Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Celebrating Women's History Month by celebrating the GREAT Palestinian-American POET Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye http://www.wingspress.com/author.cfm/91/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/

poets.org.... Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.

Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East, Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, "her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."

Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Wittner Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin.

Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174

Poems by
Naomi Shihab Nye

Blood
Famous
Fuel
Making a Fist
Negotiations with a Volcano
San Antonio
Snow
Streets
The Man Whose Voice Has Been Taken From His Throat
The Words Under the Words
Two Countries

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178324

The Small Vases from Hebron

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Tip their mouths open to the sky.
Turquoise, amber,
the deep green with fluted handle,
pitcher the size of two thumbs,
tiny lip and graceful waist.

Here we place the smallest flower
which could have lived invisibly
in loose soil beside the road,
sprig of succulent rosemary,
bowing mint.

They grow deeper in the center of the table.

Here we entrust the small life,
thread, fragment, breath.
And it bends. It waits all day.
As the bread cools and the children
open their gray copybooks
to shape the letter that looks like
a chimney rising out of a house.

And what do the headlines say?

Nothing of the smaller petal
perfectly arranged inside the larger petal
or the way tinted glass filters light.
Men and boys, praying when they died,
fall out of their skins.
The whole alphabet of living,
heads and tails of words,
sentences, the way they said,
“Ya’Allah!” when astonished,
or “ya’ani” for “I mean”—
a crushed glass under the feet
still shines.
But the child of Hebron sleeps
with the thud of her brothers falling

Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Small Vases from Hebron” from Fuel. Copyright © 1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178324

5 comments:


  1. Poetry Book Review: Time You Let Me In


    from
    The Small Nouns

    For teachers, readers, and writers of poetry...that they are there.

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  2. The American Task Force on Palestine is happy to announce that it will be holding its Fifth Annual Gala on October 20, 2010. ATFP is also proud and honored to announce that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the keynote speaker.

    Each year, ATFP’s Annual Gala honors Palestinian Americans in recognition for their outstanding contributions to the United States. The 2010 Gala will award the following honorees:
    Dr. Peter Mansoor, Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired) for Distinguished National Service;
    Mrs. Naomi Shihab Nye for Excellence in the Arts;
    Ms. Betty Shamieh for Excellence in the Performing Arts;
    and Mr. Ghassan Salameh for Excellence in Business.

    This year’s Honorary Host Committee members include T.H. Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, and T.H. Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor as well as a group of Senators, U.S. Representatives, Ambassadors, Diplomats and heads of national and international institutions.
    ATFP's Fifth Annual Gala 2010: Building Palestine, the Indispensible State for Peace

    This event has sold out!

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