{"id":4627,"date":"2022-02-09T18:28:35","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T18:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/?p=4627"},"modified":"2022-02-17T17:05:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T17:05:20","slug":"practical-poetry-in-times-of-revolution-lisa-luxx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/2022\/02\/09\/practical-poetry-in-times-of-revolution-lisa-luxx\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Poetry in Times of Revolution – lisa luxx"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word <\/span>poetry<\/span><\/i> to mean \u2013 in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.\u201d \u2013 Audre Lorde, <\/span>Poetry is Not a Luxury<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was the winter of 2020 when the deadline for my debut collection was chasing me. I\u2019d waited ten years for this moment, to write this book. Yet there I was, in post-blast Beirut, working every day on the ground with people left behind in crisis. Working with doctors, pharmacists, landlords, and food suppliers, at all hours of day and night trying to suspend lives a little longer. Beneath this, the pandemic had taken the best of many of us; my own lungs scarred. I opened my laptop to tell my editor that I had fallen out of love with poetry, that it was superfluous. She wouldn\u2019t accept my pulling out of the contract.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the past two years, every poet has had a different experience of their time to write. For nobody has this been easy, but for many it was a time to crystalise our why and what for. There were people for whom the pandemic was a golden opportunity to stay at home with the dog, lonely as the neighbour, but enjoying the quiet roads and practising sestinas. For other\u2019s the months passing were a marching band of grief, fishnets of claustrophobia in one-bed flats, or family members imprisoned in care homes; the institutionalisation of those who couldn\u2019t be trusted alone in such desolate times.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was living predominantly in Lebanon. If my heritage has one thing to teach me it is that poetry is a political act. An everyday happening at the rakweh. A tool for protest. A resource. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is Ahmed Fouad Negm writing colloquial poems to fill the mouths of dissidents who were hungry to stack chants upon their tongues in Egypt.<\/span><\/p>\n

It brings to mind Solmaz Sharif:
\n<\/span>A lover, once: You can\u2019t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.
\n<\/i>He added: What is political about this moment?
\n<\/i>I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was speaking to Farah Z. Aridi, a poet living in the mountains of Lebanon, during the winter I was wrestling with writing the book. She said, \u201cI think it is time for criticism, reflection, and reassessment of our revolutionary work. And poetry seems a luxury. I do feel that poetry can definitely give me hope I don\u2019t need, hope in a dreamy way and not a productive manner.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry says I believe in a tomorrow where poetry can be read. Around me, we were dealing with so much collapse we could not believe in tomorrow.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nikki Giovanni famously wrote:
\n<\/span>maybe i shouldn’t write\u00a0\/\u00a0at all\u00a0 \/\u00a0but clean my gun\u00a0 \/\u00a0and check my kerosene supply\u00a0<\/strong>
\nperhaps these are not poetic\u00a0\/\u00a0times\u00a0\/\u00a0at all\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Any free time I got wasn\u2019t spent sat at my desk writing poems, I was riding my motorbike through the hailstones falling across Beirut trying to arrange shelter or housing for another single mother victim of human trafficking. As I pulled my helmet off and saw another text chasing me for my manuscript, I spoke back to my editor and said, I am establishing a new relationship with poetry before I can do this. If I wanted poems as tools and resources of daily survival, I had to close the gap between imagination and action.<\/span><\/p>\n

Farah messaged me, \u201cI refuse to write what I can\u2019t apply.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went to visit the family of a Syrian refugeed<\/span> baby I\u2019d been helping organise medical care for, I observed their eyes lighting up as I admitted to them, \u201c\u0627\u0646\u0627 \u0634\u0627\u0639\u0631\u201d \u2013 I\u2019m a poet. It was inappropriate of me not to have a poem to share right then and there, a practical poem for the small room we sat in. So, we bent our heads in silence, sharing the maqlub between us, a giant mound of rice. In the silence I decided I wanted to write rice. How can poems be as useful as grains of rice in crisis?<\/span><\/p>\n

Naomi Shihab Nye says she writes for \u201cour own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.\u201d I call these Practical Poems. I want to write practical poems. Rice poems. I want coffee poems. Protest poems. Poems I can recite to my friends as we road trip through the mountains searching for reprieve or when spilling our secrets over one another by night.<\/span><\/p>\n

Practical words for the unoffending moments of the day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Small gifts to lower gently into the mundane.<\/span><\/p>\n

If a poet only writes for poets, who will see the gods pouring out the saltshaker?<\/span><\/p>\n

Poet Shareefa Energy, who <\/span>recently partnered with Level Up<\/span><\/a>, a feminist grassroots organisation campaigning to end prison sentencing for pregnant women, spoke to me about all of this. She believes one job of the poet is to \u201cbring truth to light; to be the media when media is scarce in times of upheaval. Practical poetry, then, is translating it all back in to the language of the people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To shed light one must have light. Light from beauty. We have to know beauty in order to want the tomorrow\u2019s where poetry will be read. We are allowed, of course, to write about \u201cthe starlings,\u201d as Shareefa does. This essay isn\u2019t to insist we must write Practical Poetry, but to remind us that there is a tremendous value if we can. Revolutionary times call for a necessary type of poem.<\/span><\/p>\n

Great writer of Practical Poems, Salena Godden<\/a>, said once: “stories are like seeds”<\/strong>. After everything I had seen maybe I didn\u2019t want to plant seeds in the abstract, in the intellectual, in the niche or the elite. I wanted to plant seeds in the ordinary. I wanted the mundane to grow back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even now I am writing this when so many of my friends cannot write, their trauma still too raw, I recognise my luxury of sitting and penning these words to you. Practical poems will be an ongoing practise, one I haven\u2019t mastered, but long may the poem live beyond the books, and into the streets, or even better: beside the rice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.\u201d \u2013 Audre Lorde, <\/span>Poetry is Not a Luxury<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

lisa luxx<\/a> is an activist and poet of British and Syrian heritage. Her poems are published in The Telegraph, The London Magazine and by publishers including Hatchette and Saqi Books. Her work is broadcast on Channel 4, BBC Radio 4 and TEDx. In 2021 she toured UK theatres with the show for her 60-minute poem Eating the Copper Apple, produced by a team of all Arab women artists. Her debut book Fetch Your Mother\u2019s Heart is out now through Out-Spoken Press.<\/p>\n

luxx is also one of six poets for this year’s Jerwood and Apples and Snakes Poetry in Performance<\/a> programme – blending together spoken word and poetry with other artforms.<\/p>\n

luxx has now released her debut collection\u00a0Fetch Your Mother’s Heart<\/a>\u00a0with Outspoken Press.<\/p>\n

Follow lisa on Instagram<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean \u2013 in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.\u201d \u2013 Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury It was the winter of 2020 when…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_surecart_dashboard_logo_width":"180px","_surecart_dashboard_show_logo":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_orders":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_invoices":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_subscriptions":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_downloads":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_billing":true,"_surecart_dashboard_navigation_account":true,"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"article_type":[9],"class_list":["post-4627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","article_type-read"],"acf":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":19,"label":"Poetry"}],"article_type":[{"value":9,"label":"Read"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Lisa-banner-2-1024x512.png",1024,512,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Fiona Simpson","author_link":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/author\/fiona\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":19,"name":"Poetry","slug":"poetry","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":19,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":4,"filter":"raw","term_order":"0","cat_ID":19,"category_count":4,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Poetry","category_nicename":"poetry","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4627"},{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/applesandsnakes.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=4627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}