My kind of people, poets are

The NewsHour just aired a series of profiles, "Poetry of the Middle East," over the past two days, featuring Israeli and Palestinian poets, respectively. It made me interested in reading more of their work, each of them.
It also reminded me why I'm glad I chose this profession (or rather, this way of life, since I guess "profession" implies a livelihood.) But these are the people I want to be counted among, or with whom, I guess, I feel most kinship, far beyond tribe and creed.

Some quotes:

GHASSAN ZAQTAN (through translator): I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I feel that's not my place. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse. That's my attitude.

AHARON SHABTAI: The world is big, and there are many big things, and poetry is tiny. But this tiny thing, it's like a small knife that you have in your pocket. But this is something that can say very important things.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

(And that last is profoundly good advice, summing up the crucial trick that I'd been trying to find words for recently.)

Reading List: Last Thoughts on "Green Squall"

I just read the last six poems in Jay Hopler's Green Squall and all but maybe one of these ended the collection on a strong note. In fact, everything I liked about this book (and very little of what I thought made it overall uneven) is here in these last poems.
My favorite poem in the book is the next-to-last, which, if I were a proper poet, I would refer to as the "penultimate" poem, since, if one is a proper poet, everything that is next to last in any group of things is referred to by this term, which, though admittedly useful, I find somewhat irksome and therefore refuse to use just now.
So, anyway, the next-to-last poem :)
It's called "A Book of Common Days" and is grouped in seven parts, spanning three pages. I think this poem also suits my stirrings of early Spring Fever state of mind. (See my other blog for a happy rant on this year's early start to Daylight Savings Time.)

These are my favorite lines, from parts four and five:

When the good and the violent are sleeping
When the city moon looks out on the streets

When the soul lies down in that grass
When spring comes back

When Judas writes the history of solitude
When I was young and miserable and pretty

When the green field comes off like a lid
When it prays --

I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul.

P.S. The new Yale Series book is coming out next month, but I'm wondering if I should run out and buy it the minute it hits the stores, having been exploring the world of DIY and small-small press poets in the blogosphere lately, and struggling to re-think my all-or-nothing attitude toward publishing. Struggling.

A habit of submission

No, I'm not talking about my personality (that would be another blog, which currently does not exist, thankfully :)
But on the digital front, I've found Google's calendar to be a wonderful, magical thing. If I add an event to it, out there in the analog world, the thing in question generally gets done. So it is written...
So if, for instance, I research journals to submit to, in Poets & Writers, which has a great classifieds section (not available in their online edition, it doesn't seem, unfortunately), or from an online resource, and I type something like "Submit to Such-and-Such Journal on Sun., March 3, then, most amazing of all, I will send stuff out on that very same date, electronically, of course (we'll see if this holds up for next month's planned submission, which actually involves a stamp and envelope.)
After years of hopeless slack with respect to trying to publish, it seems incredible how easy it is. Getting accepted, by comparison, seems less than half the battle, especially since it's out of my hands. Once I have something polished to the point where it seems worth the effort, the important thing is to give it an honest try -- am I right, self-help gurus? (This should be a commercial. I could dress like a winsome slacker poet chick and talk about how Google changed my life. Fortunately, I don't think Google makes commercials like that... last time I checked.)