasure, right, and trying to fight against Palestinian erasure, while using erasure as a tool for you. How did that manifest in your work? How did you start looking at the possible tools of the oppressors, right, and like, sort of turning them on their head, right? Is that an intentional movement? Is that something you sort of found yourself sort of accidentally doing after a while? Or does that feel like a political act within the craft of your work itself?

George Abraham: A little bit of both, but more the former. So, I will say Solmaz Sharif has, not even just with me, with almost everyone I know, I think, changed the landscape of Southwest Asian North African poetry. Reading LOOK was a kind of defining moment for me of, in my own thinking about formal disembodiment. And thinking about erasure as a process that I not have only lived but I can use within my poetry. I didn’t really have an even remote interest in that until I read LOOK by Solmaz Sharif. Or Phil Metres’s Sand Opera. Those are kind of both kind of canonical examples of erasure poetics. And I think that both of those—so my interest in erasure kind of maybe evolved from sitting with those works for a while. But also, the more I’ve actually grown through form and through just, the more I’ve written poetry, the more I’ve actually come to really dislike erasure, in a lot of ways. I’ve kind of shied away from it. I guess, like the kind of poetics I’m writing towards, I don’t know if like, explicit forms of erasure are as useful to what I’m trying to do right now.

Franny Choi: Can you say why? Yeah, what is it about erasure that you’re feeling suspicious of?

George Abraham: And this is why I’m, yeah, I’m, I guess I’m kind of trying to work through. 

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah!

George Abraham: So just, disclaimer, this is something I don’t—I’m actually very unsure about.

Danez Smith: Yeah. And I think we can say like, you’re not talking about erasure as a tool for anyone, right? For those who find it useful, it’s useful, but you’re talking about George’s erasure.

George Abraham: Exactly. Most of the forms of erasure in Birthright are erasures of self, are a poem where I start off my poem and present in a quote-unquote, “unerasured” forum. And then I, later in the book, or later in the sequence of poems, I write in an erasure of that poem. And so I’m interested in the process of self-erasure. And how, I guess, language can sort of embody and disembody acts of self-erasure, at intersections of colonial and queer phobic violence. What is the erasure that I wasn’t really taught to see.

Danez Smith: Hm.

George Abraham: Being in America means that everything I witness about Palestine is a bit of an erasure of sorts. There are always these moments, I guess, of awakening that like, I think, “Oh, wow. Over the past [insert period of time], I didn’t quite realize how entrenched I was in America’s erasure of Palestine. And I didn’t realize that every aspect of how I view reality is tainted by that. Like, a kind of example I’ve been going back to a lot in childhood is, back when I was little, I had a—what’s it called, family history. A family history project in first grade or something where, we had to talk about, oh, where was our family from, and like, point to it on a globe, and you know, what do we eat there? What languages do we speak, etcetera, things like that. And I knew the word Palestine then. Like, my parents always, you know, have said it and stuff. And so I was looking on the globe in my room, and the closest word I can find to Palestine was Pakistan. (LAUGHS) And so, I’m like, “Oh, I must have just misheard. My family’s from Pakistan.” And so, I gave a really confusing report on my Arabophone Pakistani heritage when I was in first grade. And then I talked with my mom about it afterwards. I’m like, “Are you sure it’s Palestine? Like, because the globe, I can only see Pakistan.” And she was just like, “Oh, well, on the globe, it’s probably Israel. You know, Israel in the Bible, that word you hear in the Bible all the time. That’s probably what it says.” And I’m like, “Oh, so then where should I tell people we’re from?” “You should say, ‘Oh, well, I’m from the land where Jesus is from or something,” is kind of what she just chalked it up to.

Franny Choi: That is so heartbreaking.

George Abraham: And there are just moments like that, that I go back to. And I’m like, whoa, like, literally, how do you, as a parent, to your first grade child trying to give a report on your family history, how do you tell that to them? I kind of think of my life as a series of kind of moments of colonial betrayal, almost. Like, I live through it. I live through the disembodiment. And then there’s a retrospective like, whoa, like a resurfacing that I go back, and I’m like, “Wow, everything about how I saw [insert situation] was an act of like, internalized, implicit, colonialist gaze.” Even parts of Birthright that I—the central section of the project is my return to Palestine. My one time I was able to go back. And it’s kind of a sequence of poems and prose fragments intertwined about that journey and the complications therein. I was reading some of the moments in that, like, just recently that I’m like, “Wow, I didn’t know that I was almost unintentionally time traveling with writing that section of Birthright.”

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

George Abraham: There’s a section in that sequence about Lifta, a Palestinian village outside of Jerusalem that I visited. It was an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village that is currently uninhabited. And it’s just stone rubble, the remnants of like, half-standing houses. And it’s also positioned on a hillside so that like the sewage from Jerusalem, like, trickles down, and corrodes the land and corrodes—our tour guide, who is a Palestinian from Lifta was like, “Yeah, my father’s grave used to be on that hill, but like, I don’t know which one is his grave, because the sewage erased his grave marker.” And then now, like, we ended the tour with the “Okay, you see in that little distance, in that hill over there, there’s a new Israeli quarter that they’re building at the base of the village, illegally. Like, it’s legally our land, and also just ethically and morally because like, legal is fucked in any colonialist system. But also legally, including, they’re trying to build a new kind of resort at the base of our village.” And this was what, 2017. This was January of 2017, December of 2016. That was when I went on my trip. Now, 2021 Lifta resorts is a thing. You can Google it on Instagram. And I’m like, wow, I didn’t know that by writing Birthright, I was, in a way, giving future Palestinians a way of time traveling, in a really devastating way. And I think of all of my poems as kind of that. Especially in thinking about erasure. Erasure as like a, how do I go back to former selves and expose just how unknowable certain truths were in that moment? And so I think of erasure as a process that can excavate that, that can embody that. Or more accurately, disembody.

