Jun 2024
14. History of Arabic Poetry with Mosab Abu Toha (video)
On this video recorded episode of Kalam, Edgar sits with the Gazan poet and very much a friend of the podcast, Mosab Abu Toha, for a discussion about, among other things, the history of Arabic poetry. Why are poets so venerated in the Arab world, and what did poetry sound like be ... Show More
28m 52s
May 2024
Huda Fakhreddine on Hiba Abu Nada ("Pull Yourself Together")
What can a poem do in the face of calamity? This was an extraordinary conversation. Huda Fakhreddine joins the podcast to discuss "Pull Yourself Together," a poem that Huda has translated into English and that was written by the Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Abu N ... Show More
1h 30m
May 2024
Constantine P. Cavafy — Poems as Teachers | Ep 3
We ask questions to find out the facts, but what if you can’t trust the answers, the questions, or the person who's asking the questions? In Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” translated by Evan Jones, leaders exercise a sinister kind of violence — they’ve take ... Show More
17m 23s
May 2024
Mosab Abu Toha — Poems as Teachers | Ep 4
In Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ibrahim Abu Lughod and brother in Yaffa,” two barefoot siblings on a beach sketch out a map of their former home in the sand and argue about what went where. Their longing for return to a place of hospitality, family, memory, friends, and even strangers is al ... Show More
16m 29s
May 2019
Episode 6: The .01 Percent
In this episode, Israeli poet Tahel Frosh talks to us about her debut poetry collection Betsa (Avarice, 2014), financial crisis, and the value of culture. We revisit the summer of 2011, when a series of protests spread across Israel sparked by rising housing costs, the increased ... Show More
27m 46s
Jun 2019
Episode 8: Death Leaves Signs
This episode, the final one of this season, features the work of Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, author-in-residence at Refugee Hosts. Qasmiyeh is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where he is writing about conceptualisations of time and containment in ... Show More
24m 24s
Feb 2025
Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems ... Show More
46m 1s
