Poetic tradition offers solace in chaotic time

I hoped that the bears were asleep. This month, I was teaching creative writing in the mountains of North Carolina. In between classes and workshops, I hiked on the trail behind the classrooms, climbing steeply past a gushing stream on a path thick with fallen maple leaves and mossy logs. After reading warning signs, I was on the lookout for black bears.

“They must be hibernating,” I told myself, and hoped that a hungry one wouldn’t come crashing through the brush. With each step, the endless bustle of the holidays receded. Gazing over the peaceful valley, hearing nothing but wind in the trees, I was excited to think about my work and my students, and about the possibilities of the year ahead — all the ways we might shine a light onto untold stories.

I loved attending poetry lectures, too, and thinking about how clarifying, how precise, how fortifying just a few words can be.

Then came the news about the U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander, Qassem Soleimani; President Trump’s sickening threats to destroy cultural sites; and Iran’s retaliatory rocket attacks on two Iraqi bases that have housed U.S. troops — all of which fueled fears that our countries were on the brink of war.

Amid the heightened tensions, Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner taking off from Tehran, killing the 176 people aboard.

In what seemed a thinly veiled attempt to distract from the impeachment process, the president has been careless with his words and his actions — with devastating, chaotic consequences.

Though I was heartsick and worried, my time away in the mountains also renewed my belief in the power of words. I wanted to go beyond the headlines, and take in the perspective of Iranian American poets, who straddle both worlds and as such provide muchneeded insight about the conflict.

They come from a long tradition. “In Iran ... [p]oets aren’t just venerated — they are loved. Everyone seems to have a favorite poet and can recite whole poems by heart,” Jasmin Darznik wrote in the online journal LitHub. She teaches at the University of San Francisco and is the author of “Song of a Captive Bird,” a novel about the pioneering Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.

“Iranians know that when you memorize a poem, it becomes part of you. You carry it with you, even if in fragments, even in another country,” Darznik added.

So often, the enemy gets dehumanized. As Kaveh Akbar’s stunning poem “The Palace” tells us, “There is no elegant way/ to say this — people/ with living hearts/ that could fit in my chest/ want to melt the city where I was born./ At his elementary school in an American suburb,/ a boy’s shirt says: “We Did It To/ Hiroshima, We Can Do It To Tehran!”

Sholeh Wolpé’s poem “Prisoner in a Hole” ponders individual history, the life led before someone becomes the enemy: “Barely twentyfive, he smells/ of yesterday’s spit and vomit,/ black beard droops in clumps/ from his drawn, sunsavaged face./ Hanging from a string/ around his neck: a small holy book./ This man was once a child/ held against the breast of a mother/ who kissed his small meaty hands/ that smelled of milk and tears.”

Americans must study ourselves as closely as we might those abroad.

Solmaz Sharif ’s poem “Mess Hall” asks us to reflect upon what has shaped America: “Your knives tip down/ in the dish rack/ of the replica plantation home,/ you wash hands/ with soaps pressed into seahorses/ and scallop shells white to match your guest towels,/ and, like an escargot fork,/ you have found the dimensions/ small enough to break/ a man—/ a wet rag,/ a bullet on the back of the cup/ the front/ like a bishop or an armless knight/ of the Ku Klux Klan/ the silhouette/ through your nighttime window/ a quartet/ plays a song you admire,/ outside a ring of concertina wire/ circles around a small collapse.”

Sharif — a graduate of UC Berkeley, a former Stegner fellow at Stanford University, and a finalist for the National Book Award — brings us to a truth we can’t deny: “America, ignore the window and look at your lap:/ even your dinner napkins are on fire.”

In the rain, in the snow, in the mist, I hiked those trails, pondering their words, hoping for the sunshine that never arrived, but I hoped for all the same.

I wanted to go beyond the headlines, and take in the perspective of Iranian American poets.