Franny Choi: I mean, I think that’s fascinating to think about erasure as this sort of like, delving into the self.

Danez Smith: Yeah, archival erasure, you know.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And that, I think, is about erasure—hmm, I don’t know the right words yet. I feel like, George, you’re talking about creating with erasure in mind or as a tool, as opposed to like, as opposed to received erasure, right?

Franny Choi: Right, because I think the conventional or common way maybe that people might use erasure, sometimes to glorious effect, is like, taking official documents or like a historical record, or some sort of received text from a seat of power and then like, clipping away in order to expose like the real truth that it’s trying to obscure. But so like, what happens when you turn that mode to the self or like to one’s own sort of like indigenous histories or stories or memories. Like, it’s something necessarily different than just like, “Let me chip away at the power,” to do like this exposé. And I think that like, to hear you talking about that process, as like an act of preservation in the face of a present that is erasing constantly, like that’s, that’s wild. That’s fascinating. My mind is going to places right now. (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: And I think that the two are not necessarily too distinct, in some ways. It’s like, exposing these systems of oppression via erasure of a document or something as a way of building towards a futurism. And a future that colonialism is trying to actively deny and strip from us. And there is one erasure of that sort, thinking about the Balfour Declaration. Also, shout-out to Kundiman. Shout-out to Jennifer Tseng. Her workshop unlocked that. She was like, “I want you to bring a document of significance in some way.” And then I just like, printed the Balfour Declaration and was like, (LAUGHING) “Well, this is why I’m in America, in a way. So I guess this is significant to me.” And literally, that act of just physically—she got us all scissors and we physically cut it up. And the words that happened when I just stripped them and cut deep into them was the word “understood,” especially the phrase being repeated “it being clearly understood.” Because so much of Palestinianness is like, understanding on a mass person to person level, colonial brainwashing is a big part of why Palestine is still occupied and is still being ethnically cleansed. But to go back to the root and say, “No, early Zionists understood what they were doing.” There was a quote-unquote “clear understanding.” The actual quote is, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non Jewish communities in Palestine.” And so, there’s a lot to unpack with that. Like, what does that mean to—

Danez Smith: Wow.

George Abraham: Yeah. (LAUGHS) I’m like, the poem is writing itself, right. Like, also implicit to that is it being clearly understood that there is a Palestinian people. There is a predictive, oh, yeah, no, on an implicit level, when you strip that away, it’s like, no, part of the myth is that there wasn’t a Palestinian people, that the Land of Israel was created on top of empty land. And the founders of Zionism were super clear that there was a Palestinian people, actually. It’s just a weird and interesting contradiction. Like all colonial histories are riddled with.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Can we return to the idea of returning?

George Abraham: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Is that okay? Because that’s sort of where we started with thinking about the palindrome in your poem “Heritage.” But we’ve been talking about like, the ways that form kind of speaks to the exiling, and distancing, and forgetting that comes with a colonial history. And I want to ask also, like, what forms other than this palindrome have been helpful for you in the process of a returning or like, getting closer to a Palestinian poetics or people?

George Abraham: I love that question. (LAUGHS) I actually got chills from that question. This might be an odd answer. But the “after” poem. Me and Franny, we talked about this at a reading we did recently, but, I think of the “after” poem as the ultimate form.

Danez Smith: What’s the “after” poem?

George Abraham: That which is called an “after” poem or writing a poem after another poet. The most fluid form. It’s a form that can take a million different forms that I love. I think it’s a form that gets to the heart of also another thing that I love about form, which is community. Forms like the golden shovel as a returning to Gwendolyn Brooks, and a way of uplifting and honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Thinking of even the possibilities of thank-yous in poems via form. I’m thinking about like, what does it mean to create—another form in Birthright is, I created a cento composed only of lines by Palestinian poets who have made me who I am today. And it’s a way of saying, I’m weaving a quilt. And I literally—it’s to be read in a two-dimensional array, like a keffiyeh, an indigenous Palestinian embroidery. And I’m stitching together the words from my people as a way of saying thank you to them for giving me this language. I’m really, really into the idea of forms as a vessel of lineage, too, because that is memory. Like, if we were to say form is neural, then maybe form as a vessel of lineage is the kind of like, way of neural inheritance. How did I inherit structurally from my previous vessel of memory or, so to speak. And so yeah, I’m really into the idea of “after” poems as a way of community. Some of the like—and this is where it gets kind of dicey. All poems are like “after” poems of sorts.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

George Abraham: Like, if you squint hard enough, “Heritage” is probably an “after” poem of yours, Danez, of that “Waiting on other people to die so I can be myself” poem. Not in maybe a formal or structural sense, but in a like, spiritual sense, perhaps.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

