The brutal and incessantly visible bombing of the Gaza Strip since October of 2023 has thrown Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians into sharp political relief for many in the West. Within this surge of pro-Palestinian support—especially among younger generations and within online ecosystems—Palestinian poetry has taken on a viral, almost iconographic significance. Some of these poems were written in direct response to the bombardments, but countless more were written years before, resurfacing and taking on new meaning within the context of Gaza’s destruction. They were reposted on social media platforms, circulated to millions online, read at vigils and peace marches, and translated internationally (Khalaf Tuffaha). Within this sphere of contemporary Palestinian poetry that is oriented (at least in part) towards Western audiences, literary rage has emerged as a prominent theme as poets grapple with the tensions between the liberatory politics of their work and the literary and colonial establishments of the West. These expressions of political and poetic rage have created a distinctly metaliterary space within Palestinian poetry. This metapoetry not only references the Western poetic canon, but actively interrogates and deconstructs it within the context of Palestinian politics and identity.

In Palestine and beyond, poetry has long held a unique political weight. While poetry is far from a physical means of liberation, it is a precursor to praxis in the sense that it can assert and broadcast notions of shared identity and craft a coherent national narrative. This unifying effect is especially important in a political community as geographically fractured as Palestinians’. And, with the Internet, the reach of these narratives is even more rapid and globalized. Yet literature is also profoundly entrenched in social and colonial hierarchies, functioning as elite cultural capital and steeped in the language of status (Culler 41). Literature is, above else, a sufficient container to widely disseminate systems of belief. The beliefs themselves are flexible: literary critic Jonathan Culler writes that “literature is the vehicle of ideology and literature is an instrument for its undoing” (Culler 39). It is within this dialectical context that contemporary Palestinian metapoets grapple with their relationship to their medium.

Within this brand of Palestinian metapoetry, there are two distinct (yet intersecting) rhetorical approaches towards the Western canon. Some works sharply and openly reject it, while others appropriate and recontextualize its history and language in order to destabilize it. Both of these approaches often coexist within a single poem. Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” first appears to fall squarely into the first category. In it, she methodically unravels the aestheticist notions of poetry that strip a poem down to a mere aesthetic object, that sanitize and isolate it from political reality. Despite its terse, assertive structure, the poem is saturated with literary and political rage. Hindi introduces the central tension of the poem with her opening lines: “Colonizers write about flowers. / I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies” (Hindi). The ability to engage in poiesis without politics touching your craft is a privilege not afforded to her; Hindi’s poetic practice is inseparable from collective Palestinian trauma. How to write about the moon when Israeli prisons shut out the sky? How to write about flowers when the earth is soaked in blood (Hindi)? 

Brigid Quirke, a literary scholar specializing in Palestinian resistance poetry, writes that the poem “is heavy with the ghosts that inhabit it”. These hauntologies are not only the real and tangible dead, but also the literary dead: “the ghost of the sonnet form lives within the poem’s 14 lines, volta, and preoccupation with questions of craft” (Quirke). At once, Hindi articulates the meaninglessness of poetic craft in the face of Palestinian suffering while simultaneously engaging with the medium of poetic craft to do so. It is a contradiction that lives in the same liminal space as other elements of the poem. Hindi’s identity is simultaneously Palestinian and American. She opens by metaphorizing a Palestinian child’s death only to close by asserting that “metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound” (Hindi). Through metapoetry, she grapples with her own place within the literary sphere of the West as much as she rages against it.

George Abraham (they/them), another Palestinian-American poet of the diaspora, adopts more concrete elements of the Western poetic canon into the structure of their political language. In “ars poetica in which every pronoun is a Free Palestine”, Abraham draws on the history of the ars poetica form, which traditionally functioned as a treatise on the act of poetry and transmitted the poet’s principles for their vision of what the art form should be. A prominent American ars poetica, written by Archibald MacLeish in the 20th century, claimed that poems should be “mute” and “silent”; that “a poem should not mean / but be” (Academy of American Poets). Essentially: poetry should contain no obvious rhetorical meaning. It should simply present images, not translate or interpret anything for the reader. 

Abraham both rails against this perspective and exaggeratedly complies with it. Eliminating every single pronoun obscures and encodes the contents of the poem, but replacing every single pronoun with “FREE PALESTINE” embeds unmistakable, iconographic political meaning into it. The rhetoric of Israel’s occupation becomes the material of the ars poetica itself. Their description of the occupying power is rapid-fire and sardonic, insulting their sunburned skin and dry falafel and inability to season food (Abraham). But they just as quickly pivot to statements of profound weight: “FREE PALESTINE, hyphenated by settler flag: / FREE PALESTINE hyphenated by settler pronouns” and “FREE PALESTINE will write poems of olive tree & checkpoint / with no free Palestine to be found” (Abraham). In these moments, the poem and its refrain engage metapoetically with their own translations and grammars and hyphenations. “FREE PALESTINE” comes into its own as the poem’s subject as the initial pronoun-oriented structure dissolves. “FREE PALESTINE” is differentiated from “free Palestine”. It is “hyphenated”—married, merged—with both political and literary structures (Abraham). The poem begins to wrestle with its own notions of language: language as colonial construct, as negative space. Throughout, it is underpinned by the same symbiotic relationship between colonialism and literary establishments that saturates Hindi’s work.

