Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis

Oxford University
Staying Alive: Poetry and Crisis

Welcome to Staying Alive, a podcast series on contemporary poetry and crisis, hosted by Adriana Jacobs. Each episode of Staying Alive will feature a conversation with a contemporary poet with whom I will discuss the relation between poetry and crisis. From Denver, Colorado to Tel Aviv, Israel, our conversations address modern crises - from the political to the environmental - as well as personal crises, like the death of a sibling or the loss of a home. I am interested in probing how poets respond to crisis and the forms and language that they use to address it. In these episodes, we also address the question of poetry’s relevance in times of crisis, and what poetry can offer - be it wisdom, critique or consolation - to our understanding of crisis.

Episodes

  1. 06/14/2019

    Episode 8: Death Leaves Signs

    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.

    24 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

Welcome to Staying Alive, a podcast series on contemporary poetry and crisis, hosted by Adriana Jacobs. Each episode of Staying Alive will feature a conversation with a contemporary poet with whom I will discuss the relation between poetry and crisis. From Denver, Colorado to Tel Aviv, Israel, our conversations address modern crises - from the political to the environmental - as well as personal crises, like the death of a sibling or the loss of a home. I am interested in probing how poets respond to crisis and the forms and language that they use to address it. In these episodes, we also address the question of poetry’s relevance in times of crisis, and what poetry can offer - be it wisdom, critique or consolation - to our understanding of crisis.

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