George Abraham: And I think of all poems as kind of “after” poems of like everything we read, everything we absorb, and everything that moves us and affects us embedded into our poetry. And so I think I would love, on the note of returning to Palestinians—and there’s also just returning to anti-colonial legacies of poets, how can we say thank you in our poems? How can we uplift each other through our poems? How can we build the collaborative model of poetics? I think that’s the kind of question I’m working towards in my future. And I’ve been writing a lot with my friend, my very good friend Fargo, Tbakhi, who, check him out! This is a plug. (LAUGHS) Me and him are kind of writing a project like, we both realized we’re weirdly obsessed with Paradise Lost. And daddy Milton has given us like a lot to think about. Even though fraught and complicated as that text kind of is. There’s also like, a weird undercurrent of “Oh yeah, Milton was like, trying to like behead the monarchy.” And that mode is like, present in the text. And so I’m not sure. We kind of both collectively came to this realization that what we wanted to do was shatter Paradise Lost, and from the fragments, assemble a queer Palestinian futurism from that. And so, we’re kind of on a journey that is sort of the spirit of this project, that both of us have just been kind of writing poems to each other, and doing this weird thing that we’re trying to, you know, maybe one day it’ll be a book. Maybe one day, it’ll be a performance. We’d love to stage it, because Fargo’s a theatrical person, and I have a lot of roots in slam and spoken word. So yeah, I would love to think about like, how performance can also unlock and be a vehicle of both formal inspiration but also just returning. Like, what if this poem was to be sung by a choir, an infernal choir of Palestinians, in some inaccessible space of historical memory? Writing with people is form, in a way. Or form is a way of, you know, expressing love for people. Solidifying those bonds. And so yeah, the easiest way to return the Palestinians is to (LAUGHING) return to Palestinians, right?

Franny Choi: Mm.

George Abraham: Together, be together. I kind of think about June Jordan. I don’t think there’s a single poet I felt more loved by as a Palestinian, who’s not Palestinian, than June Jordan. And thinking about how a lot of her poems are vehicles towards building a better future with and among, and speaking with and speaking among, not speaking for, like, the colonial project wants us to do. 

Danez Smith: That’s beautiful. Also, I just want to say I love hearing you talk about poems. It’s such a active like language and vocabulary. You know, talking about shattering Paradise Lost, like, just such like, you talk about form and such a muscled way. It’s just like, so—it’s invigorating, as a poet, to hear.

Franny Choi: Yeah. It’s muscled and super nerdy.

Danez Smith: Super nerdy!

Franny Choi: And we love both. We love it all.

Danez Smith: But isn’t language how nerds get muscles, you know?

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: We have muscular language, you know.

George Abraham: I’m not a sports, I’m not a sports guy. This is the only muscles I’ll have!

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: I got a muscular sentence, motherfucker.

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: But I want to think about performing, because I thought it was so powerful in your work that so many of your poems require us as readers to perform or to imagine, right, this work in the world. “This poem is to be written on the side of my childhood home in blood,” or “This poem is to be written two dimensional as, you know, traditional tapestry,” or “This poem is to be read in the mirror,” right? I thought it was beautiful, because I was like, wow, George is really making us perform and imagine and make Palestinian poetry happen in the world. And what does that mean for like, an English-speaking, probably American on this, like, you know, on Button Poetry Press? Like, what does it mean for that? (LAUGHS) And I mean, right, like, you know, shit. Let’s be honest, right?

George Abraham: Yeah!

Danez Smith: Like, we know the presses we’re on, right? All of us, shit.

George Abraham: We read the Goodreads reviews, like, “Was a difficult read. Tear.” (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Oh, lord.

Franny Choi: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: You’re already set to answer it. But like, how are you thinking about your work as performance? And what does it mean for you to make us perform as an audience member? What does it mean for you to reach to us and make us do some of the work?

George Abraham: Y’all’s questions are giving me goosebumps. (LAUGHS) Oh my god. I think there are complications within the framework, of course, that oh, once the poem is out in the world, it’s not my own. Because it is my own, but also, it is and is not my own, maybe is what I’m trying to say. And I like the idea of saying, okay, you can lowercase “r” read a poem, but you can also capital “R” Read a poem. I don’t think every poem is to be capital “R” Read by every reader. And that’s okay. I don’t think it’s a realistic expectation. But if there is something that is unlocking with the poem, to push one to capital “R” Read it, to take it to the mirror, to, you know, I would really hope that someone doesn’t write that poem on a wall in blood (LAUGHING) on someone’s house. Like, that is not what I’m trying to ask you to do.

Danez Smith: You asked for it. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: Right. Yeah. But like, the idea that there are readers out there that I know just as when I had that magical unlocking moment with Solmaz and Phil and, and and and and, there is going to be someone for whom this poetry will either be that or we’ll lead them to the poets that might want them to be that. Like, if you read my book, and you say “Oh, who had that line in that cento? Oh, that was Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Now I want to read her work.” Great, Birthright accomplished its job. I think of my poems as, like, “Hi, FBI agent listening to this call.” (LAUGHS) I think of my poems as little terrorists, almost. Ways of saying, if you are capital “R” Reading my poem, you want to go to a protest, you are capital “R” Reading my poem if you want to go and support BDS, you are capital “R” Reading my poem if you are like, putting my book down and getting involved in doing shit against Empire, against American colonialism, and against Israeli, just against, you know, any forms of colonialism we’re entrenched in. So I think that, for me, it’s not even a performance at that point. It’s like the—I think performance can be a link between poetry and action. And a call to say, “No, I’m not really interested in my poetry existing as just poetry. I don’t want you to sit and read this book to empathize with me as a Palestinian, I want you to read this book and get angry. I want you to read this book and like, do something for Palestine.” (LAUGHS) And that’s not every reader but like, it’s, it’s my hope, at least. And I don’t know, maybe performance can be one way of thinking about how we can get there, thinking about how we can push people to say, “No, you have a role in it.” Birthright ends in a two-dimensional map. The table of contents is not actually the table of contents. It’s at the very end of the book. The book isn’t to be read in a linear order, the book is actually a two-dimensional map where you can drop yourself in at any points and read the poems in kind of fixed lineages. And you can either stay within a lineage of poems—there are two kinds of solutions of how to read Birthright. You can either remain cyclic, like in an infinitely cyclic loop of trauma, or you can break your lineage and converge into an alternate mythology. And that’s kind of the meta, like, capital “R” Reading of the book. And I’m like, no, but that is kind of colonialism. You’re placed on a point in the map, and you’re saying, “Okay, what are my bearings? Do I want to cycle infinitely in a traumatic loop? Or do I want to break and converge towards an alternate myth? A better elsewhere.” I wanted, at least, Birthright to get closer to embodying that decision process. And the book is a performance object in that sense.