Like Abraham, Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha engages with direct metapoetic references to idols of the Western literary canon in order to interrogate its legacy. In his recent collection Forest of Noise, Abu Toha published twin poems “After Allen Ginsberg” and “After Walt Whitman” in conversation with the artistic legacies of the two foundational American poets. He adapts and reinvents landmark poems “Song of Myself” by Whitman and “Howl” by Ginsberg. The originals are both long, sprawling poems. Both writers continuously revised and added to the works throughout their lives; they are roughly 1,000 lines and 100 lines respectively. Abu Toha’s adaptations, however, are clipped and blunted: “After Allen Ginsberg” is 7 lines and “After Walt Whitman” is only 4. And, counter to the actual chronology of literary history, the Ginsberg poem appears before the Whitman poem in the collection. Read as a sequence, this inverted placement implies a process of recalling, of revisiting; an interrogative unwinding from the present towards the past. Within this context, the fact that Abu Toha’s adaptation of Whitman is shorter than that of Ginsberg—despite Whitman’s original poem being exponentially longer—conveys an almost progressively increasing disinterest with the works. It engages with these consistent notions of rejecting the Western canon even as he actively rewrites it.

In “Howl”, Ginsberg writes of a collective American madness festering within his social sphere, which was made up primarily of revolutionary queer artists rendered mentally ill, poor, institutionalized, or addicted. At the time of its publication, “Howl” saddled Ginsberg with an obscenity trial and was received with riotous upset by the American public for its taboo subject matter (especially its blunt portrayal of homosexuality). “Howl” is a poem that revels in the poetics of misery and marginalization, elevating the urban grit of its setting to divine heights. Ginsberg writes of “angels staggering on tenement roofs” and victims of poverty “floating across the tops of cities” and “[baring] their brains to Heaven” (Ginsberg). Abu Toha recontextualizes the contents of “Howl” into a fundamentally Palestinian context.

In place of the glorious destruction of “Howl”, Abu Toha’s “After Allen Ginsberg” is stripped-down and nauseatingly mundane. He writes of Palestinians scrambling for diapers in bombed-out tents, of “a generation under the rubble of their bombed houses” (Abu Toha 69). He contrasts the septic cultural ills of Ginsberg’s America with the sheer and complete destruction of life in Palestine. Where Ginsberg’s trajectory of suffering is slow and bacterial, Abu Toha’s is flat, atomic, and immediate. This contrast is exemplified in Abu Toha’s fixation on the differing notions of destruction in the two poems. Where the verb “to destroy” is used only once in “Howl”, it is repeated in “After Allen Ginsberg”. He pivots from the abstract destruction in Ginsberg’s opening line—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”—to something cuttingly physical: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent”. In his final line, Abu Toha again rewrites Ginsberg’s opening: “I saw the best brains of my generation / protruding from their slashed heads”. This transition from “mind” to “brain” embodies the poem’s central concept of redefining destruction into something physical, into tangible atoms, into the mass of a dead body. Abu Toha looks back at an assertion of destruction within the American poetic legacy and reframes the concept. Says: I will show you destruction. It is simultaneously an expression of literary rage and a conscious unraveling of the fabric of the Western poetic canon.

These myriad metapoetic references cut to a paradox at the core of the Western—specifically American—canon. In its time, MacLeish’s ars poetica was a Modernist rebuttal of widespread poetic convention (Academy of American Poets). In its time, Whitman’s free verse, explicit queerness, and abolitionism broke drastically from the literary and political establishments of the day, frequently rendering him poor and unemployed (Voigt). In its time, Ginsberg’s Beat poetry and radicalism was received with censorship and an obscenity trial. In each case, these disruptions to the literary canon were eventually subsumed by it. Contemporary Palestinian poets have engaged with this cyclical pattern of rejection and embrace, considering the added dimensions of colonial occupation at play within their own relationship to the Western establishment of both poetry and politics.

Works Cited

Abraham, George. “ars poetica in which every pronoun is a Free Palestine.” The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 10 Sep. 2020, aaww.org/broken-ghazal-before-balfour- two-poems-by-george-abraham/.

Abu Toha, Mosab. “After Allen Ginsberg.” Forest of Noise, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024, p. 69.

Abu Toha, Mosab. “After Walt Whitman.” Forest of Noise, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024, p. 70.

“Ars Poetica.” Glossary of Poetic Terms, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/glossary/ars- poetica.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation, 1984, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/ howl.

Hindi, Noor. “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.” Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying.

Khalaf Tuffaha, Lena. “Running Orders: The Poem That Spoke When I Could Not.” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, 2021, www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com/running-orders.html.

Quirke, Brigid. “Fuck Lectures About Sonnets: On Noor Hindi.” Cordite Poetry Review, 1 Sep. 2023, cordite.org.au/essays/fuck-lectures-about-sonnets/4/.

Voigt, Benjamin. “Walt Whitman 101: Celebrating everybody’s radical poet.” Poetry Foundation, 1 Jul. 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70243/walt-whitman-101.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself (1892 version).” Poetry Foundation, 1892, www.poetryfound ation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version.

Cover artwork by Caroline Acker. Original artwork by Adnan Al-Zubaidy