Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse

Someday, with my hands
I will transform the image.
Samih Al-Qasim, “I, The Pronoun of the Speaker”

I gave my first lecture, at my first academic job, behind a wall of plexiglass, speaking to an awkwardly spaced out group of masked students who had maybe already given up – and honestly, who could blame them? I walked in sweating and late because my building’s social distancing protocol required me to run up five floors and down two to get to my third floor classroom. Leaning into the mic, I opened with the joke: “Welcome to apocalyptic poetry!”

My students chuckled nervously. Maybe the joke was that it was day one of the fall semester, and who really wanted to be in a required advanced poetic form class? Or maybe it was my way of cutting the tension of our gathering, united by the sole purpose of discussing poetry in a time that, back then, felt newly apocalyptic to some.

Soon, apocalypse became a tired punchline. Languishing through mere existence, I did what any young Palestinian instructor of literature would likely do: I returned to Audre Lorde, who reminds us “poetry is not a luxury,” and June Jordan, who gives us models for writing against and despite the state. I returned to extensive traditions of Indigenous ecopoets who have been resisting western colonialism’s devastation of the Land since the beginning of the settler project. I turned and returned to Don Mee Choi, Etel Adnan, Anthony Cody, and Bradley Trumpfheller: living poets who are building new language for apocalxypse by breaking capital-E-English – English as a state actor, English as a colonial accomplice, in our apocalypse.

Teaching poetry while witnessing the horrors of ongoing murders of Black Americans by the police, anti-Asian violence surging in the pandemic, and of the Israeli state in the vaccine rollout, I often returned to Franny Choi’s “” to open my lectures. The poem travels from the apocalypse). In naming the collective(s) built in catastrophe’s shadow, the poem offered my students and I new possibilities of language for our grief, and for our survival of an which mutates daily and without warning.