Franny Choi: It seems like another example, though, of like, how what you envision happening at the end of somebody reading your works is that they like, take an action, whether it’s like, going back and reading it differently, or leaving the book and going into the world and, you know, doing some of the things that you said, supporting BDS, going to a protest, etcetera. This link between poetry and not just performance, but like maybe performance as part of a larger practice, or like praxis. You know, poetry as like, the spur to actions of various kinds is like, just really moving to me.

Danez Smith: Poetry as a practice of action.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Whether in the reading or what that poem leads you to in the world.

George Abraham: Right.

Franny Choi: Well, I wonder before we go into games, if there are, like, speaking of spurring our listeners to action—I know that kind of like the asking for a list of action steps can be kind of dicey. But if it’s something that you would be willing to engage in or throw to our readers, I think that that would be cool.

George Abraham: Yeah. No, thank you for that space. I think that it all boils down to listening to Palestinians on the ground right now. I am not a Palestinian on the ground. My ground is stolen indigenous American land. And yeah, speak up, have conversations with your workplace that are uncomfortable and that are, like, asking your workplace, be it academic or whatever, to take a firm stand in solidarity with Palestinians, boycott Israeli products. The BDS movement is a concrete call to strategic, intentional targeted boycotting of key companies that have a specifically harmful role in the colonial apparatus. BDSmovement.net. That is the correct website for it. As a strategic targeting, it’s kind of working. So, supporting BDS is a concrete, tangible way of getting involved. Listening to and boosting news sources on the ground. You know, I would love to have more conversations with poetry institutions about, how can we support Palestinians in Palestine who are poets, too? Great, you retweet, like, my poem and Noor Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft” and [insert list of like a few Mahmoud Darwish poems’. Great. That’s not activism. What I envision of like, supporting Palestinian artists, if it’s not including artists in Palestine, that’s like, kind of weak in my opinion. And Fady Joudah actually has a really great translation series right now out with the Baffler that is translating, again, predominantly younger and newer Palestinian voices into English. And it’s an ongoing, like, at least once a week type, a poem releases at least once a week type series. The call to translation as an anti-neocolonial mode. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. And I think there’s a lot of great, radical potential for that within Palestine. It’s an imperfect answer. But like, it’s something that I think that—that might be more for like, Palestinian and Arab and Arabophone listeners out there, for like, thinking about, how can we, as a collective take an anti-colonial practice with our translation skills, if we have them? And center Palestinians in Palestine? That’s also a challenge to me that I’m trying to vocalize as well. And it’s something that I want to think through more with other Palestinians.

Franny Choi: Thank you. Thanks, George. Yeah. And may this starting list of actions lead to other actions, you know.

Danez Smith: Until Palestine is free.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

George Abraham: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Franny Choi: So we’re going to subject George Abraham, the brilliant George Abraham, neuroscientist, to some of the dumbest games that we could come up with. (LAUGHS) The first of which is called Fast Punch, for better or for worse. And it is where we will throw a list of 10 categories at you, George, and depending on whether you want to be a lover or hater today, you’ll tell us either the best of all those categories or the worst of those categories. So George, do you wanna say the best of stuff or the worst of stuff?

George Abraham: Can I switch between?

Franny Choi: Ooo.

George Abraham: Like, I’ll do the best of this thing and the worst of this thing?

Franny Choi:  Oh yeah!

Danez Smith:  Sure!

Franny Choi: Yeah. Maybe Danez can be the worst. And then I can be the best. Or, Danez can say the worst stuff, and I can—

Danez Smith: Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, okay, mine can be worst. Okay, cool, cool.

Franny Choi: Yeah, because I think the mine are a little—yeah.

Danez Smith: I’ll go first?

Franny Choi: Yes.

Danez Smith: Alright. George, worst month.

(TIMER TICKS)

George Abraham: Not to be that person, but it has to be springtime. I hate spring.

Franny Choi: So like, April?

George Abraham: March. March.

Franny Choi: Wow.

George Abraham: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Best sonnet that you’ve ever read.

George Abraham: It’ll have to be “A Lovely Love” by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Alright. Worst shape?

George Abraham: Oh, square. Yeah.

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES) Okay, best tree.

George Abraham: Olive tree. Sorry (GIGGLES) Not to be that person! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: 100 percent. On brand.

Danez Smith: You can be that Palestinian.

George Abraham: (LAUGHING) I know! Apologies to the Palestinian listeners cringing.

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES)

Danez Smith: Somebody’s like, diaspora fucking poets.

George Abraham: Yeah, I know.

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Alright. Worst science class.

George Abraham: Oh, chemistry, easily. Ugh, fuck chemistry!

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES) Best form of potato.

George Abraham: I like my red potatoes. I like them. I like mashed potatoes with red potatoes. It’s very—

Franny Choi: But mashed. You want mashed red potatoes.

George Abraham: Yeah. 

Franny Choi: Interesting!

George Abraham: Because I like leaving the skins a bit on, and it’s very like, I don’t know. Thick mashed potatoes with—yeah, anyways, yeah.

Danez Smith: Worst—and I’m not sure how to define this, but, worst poetic form. So I don’t know if that means like, you hate them, or you hate writing them.

