The Poetry Project

Editor’s Note

Kay Gabriel

“We rapid age every day / Palestine is there where its not there,” Tenaya Nasser-Frederick writes in his poem “Life is Precious Thank God,” in this late-fall issue of the Newsletter. It’s one of the most precise descriptions I’ve encountered of what life feels like during the past year of genocide, in which billions of people worldwide watch the Israeli government carry out fresh horrors every day. Nasser-Frederick suggests an understanding of reality—“Palestine is there where it’s not there”—that’s more and other than just the present, dire shape of things. It’s a dialectical way of thinking, perceiving how things can be made otherwise through turning what we have into what we need to get what we want.

Which is what we have to, have to do, all of us, in an increasingly dark conjuncture, marred by galloping fascism. I’ve been reading Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, in a reading group with a friend who I also organize with. From 1937–45, it follows the trajectories of antifascist organizers in small cells across Europe attempting to defeat that era’s fascist regimes, persevering through unbearable conditions. They think hard about the failures and defeats that led up to their moment—chiefly the failure of the workers’ movement and its major parties to build a durable popular front—and what coalitions they would have to build to beat the deadly alliance they face between capitalist interests and racist ideologies. As they organize and debate, they use art to think through their problems obliquely, looking at a reproduction of Guernica, or the Pergamon Frieze.

Weiss’s novel isn’t a model for how to act in our differently horrific time, but it’s useful to think with as we organize, organize, organize. Something it reinforces for me is a sense of the purpose of organizations like the Project in this moment: we assemble here as people who want to change everything and reframe our understanding of what’s going on through productively strange encounters with language, ideas, relations, each other.

Audiences at the Project got a fat Brechtian taste of that estrangement at our Poets Theater festival this fall, curated by Ethan Philbrick, which we’ve assembled a folio on in this issue of the Newsletter—check out excerpts from plays by Amelia Bande or Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić, and Pamela Sneed’s interview with Nile Harris. For the Symposium, we brought together writers, actors and theater-makers whose work, through rigorous contemplation and militant absurdity, makes new and different sense of changing everything.

You might have picked up this issue during the New Year’s Day Marathon 2025; in that case you’re megadosing a similar estrangement, from a riser in the Sanctuary. Or maybe you’re reading this online a couple weeks before the new year, wondering what to do with yourself in this bad world, in which case we’ll see you soon.

#278 – Fall 2024

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