when you get published on a national level, you realize that your audience chooses you.  i had no idea as a teen writing in her journal that folks would find their own stories in my words.  of course, i'd found mine in the works of other writers, but like all avid readers, i felt like this was a unique experience.  i have one rule, and even that i bend, but within its own flexibility.  the only people i think of when i write are my sisters.  i mean literally, my two younger sisters.  they have always been honest with me and they themselves have keen senses of art and politics.  when they get it, i know its right.  when they don't get it, i know that the work is all about me, and doesn't need to be shared.  that said, the fact that my audience has searched me out and supported my work, open up their worlds to me.  people often share their other influences with me, and i investigate what it is i have in common with their other favorite poets or artists.  sometimes i'm honored, a lot of times i'm offended (jokes) (not really) but i'm almost always surprised and interested.  of course, i have political and aesthetic ideals and i want my work to continue to reach them, but i still write in my journal and there are so many pieces that i want destroyed at some point, because their creation wasn't about anything else but the moment and what i needed.  my business.

It's been sone time since you wrote Drops of This Story.  Something you emphasized in it was your choice to abstain from alcohol and drug use.  I think drug experimentation has always been part of the process of becoming an artist, or for some artists a constant factor in the creative process.  Have you really never experimented with drugs?  If you have not, Don't you fear you are avoiding a universal, possibly positive universal, for all artists?

now, about highs and drugs and liquor.  without getting too preachy or personal (as if).  i certainly wouldn't say that drug experimentation is a crucial part of all artists' lives.  i can't imagine jimi without it, but i'd like to be able to.  with folks like him, its part of the whole package.  but the music that moves my soul is coltrane's after he went clean.  his experimentation had led to some amazing swing, and maybe an insight to where he wanted to go musically.  but he decided that the music itself was the conduit, not the drugs.  and the music itself was the high, not the speed.  i'm very influenced by this idea.  on a real level, i've hosted so many open mic hip hop events where the dopest mcs were usually too high to remember their lines or stay on beat.  that hurt to see.  i've been confronted on my prudishness about all this, and i think in the past i was too righteous about all of it.  i realize that some folks, thats how they do.  i respect it.  its another way.  not mine.

As a segue way into current affairs, the late poet Allen Ginsberg said, "Poets should stay out of politics or become monsters, I have become monstrous with politics." Your poetry book was the first of your works I read. I sympathized with you as deeply as I could (not being born into such hell) and I admired your strength. The importance of the subject matter of your poems, especially the conflict in Israel, the usurpation and slaughter of your people, at your command it all leaves readers with the strong image of the poetess with the strength-filled stance considering trading her pen for a sword. However, do you feel your strong image may be dwarfing the poetess herself? It seems impossible that there was ever a poet, a revolutionary, a leader who was all politics, all struggle, all fury and no vulnerability, no romance, no collapse into the prison of confusion. Is the partially formed image in your poetry intentional? In your memoir, the writer is more complete. Is this because you feel poetry has a more important function than memoir or does the necessity to speak of the pain and promise of your people simply make it impossible to sit amongst the roses daydreaming of a lover?

i'm wondering if ginsberg ever felt like the people he came from were under constant threat of extinction.  i am thinking that he must have, at some point.  no one descended from european jewry can forget, or should try to, the european holocaust.  but when he advised poets to shy away (if not deny) politics, was he thinking about what people feel in the now?  that their bodies are not safe, because they are female.  or that their bodies are hated because they are homosexual.  or that their bodies are targets, because they are colored.  poets live in their bodies.  we all do.  poets however, often try to translate the absolute physical into language.  a poet, like audre lorde, who lived in the body of a black woman lesbian mother (no particular order) wrote from that body.  safiya henderson holmes (awesome writer - check out her book "madness and a bit of hope") wrote from her diseased body before she died earlier this year. 

and though our ideas and feelings about our bodies change, we speak and write from them constantly.  i live in a female body, there is no one type or voice for that body.  i don't necessarily write like other "females", but i have one body, and one experience in the world because of it.  and though my poems are not always about my own experience, the lens i am filtering other people's stories through is my own.  and unique.  and not unique at all.

each poem is a moment in time.  hopefully, each time i read a poem, i hear something new in its music.  or see a word play i had not noticed before.  the one poem does not make up the whole poet.  but there are politics involved in what the poet publishes - on her end and on the end of the industry of publishing (both underground and mainstream). 

one last thing on this question.  the artists i admire, from rumi to bono, loved humanity enough to create art about the politics that surround us.  and the politics that are within us.  we love in times of crisis, in time of affluence, in times of war. 