George Abraham: Oh, god. Ah, fuck the French. The villanelle. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Amazing. Best Arabic word. We know that you’ve been taking an Arabic class.

George Abraham: I like the word muzdahima, because there’s a big, like, muz … dahima. 

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: The “d” is like a punch to the gut because of the little vocalizations in the word. And it means “crowded” and I’m like, that word feels crowded to me.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

George Abraham: So, yeah.

Danez Smith: Alright, last one for me. Worst poem at the poetry slam.

George Abraham: One time a white girl went up in an IDF—for those who don’t know, the Israeli Defense Forces—shirt and opened a poem by starting to twerk.

Danez Smith:  What?

George Abraham: And then was like, “Eek!” and stayed there uncomfortably, like, as if we thought, “Oh no, did she actually throw her back out twerking on stage?” But it was part of the performance.

Danez Smith: What was her poem about?

Franny Choi: What!?

George Abraham: I, honestly, I think I repressed it from my memory. The runner up was—I was at a slam once, a slam that that shall not be named, from a Jersey team that shall not be named, where they did an entire group piece hating on Scorpios. I’m a Scorpio. And I was just sitting in the back with [insert y’alls favorite slam poetsTM], and we’re all rolling our eyes so hard. The final poem I’m reading on this podcast I had to do right after a Scorpio hate piece.

Franny Choi: Ooo. Final one. Best home-cooked dish.

George Abraham: Aw. There’s a disc called maqluba. It means “upside down” in Arabic. And you layer it, chicken on the bottom, and then a layer of veggies, eggplant and cauliflower, etcetera. Then rice, and then you cover that with broth, and just let it stew together. And then at the end, you flip it upside down, so the chicken’s on the top, and yeah. (LAUGHS)

(TIMER DINGS)

Franny Choi: Mmm. I want that immediately.

George Abraham: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yeah, I’ll make it. I’ll make y’all come to Boston. I’ll make it for y’all.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Oh my god. Wow, someday.

Danez Smith: ’Bout to text my grandma like, “Hefa, why ain’t you Palestinian?”

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Go be from Palestine, girl. That sounds delicious.

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: George Abraham, you won the game!

(SOUND EFFECT)

Danez Smith: Yay!

Franny Choi: Yay! Good job!

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Okay, next, round two of our game night is—well, I guess I explained the last one, do you want to explain this one?

Danez Smith: Yeah. Well, here we have a special round of This vs. That, because we are going to play a final four of This vs. That. We are going to play a little bracket with four different poetic forms to decide once and for all, which one will win in a fight. Who is the strongest?

Franny Choi: Round one is:

Danez Smith: The sonnet versus the sestina.

(BELL RINGS)

George Abraham: I am in the audience rooting for team sonnet. I think probably 99 percent of the literary world would likely be reading for team sonnet. But sestinas are just so fucking annoying that the sestina wins. I think that’s how it has to go down, just like, I’ve just seen sonnets can be really inconsistent. And sonnet has a higher standard deviation, but sestina has a sharper, less standard deviation. And maybe the mean is like, lower, but like, the better things are—

Danez Smith: Yeah. A lot more bad sonnets in the world than bad sestinas. Because when you write a bad sestina, you don’t publish it. A bad sonnet could convince you it’s a good poem, you know, like, only the good sestinas really make it.

George Abraham: Right. 

Franny Choi: And also, like, lots of us poets have been beaten by sestinas.

Danez Smith: Literally to the point where like, niggas have to start making shit like “failed sestina” or blah blah blah.

Franny Choi: Right, right.

George Abraham: Yeah!

Danez Smith: Because it’s like, I tried to write a sestina, and I couldn’t.

Franny Choi:  I couldn’t do it, so.

Danez Smith: So, here’s the remnants.

George Abraham: Exactly. Exactly.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Okay, round two of this fight.

Danez Smith: Okay, so sestina advances.

Franny Choi: Sestina advances to the final round. Ghazal versus pantoum.

(BELL RINGS)

George Abraham: Oh, no!

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

George Abraham: You didn’t do it to me! I, you know, I will say the ghazal, because pantoums—I love what Kay Ulanday Barrett said about pantoums being the “buy one, get one free” of the poetry world. 

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

George Abraham: (LAUGHS) It’s really funny.

Franny Choi: That’s so funny!

George Abraham: Shout out to Kay forever. I’ll never forget that. But, I mean, ghazals are like, not a form to me. They’re a world. They’re a universe. It would be a respectful fight. It would be a very close fight. And I think at the end, the pantoum and the ghazals would hug it out and write a very dramatic poem about it. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Wow, so ghazal advances to the finals.

Danez Smith: Amen. Amen.

Franny Choi: Which means that the final round is sestina versus ghazal.

(BELL RINGS)

George Abraham: I think I already told myself it’s gonna be the ghazal. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

George Abraham: Because at this point, everyone is just like, fuck sestina for winning round one. And then the ghazal’s round like, put a, you know, wrench in everyone’s hearts. And then it’ll be a very hard-earned fight. The sestina at several points will look like it has won. But the ghazal will just take it.

Danez Smith: It keeps coming back. (LAUGHS) Keeps coming back.

Franny Choi: Yeah, the persistence. Yeah, and also because a sestina has an endpoint, but a ghazal could go on forever.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: It could just keep going, yeah.

George Abraham: Right.

Danez Smith: And then just like a fighter that just knocked you out says its name at the end, right? 

George Abraham and Franny Choi: (LAUGH)
 

Danez Smith: Stands over your body, and is like—

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: In the last line, the last couplet, oh man!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: That’s really good.

