Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis

This episode, the final one of this season, features the work of Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, author-in-residence at Refugee Hosts. Qasmiyeh is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where he is writing about conceptualisations of time and containment in Arabic and English “Refugee Literature.” His poems and translations in both English and Arabic have appeared in numerous journals, including Modern Poetry in Translation and An-Nahar, one of Lebanon’s leading daily newspapers.

As writer-in-residence for the Refugee Hosts Project, he contributes poetry, translations, and essays that draw from his childhood in and visits to Baddawi camp. Located in North Lebanon, Baddawi camp has been home to Palestinian refugees since the 1950s and in more recent years to refugees from Syria. In this episode, recorded in Oxford, we discuss writing the camp, poetry’s ways of seeing, and the signs that death leaves in the camp to remember, revisit, and translate.

This episode features the poem “In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds,” which was featured in the 2017 Venice Biennale and can be read, along with other poems and translations by Qasmiyeh, on refugeehosts.org. Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and hosted by Adriana X. Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website www.stayingalive.show.

In this conversation with Trinidadian Scottish poet Vahni Capildeo, author of Venus as a Bear (2018), we explore the layered, polyphonous histories of the places we pass through and inhabit. Capildeo, who studied at Oxford, opens their collection with a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by items in the Ashmolean Museum’s permanent collection, part of the book's rich investigation into the material and immaterial persistence of the past. Last December, I met with Capildeo in London to talk about these poems and history as a reckoning of erasures, translation, and roses.

This episode features the poem “Heirloom Rose, for Maya” from Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and hosted by Adriana X. Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website stayingalive.show.

In this conversation with Trinidadian Scottish poet Vahni Capildeo, author of Venus as a Bear (2018), we explore the layered, polyphonous histories of the places we pass through and inhabit. Capildeo, who studied at Oxford, opens their collection with a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by items in the Ashmolean Museum’s permanent collection, part of the book's rich investigation into the material and immaterial persistence of the past. Last December, I met with Capildeo in London to talk about these poems and history as a reckoning of erasures, translation, and roses. 

This episode features the poem “Heirloom Rose, for Maya” from Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and hosted by Adriana X. Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website stayingalive.show.

In this episode, Israeli poet Tahel Frosh talks to us about her debut poetry collection Betsa (Avarice, 2014), financial crisis, and the value of culture. We revisit the summer of 2011, when a series of protests spread across Israel sparked by rising housing costs, the increased cost of living, and a widening gap between rich and poor. During this period, poets like Frosh were notably active, organizing public readings and distributing their poetry online and for free.

A few years later, Frosh published Avarice to wide acclaim. In Hebrew, the word for “avarice" is "betsa," which derives from the root meaning “to break off, cut and tear apart.” Frosh's visit to Oxford in February presented an opportunity to revisit the making of Avarice and the questions that it raises about the value of poetry and the complicated role that money plays in our lives.

This episode features the poem “Dark Country" from Frosh’s Avarice, published in 2014 by Mossad Bialik. Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and hosted by me, Adriana Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website www.stayingalive.show.

In this episode, I talk to US poet Diana Khoi Nguyen (Ghost Of, 2018) about the perseverance of eels, technologies of printing, and how poetry allows for the possibility that our dead will remain present with us in one form or another. Many fine books of poetry came out in the United States last year, but one that stood out in particular was Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection Ghost Of (Omnidawn), which was shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Awards. The poems of Ghost Of explore how the grief state can open up a wider dialogue with the past—and with the voices that lie both within but also outside of the frame of our family pictures and memories. And it is in that space that we can connect with the grief of others and where we can share our losses.

This episode features the poem “A woman may not be a safe place” from Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, published in April 2018 by Omnidawn. Staying Alive is an original podcast series produced and presented by me, Adriana Jacobs, with editing by Danielle Beeber and Danny Cox, and music by The Zombie Dandies. Support for this podcast comes from the John Fell Fund. For more information about this episode, including materials that didn’t make it into the final cut, visit the podcast website https://www.stayingalive.show.

Interview with US poet Laura Sims, author of Staying Alive (2016) and Looker (2018)

Interview with Israeli poet Shimon Adaf, author of Aviva-Lo (Aviva-No, 2009).

Interview with Israeli poet Shimon Adaf, author of Aviva-Lo (Aviva-No, 2009).

Interview with UK poet and translator Sasha Dugdale, author of Red House (2011) and Joy (2017)

Interview with UK poet and translator Sasha Dugdale, author of Red House (2011) and Joy (2017)