Of recent affairs, the United States of America...no...the government of the United States of America has certainly caused a lot of people across the world a lot of pain. Certainly you must have some animosity toward the U.S. Government for their role in the Palestinian Holocaust. Reading your poetry, one might have expected you to feel no great surprise or sorrow when considering the events of September 11, 2001. I apologize for placing labels on your work, and please feel free to cast them off, but there did seem to be a lot of anger, a bit of violence, and maybe even...strong prejudice in your poetry. I read your quote in The Village Voice after the September 11th attack and was pleasantly surprised to see that you have sympathy for all victims of these sorts of deeds, and seemed to have moved toward a more non-discriminatory life view. Is this the growth of the poetess, or am I misreading and misinterpreting?

not really a question, but a direction.  the village voice piece, as well as first writing since, which was the prose poem i wrote nine and ten days after the horror of september 11th, are def about my growth as an artist and a human being.  i don't think that i have ever valued one human life over another.  back to politics - when one peoples' lives are not given the same value as anothers', we over compensate to make up the math.  blood is blood, right?  wrong.  just think of iraq and the hundreds of thousand of people who have died as a result now only of hussein's mean-assness, but because (and probably more directly) of the embargo and the bombs the u.s. and england routinely drop.  or, my god, africa and aids.  genocide.  and these lives, colored and poor, do not get the attention of other lives.  this paradigm makes it hard to love.  love self, or others.

i have a prose poem that i wrote about the murder of a palestinian boy as his father was trying to shield him from what the israeli govt called cross fire.  i know the bullet that killed him came out of an israeli held gun, and that his father was pleading for the shooting to stop for 45 minutes.  in this work, i have a line that says "the body of a 12 year old israeli boy will not equal one freckle on rami's cheek".  that line has hurt folks.  folks who work for children, jewish folks who work towards ending the occupation.  i've thought about it, and having been denied publication because of the line, have been confronted with what it means to say that.  the line directly preceding is, "and fuck and eye for an eye".  that right there, is my position.  revenge don't work.  the line about the freckle is a play on words, an israeli saying that an arab is not worth a jewish finger or something.  and it was meant to be real.  nothing, will bring that boy back.  its an uncomfortable line, but its an uncomfortable life.

what a time.  as i'm writing this, god only knows what is happening in palestine.  heaven help us all.

All political discussions, in my opinion, must arrive at this: There seems always to be a slighting of the individual human for the good of the society. Government can slaughter as many people as they want to in the name of their political ideology. And then the opponents of that ideology, often do the same. Look at the September 11th attack, the United States has began to murder for revenge, to protect their economic interest, and of course to protect their ideals, every speech the president has made has been filled with ideals like "Infinite Justice," "Freedom".   What I want to ask you Suheir, is this. What is the most affective means of opposition to a political system? War begets war until humanity is wiped away. There seemingly is no peace. So should there then be a full-scale collapse into this, in which all individuals just follow their ideas. I guess some would call it Anarchy. Or should there be an individual by individual drop out from society, like the yippies (hippies) attempted during the Vietnam War. Do you perceive any type of end to the constant struggle of humanity. Or do you think this type of mass struggle is infinite, and history is just doomed to repeat itself? What is your role in the world you see?

man, i wish i knew.  damn, shit is hectic right now.  i'm on a news strike, but that don't stop the murders or starvation.  it just keeps my little bit of sanity safe.  what a world. 

i simply don't know, k.  my sister said it best.  if we even survive as a species, the future will look back at the turn of the century with horror.

i think about the individual and society often.  and i agree with you that it seems inherent in community to, at some point, silence opposition.  but i also know that none of us are who we are because we made ourselves that way.  really, if you think of all the people who got you to where you are, through their love, physical support, financial support, emotional support (your parents, no matter what your issues are with them, are the prime examples of this).  and the people who shaped your personality through their player hating (oh, yes), misogyny, racism, classism, out right ignorance - even these experiences have made you the person you are.  and if we stretch that idea, as many people all over the world have, and include the natural world and the cosmos as our inspirations and co-inhabitants, we see are indeed part of a whole.  part of a puzzle.  i always liked this idea of a puzzle - we need each other to figure it out, but we are also whole entities within our own rights.

i just hope to keep meeting people who respect life more than they need to be right.  that is hard enough.

What do you mean by a "news strike"?

news strike - not even watching the tv news.  not buying papers (except on sundays).  sadly, i've been breaking it all the time because its so hectic.  but the good news is mumia's death sentence has been thrown out.  lets pray somehow the trial will get re-heard (is that a word?)

Have you any summation for this piece, any parting words to leave the readers of The Listener with? 

fade out - corny as it sounds, like michael jackson said, you got to start with the (wo)man in the mirror.
we gotta start from within.  change has to come.

Kurtis L. Darby