George Abraham: That’s hilarious. Oh my god. To be clear to all the viewers out there, this is not me saying ghazal is the best form. But like, this is just me saying that, in a fight, I think it’s an obvious winner, in my opinion.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: It’s got them hands. Yeah. Them nonlinear hands, you don’t know where they coming from.

George Abraham and Franny Choi: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: This nigga hitting me with everything.

(ALL LAUGH)

George Abraham: Yes.

Danez Smith: Okay.

George Abraham: If folks want to listen to or read a really awesome ghazal, Zeina Hashem Beck has some amazing ghazals. Dilruba Ahmed has a bunch of amazing ghazals. Shout out, Ruba was my mentor in undergrad. Love her. Yeah. And of course, Tarfia Faizullah’s “Infinity Ghazal.”

Danez Smith: Tarfia’s been on this podcast, right?

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm. She’s been on it twice, technically.

Danez Smith: Yeah, we had to record it twice. I was like, yeah, that’s right. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: The first time, the audio got messed up.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: And also, Danez was having a full body allergic attack.

Danez Smith: I was having a full body allergic reaction to some—confusing milk sign at a coffee shop.

Franny Choi: Yeah, turns out almond cashew milk doesn’t mean—

Danez Smith: Does not mean either/or. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) It means almond cashew.

George Abraham: What! Okay, that’s bullshit. Sorry.

Danez Smith: Who does that? Some of us can only have one nut.

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Not two.

Franny Choi: She’s a one-nut girl. 

Danez Smith: Yeah, I’m a misogynist, I’m a misogynist, but—

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES)

Danez Smith: What’s the word for when you only fuck one person?

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Monogamous.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHING) Oh, monogamous.

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I love you ending this podcast by saying, “Yeah, I’m a misogynist.”

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) It’s true. I mean, you’re a misogynist until you’re not, so I’m probably a misogynist, you know.

Franny Choi: I mean, we all participate. We are—

Danez Smith: I participate. I go to the misogynist county fair. You know, I’m not proud to be there. But.

Franny Choi: (INHALES) Alright, let’s play our last game.

(ALL LAUGH)
 

Danez Smith: Okay, last game is a game of Franny’s invention called This vs. Something Else, where we’re going to ask you if you would like to stay in this reality, or live in the surrealist space that we just have for you. So George, thinking about the fragmentation of memory inside of form and who memory belongs to and all those other kind of things, I want to ask, would you live in this world, or would you rather live in a world where you can have any memory you want, but it comes as a 1000-piece puzzle that you have to figure out?

(SOUND EFFECT)

George Abraham: Well, this world, because I think, invasion of privacy. (LAUGHS) Not to be a poet, but I think there’s a price to memory and there’s a burden to memory, too. I don’t know, I feel like everyone would distrust everyone in a world like, where you could just access everyone’s memories and like, the puzzles would have to be that like, some puzzles are impossible to solve to protect people’s privacy. That’s, that would be the redeeming thing of that world. But I think for the time being, I think it would be this world.

Franny Choi: Hmm. What if it were only your own? If you couldn’t access—if it was just like, any memory that you have from your life, but you could access it as a 1000-piece puzzle?

George Abraham: That would be a yes. And I would even add to like, I don’t know past lives and ancestral lives. I’m like, what if the ancestors themselves made the puzzle? I want to access this part of the memory, and then an ancestor will be like, “Okay, here’s a two-piece puzzle, because I want you to know that.” But then, “I want to access this,” and then they’re like, “Here’s a fractal that is an infinite puzzle you’ll never finish solving.” (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Right. Damn.

Franny Choi: Whoa. I love that.

Danez Smith: So the ancestors get to decide like, the way to the memories.

George Abraham: Yeah.

Danez Smith: It’s like, “Oh, you want this one? You’ve literally gotta work for it. Or I’m literally not gonna give it to you. Here’s an impossible thing, or—”

George Abraham: Yeah. I don’t know, I feel like this could be like a really spicy, like, YA series or something. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. I love it as a YA series.

Danez Smith: Yeah, if I see any of you hoes out here selling TV shows with memory puzzles, I’m gonna kick your ass.

George Abraham: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: The Ancestor Chronicles.

Danez Smith: No it would be called Piece of Me. 

Franny Choi: Ooo.

George Abraham: Wowww.

Franny Choi: Piece of Me!

Danez Smith: We are dangerously far from where we started and two hours—

George Abraham and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: George, it has been such a blast and such a boon to get to spend this time with you. Thank you for everything that you’ve shared with us and with our listeners. Where can people find you? Yeah, where should people look to get more George Abraham poetry in their lives?

George Abraham: Oh, thank y’all. This has been honestly really fun. It’s been so great. (LAUGHS) So my Twitter and Instagram handles are @intifadabatata, which means, “revolutionary potato.” (LAUGHS) And yeah, I would also love to shout out my friend Fargo Tbakhi. You can find him @YouKnowFargo. Zaina Alsous is another amazing poet. I think she’s a little bit under the radar on social media but just look out for her poetry, Zaina Alsous. If you want to follow folks on the ground and other Palestinians, Nadirah Mansour has an amazing list of Palestinian sources. Also Mohammed El-Kurd should be like, the poet laureate of all of our hearts. He’s literally fighting a battle against ethnic cleansing of his own house. Live streaming it pretty much. And like every single day the Israeli military is just like making him and his family’s lives hell. And he’s also an amazing poet. So like, check his work out. His book is coming out with Haymarket this fall. Rifqa by yeah, Mohammed El-Kurd. So yeah.

Franny Choi: Thank you so much, George. Will you do the honor of closing us out with one last poem?

George Abraham: Yeah.

(READS POEM)

There is no loneliness when you have the whole world inside of you.

