By: J. David


​Of poetry, Kevin Stein says (https://northamericanreview.org/the-show-and-tell-of-poetrys-show-tell-by-kevin-stein):
 
“To read a poem is to engage beguiling Show & Tell. [One] learns the voice of her wondering, worrying, singing, or dissembling about those matters. One is enthralled or one is bored…
Much of what poets call work resembles friskily serious Show & Tell… Its performance—both the writing as making and the co-making also known as reading.”
 
Much of good modern poetry has become audience facing, a choice to write into the here and now for the everyday (read as: not poetically trained) person in an effort to seriously grapple with the forces at work in society. What makes this kind of poetry so efficacious is its balance between showing and telling. A poet’s greatest ally is imagery—deployed well it can embody a whole universe of possibilities; there is no limit to the poetic imagination.
 
The brave part of the whole endeavor comes on the coin’s other side—the audacity to say with any measure of certainty that anything is true: the telling. If we are being honest, we are compelled to admit how little we actually do know, how grand of a space the wide unknown occupies. To make any statement of truth is to open up the possibility of being wrong. In For the Love of Endings, Ben Purkert is fully aware of this (IDEAL WORLD):
 
"in an ideal world there’s no history:
no chicken before the egg broke
in the beginning there was
light without words for light"
 
Ben invites us along with him as he works his way to the truth, adept in the practice of uncertainty, and honest about the process of the search (TODAY IS WORK):
 
                “I’m searching for the right verb
                for a dead frog. I want one
                large but not so full it floods
                my eyes. The verb should stand
                on its own without support
                from viewers like you & you
                really are a viewer”
 
In an almost prescriptive format Purkert, with surgical precision from the spacing to the line breaks, often begins his poems a statement of fact (MIRROR I DON’T KNOW):
 
                “I’m far from the dead center of things”
 
He then does as Plato’s Socrates suggests and follows the evidence where it leads into the poetic imagination (MIRROR I DON’T KNOW):
 
                “Each afternoon spent in four coordinates:
                Me, Me, Sunlight, Ache. You, leaving warm prints
 
                on whose mirror I don’t know”
 
Finally ending with an action, the way this new knowledge manifests in the world and its result of sitting in the body (MIRROR I DON’T KNOW):
 
                “Dearest pin on my screen, I’ll drag & drop you.
                I’ll hold down on + until I’m larger than life.
 
                To exit this window, I claw my way out”
 
Cloistered in the thought of losing your planet, your lover, and yourself is the idea of identity. Purkert, in exploring the ways out of a planet on the brink of destruction or a heart-break where the road corners either death, or apathy, or hurt; demonstrates with each poem a new thing we are capable of losing, slowly stripping away what we are comprised of in an attempt to uncover the fundamentally human: that which cannot be taken away.

Taking away piece by piece until there is nothing left to take from us, and with that, discovering where we go next (IN ZERO GRAVITY):
“…who really cares—the truth is so much
                        less engraved. The truth is
            sailing across the sea & the sadness of
                    not wrecking. I remember the boats
                            upon boats. If one fills with water,
                                                                            it veers away
                    from what it knows
                    starts a new life entirely.”

By: J. David

 
In anything we write there is both a decision and a discovery to be made, and that is the important part of the whole storytelling ordeal. Everything else is to the two of them speaking back and forth at each other— new discoveries moving you forward into more questions that must be answered. As writers, we must decide what these answers are or be candid in the fact we are still uncovering them ourselves, anything else would fall short of the honesty required to truly connect with a reader. Every good story has an element of unveiling— where what we’ve been chasing after all along starts to become clear, and expected or not— we are left to contend with whatever is there.

At first glance, Set to Music a Wildfire appears to be an attempt to answer the questions “where do I belong,” and “how do I belong,” chasing after an ever-elusive definition of home. Ruth Awad documents her father’s life, from his early days in Lebanon during the bloody civil war to his immigration and later life in America, offering us two competing definitions of home: “the people and places we allow ourselves to belong to,” and “the place we come from and the place we are going.” In the end Ruth does not tell us which one is right, and until the fourth time I read through the collection I couldn’t figure out why she left that part out. It was because, all along, the collection had been about the things which we are capable of surviving. The search for belonging was most obvious in the poems, because that is the chief search of every human, but the more important question that Ruth continually revisits is “can I survive this?” Or to rephrase: “I know I am not home yet, I still have farther to go, but I wonder- will I survive this, what is it that I can lose and still survive?”

Can you survive the innocence lost when you discover just how cruel this world is capable of being (Sabra and Shatila Massacre): “How else do you say it—I stood on them   /   what seemed a tarp-drawn embankment   /   a hummock of corpses.   /   Quicksand…” Can you survive in spite of war, in spite of your world tearing itself apart (Gulls):  “Men can run-   /   what else?   /   What else   /   will save them from   /   the world they’ve burned?” Can you survive in the shadow of death, in a world eclipsed by fear (Interview with My Father: Names): “When someone dies in Tripoli, we write their names on paper,   /   next to their pictures and post them where others can see.   /   Walk the street where the names wave from the walls,   /   flutter from windows, buildings grilled with sheets—   /   breathing paper, beating paper, the streets are paper—“

Can you survive the upheaval of leaving your life behind to come to a place that doesn’t love you (My Father Is the Sea, the Field, the Stone): “Why choose a coast   /   when my hands are stone?   /   Why carry a rifle when my blood is a field?   /   I carry these suitcases full of rain   /   because I can’t take my country.   /   If it’s a choice you want—I’ve never known   /   a world that wasn’t worth dying for.” Can you survive the strife of poverty and the label of strangeness (Lebanese Famine in America):
“I push a mop to pay rent,   /   steal mustard packets   /   to dress bread slices,   /   and tell myself it’s enough   /   it’s enough it’s enough.”

(Migratory Patterns): “[we] watch our signal slip past the old frame   /   and out to the small town that never wanted us—what, with our ratty socks and too-short bangs   /   and our names. I want the town erased   /   if it means I’ll never hear Muslim snarled   /   like a slur…”
 
 
Can you survive heartbreak and the monumental weight of grief (On the Night You Ask for a Divorce):
“Sleepless beside me, you turn   /   all night like a wave…   I inventory what the night does not erase:
your coldness,   /   amphibious raft I envy with my heart.”
(Lessons in Grief): “…here I am   /   half wet and stung   /   with the mercy of living   /   where your robe trailed   /   like a thought across   /   the kitchen floor…   I’m a clockwork animal tied   /   to fading light, but the days   /   never stop coming.”
 
The answer Ruth uncovers time and time again is              yes.

​Resoundingly:                   yes.
(Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion):
“…the black night ahead, and I think, My God, will I ever not be   /   surprised by what I can survive?”