On this week’s episode, Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha about the life and work of the renowned Palestinian poet and writer Zakaria Mohammed. Born in Nablus, Palestine, Mohammed was a freelance journalist, editor, and poet who authored nine volumes of poetry. In 1994, after twenty-five years in exile, he returned to his homeland to live in Ramallah where he recently died at the age of seventy-three. Ok and Khalaf Tuffaha discuss Mohammed’s rebelliousness, his democratizing practice of posting early drafts of his poems to Facebook, and how he approached writing in the shadow of Mahmoud Darwish. They also talk about grief, the politics of translation, and the always tricky task of composing an email. Finally, Khalaf Tuffaha treats us to some of Mohammed’s poems in Arabic and English translation that appear in the September 2023 issue of Poetry.
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Kevin Young and Cindy Juyoung Ok on All the Things Poetry Does
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Elisa Gabbert and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Self-Pity, Death, and the Internet
Omar Sakr and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Queer Use, Cynicism, and Falling in Love
Donika Kelly and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Desire Paths, Therapy, and Pleasure
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Brian Tierney and Charif Shanahan on Poetry as a Verb, Truth vs Fact, and Love
Marie Howe and Charif Shanahan on Ecopoetics, Spirituality, and Losing Oneself
CAConrad and Hoa Nguyen on Crystals, Crows, and Cannibalizing Poems
Arthur Sze and Forrest Gander on Silence, the Importance of Blank Pages, and How Every Poem Written Shines a Light on Every Other Poem
Nam Le and Lindsay Garbutt on Language as an Ecology of Violence and Corruption, the Pain of Being a Writer, and the Value of Uncertainty
KB Brookins and Holly Amos on Systemic Freedom, the Power of Insistence, and What People Don’t Understand about Texas
Joanna Klink and Holly Amos on psychic longing, attention and attunement, and their differing childhood dinner tables
Charif Shanahan and Adrian Matejka on the shifting of identity, oneness, and centering love
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