—Vanessa Meng

Against Consolidation

i want to write about the blueberries i picked from the throat of a New England fall afternoon; how my hands plucked each branch like a familiar melody.

& suddenly, it is 2008. i am small and unremarkable, standing in a blueberry orchard in northern california with my brown cousins. maybe summer is a form of muscle memory.

it is important to mention that the phrase, brown, in the previous sentence was used unironically, so as to normalize the existence of a particular subject in a particular landscape. one could call this poem a form of painting, but that would assume it exists within a physical color scheme & landscape, neither of which are essential to the poem’s existence.

i mean to say, this is a poem about muscle memory – a phenomenon which, after decades of studies, still has no explanation. a leading theory suggests that memories undergo consolidation: the process of stabilization from short to long-term memory.

perhaps we can infer the existence of a thing without knowing its internal structure; perhaps, like music, the hands remember even when the ear cannot; the body remembers a music by the hollow dancing it leaves behind –

many mathematical proofs of existence rely on inference & the limitations of a given logical framework, as opposed to an explicit construction. hence, we can construct sets for which we can assign no logical measure without being able to visualize or even describe them abstractly.

one tool for such proofs of existence is the axiom of choice – metaphorically speaking, it too is a form of unconscious memory. it states that, given a tree with infinite branches, it is possible to pluck one blueberry from each branch –

that’s not the point. i mean, choice is not inherent to every system of logic.

the first time i learned choice is not inherent to every system of logic was not in the context of mathematics, or countries,…………..or bodies.

i want to write about my country & mean country. such a silly tithe, forgiving sacrifice; something i didn’t have to cough out like praying with tiny flags caught in my teeth.

i want to write a poem about home & not have to mean country. or death – or how easily the two can be mistaken for one another–

one could say this is a consequence of neither concept being well-defined; hence the lack of a former can give rise to a definitive latter, or vice versa, in most logical frameworks.

a professor warns me that a consequence of the axiom of choice leads to many mathematical paradoxes that violate our conceptions of mass, space, and time. such ill-desired behavior is labelled pathological.

for instance, it is possible to decompose one sphere into two identical spheres, hence four hence infinitely many; from one life, springs two, hence four, hence infinitely many.

one could say death is poorly defined in such a logical framework.

or perhaps every death is an unobservable construction; consider, for instance, the ancestors resurrected in every poem. how i was fluent in the language of their death before ever being fluent in the Arabic they spoke before me – allah yerhama, allah yerhama –

& perhaps this is the job of the poet, much like the mathematician; to give language to that which cannot be constructed; to un-eviscerate the flesh, give muscle memory to every chaos of limbs.

1998 – my earliest memory is being lost in a sea of cousins at a Christmas party. i do not stand out from the crowd until the dabke starts – the music shaking the floor beneath my tiny feet & i danced like there was no earthquake beneath me; i danced & parted my cousins like every ocean my ancestors split before me; like my body knew i was Palestinian before i did –

or maybe it was the lurch of my gut the last time i visited my queer aunt’s unmarked grave; how even in remembrance, her ghost was but an erasure of her former self.

it is important to mention that the last woman i loved was buried in the same cemetery, just yards away, & yet, i have spanned entire galaxies & failed poems trying to reconstruct her laughter; how the body remembers not the beloved but the music she left behind –

how the last time i visited her grave, the gray skies parted, no metaphor, leaking light onto blank stone for the first time all week & in coincidence or faith, i am inclined to call that grace –

i want to write about tiny miracles: i woke up this morning. i woke up this morning.

contrary to expectation, the repetition in the previous statement was not intended to provide emphasis, and yet, you are inclined to revisit the sentiment once more. one could say this is an instance of pathological behavior.

or perhaps the first noted instance of pathological behavior was when i first mentioned the word country. or the space between countries & bodies in line 9.

perhaps, since this is a poem about memory, it is discontinuous by necessity; there are hands, hence there will always be breakage –

current neurological theory argues against consolidation; says that, perhaps, memories never stabilize, but are encoded in parallel architectures.

this suggests we encode reality in multiplicities, hence, every perception of reality is, by construction, a multiverse of complexity.

i want to write about the first Arab i met in grad school like she wasn’t a miracle; or maybe every Palestinian is a parallel universe.

i want to write about new year’s eve in Bethlehem: the house, swelling with cousins & their pillowfight laughter. i want to talk about george, who was always first to throw the pillow but had the sweetest face when his mother came around; his father outside, roasting kabab, talking about those fuckers & their checkpoints ruining his morning commute; & nathalie who paraded her hand-stitched gowns throughout the house like she owned the place & in the same breath, lectured us on god’s grace; how jesus cured her cancer before the chemo could; she sounded so much like my teta i swear i was home or at least somewhere she was allowed to exist whole; i want to write about nadia who knew more english than her mother & still counted down to midnight in arabic; the whole house, dancing to a music they didn’t know but understood; i want to remember my homeland this way: the city alight but not ablaze.

i want to write about nights in Palestine where the last thing we thought about was death; about being smoked out in Ramallah like she knows she’ll rise with barbed wire teeth & a steel-tipped boot to the face; that reality exists without saying, so give us tonight to dance without words –

let me remember, first, the dance & not the ensuing exile; let me write about home without writing its unbecoming –

& i confess, i have spent too much time revolving around my own unbecoming;

the way time dilates around a black hole, reality diverging at the point where not even light escapes –

i confess, dear reader, that by reading this you have become my new test subject: the specimen is biting back. i speak not of this poem, but of the memory of it – the parallel worlds your mind will inhabit, patching together my every image in your universe of perception.

i mean to say, there will always be a universe in your mind & in that universe, there will always be a Palestine with children laughing.

men have turned entire countries into test subjects without their consent. neither the men nor countries are named in this poem, so as to restrict this reality from the universes of this poem.

& it follows that every poem is a false god; maybe not in sin but in the confession of it all: how every implosion is only beautiful in unraveling – not in the breath held before the collapse

between poem…………………………& reality………………………… & perception of poem

…………………in the fringes ………………..between reality & perception of reality –

i began this poem……..THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE …with blueberries

with muscle memory .THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE ……….& hands –

…………………………………………..(or maybe i never had control

………………………………………………….over the narrative – )

being ill-defined…………….THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

when i say…………….////…….THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE .His hands smelled

……………………………………….THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE ….like blueberries,

I mean California, 2008: …THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

i am small & insignificant ……………….THE SYSTEM ……………../..Philadelphia, 2015:

…………………………………………………(yes, He made a massacre of me –

…………………………………………………(yes, i was his for the taking –

…………………………………………///…………..DOES NOT ……………….i am small

……………… ………………. …………….///.//….CONVERGE …………. i am insignificant

the poem is both circling back. ..THE SYSTEM DOES NOT ……….& diverging

the poem assumes multiple ………..//.. CONVERGE ……………………………….. realities,

meanings …………………THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE …..the hands

in this way ………………. ……………….THE SYSTEM FAILS ………the poem intersects with

………………. ………………. ………………….TO CONVERGE ………..the reality of the reader

the poem remembers ……..THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE …..what the reader

cannot, the hands, ………….THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE ……… always –

………………. ………………. ……………….(the hands, for instance

………………. ………………. ………………the poem remembers always ……the hands–

………………. ……………………THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

………………. ……………………THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

………………. ………………………THE POEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

………………. ………………………..THE POEM FAILS TO CONVERGE

………………. ……………………..THE SYSTEM DOES NOT CONVERGE

………………. ………………………THE SYSTEM FAILS TO CONVERGE

* * * 

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Danez Smith: That was George Abraham with a nine-minute poem. Thank you for taking up that space, George, and offering us this new work that is just so incredibly forceful.

Franny Choi: Yeah, I wonder—we actually don’t usually spend a lot of time in this, like, little bit at the end here, Danez, talking about the poem, but I know that you had some thoughts about it that you wanted to say. Yeah.

Danez Smith: Yeah, I mean, well, one, I think I just love, from the lead up, the idea of George doing this poem in a slam, which I think, you know, to do a nine-minute poem is truly, you know, a fuck you to the form of slam, right. Really breaking form in a physical way, right? And saying that, “I am going to break the rules of this game, because there is like something that I personally must say.” You know, we all talk about, like, making the personal political, but I think, anywhere you look in one of George’s poems, you sort of can cite both the emotional location and the political awareness and implications of the body at any point. And they’re not sacrificed for one another, right? The body is, as whole in theory as it is in flesh. You come out of any work, right, with knowing that this is a writer who loves and dreams and fights for Palestine with his real heart and real hands, you know, and I just think they just do such a wonderful job. I don’t know, I was floored by it, right? That’s how—you should be floored after that nine-minute poem. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I mean, I wrote down this line that they said in the interview, “To be devoted to form is to be devoted to form’s breakage.” And, on the one hand, we all know that, like, you know, you break the rules of the form, you break the rules of like, the convention of like, when you’re making art. This is sort of like a common thing. But also, the idea of performing this poem in a slam makes me also think about the ways that breaking the rules has consequences, sometimes, you know? Like, you can not rhyme the sonnet or like, put a 15th line on it. And then like, the consequence is that you’ve like, written a cool version of a sonnet. Whereas like, to break the rules in that competition means that like, you lose the competition, and maybe you lose like money. Maybe you lose something material. And like, I don’t know, this makes me think that maybe like, this is a thing for us as writers to also keep exploring, us as like, minoritarian writers. Like, what are the consequences, what are the actual consequences that some of us are subject to when we break the rules, and some of us are just, you know, maybe like praised for.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Franny Choi: But maybe in the spirit of not coming to really neat conclusions, maybe we should just leave it there and invite you all to sit with the questions that have come up in this interview and come up for you while listening to the poem. And like, if you don’t come to any easy, cohesive answers, then like, that’s okay, you know?

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: So should we thank some people? 

Danez Smith: Yeah. I’m gonna thank Suheir Hammad, who was the first Palestinian poet, I think, to really awaken me to what was going on in Palestine, to complicating the narratives that I was hearing as a citizen in America about Israel. And so what the experience on that land is, and what the history of what that has been. I still teach her poems from “The Gaza Suite” all the time. I highly recommend it. If you are somebody who art is a way that you access the truths and like, you know, the actions and the energies that we need to change the world, then definitely check that out. So, thank you, Suheir Hammad, just a beautiful poet, in general, but thank you for always showing us that our people’s heart is always at the heart of our work. 

Franny Choi: Yeah, for sure. I want to thank poetry translators everywhere. And people who edit anthologies of translated poetry, too, for helping kind of bridge those, you know, what Bong Joon Ho called the one-inch fence of subtitles, right? Like, there’s a lot that goes into scaling the fences of language barriers, and so, to everybody that helps us scale those fences, thank you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

We also want to thank our producer, Daniel Kisslinger. Thank you to Ydalmi Noriega and Itzel Blancas at the Poetry Foundation. Thank you to Postloudness. And thank you to all of you for coming to listen to us here at VS.

Danez Smith: Make sure you like, rate, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @VSthepodcast, and … that’s it. Turn this off, you know, go listen to the next thing. Okay, bye.

Franny Choi: Bye!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHING) Perfect.