Unceded Land: Politics, Poetry, and Community

an Interview with Issam Zineh

After years away from poetry, Issam Zineh began writing again and soon after put together Unceded Land. Intimacy, place, the embodied self, and language are explored in Unceded Land (2022), which was an Editor’s Choice and finalist for the Trio House Award. In this interview with guest stacker Sara Lieto, Issam Zineh speaks about his path to poetry, writing Unceded Land, poetry as political, and recommendations for what to read next. Paid subscribers can read the full interview here

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Sara Lieto: Thank you for meeting with me. I want to start off with an introduction to you as a poet: what was your path to poetry like?

Issam Zineh: Thank you for spending time with Unceded Land. The poetry of language was ever present in my life and in my family. I grew up in an Arabic speaking household. There’s something inherently musical about the rhythms of the language. My grandmother was rhyming all the time. The figures of speech are poetic. The music I grew up with, whether it was Arabic music or other music, poetry was always part of it.

My first memories of writing poetry were as a young person’s form of an expression–mostly unrequited love poems. I also remember using poetry to contend with social issues and things that I was upset and bothered by. That was in the form of raps. I used to write raps, yeah.

In college, I was in pharmacy school. I remember having to make a decision early on. Do I want to go into health science or liberal arts and English? I had passion for both of those. I decided to go into the sciences. But I remember being able to overload every semester with a free class, and every time that class was a literature class or a poetry workshop. I took my first poetry workshop in college with my beloved teacher, Joe DeRoche, and that really turned me on to craft. I didn't do much after college.

I hadn't written anything for, like, 20 years. When COVID hit and people were quarantined, I was saving a couple hours a day off of my commute. I started poking around and re-engaging with the poetry community, which had changed a lot since the 90s and 2000s. Unceded Land was born a little bit after that.

SL: In Unceded Land there are many layers, connections, gestures, both between what is said and what isn't. There are themes of the body and land, self in place, misplaced or changing intimacy. I was wondering if you wanted to speak to any of those themes?

IZ: It would be disingenuous to say those were my themes at the outset, but I will say a couple things.

I was born and raised in LA. If you've ever met anybody from LA, you know they have a fierce loyalty to the place. I moved when I was a teenager to Massachusetts. To Cape Cod. People also have a loyalty to that place. What's really interesting about both of those places is their colonial histories. They're violent histories. And being a son of the Palestinian diaspora, place is really central in our emotional lives, our creative lives, our psychologies.

When people said things like: the body, territory, land. There was a light bulb moment for me: Oh, if I think about territory in the physical sense as well as the emotional sense, the very next association my mind went to was borders and boundaries. Then the very next association after borders and boundaries is power, right? Because who defines boundaries, who's affected by boundaries. The next association my mind went to was power imbalance. So, who's got the power, who's subjugating whom? What is in resistance?

And all of those things you see play out in intimate relationships and in geopolitics, and those play out in just about every aspect of human experience.

SL: Yeah, it’s interesting how this has also helped you be able to talk about your writing as well.

IZ: You know, when you write artist statements, it's like: I don't want to write that. I don't want to write about myself. But I remember Vievee Francis saying in a workshop: you better know what you're writing about. If you can't speak to your own work, then you've left it open for other people to speak to it. There's an agency that comes with being able to speak intelligently about your own stuff.

SL: Thank you for that answer. Do you feel like the poem or poetry is a political space for you? Talking about colonialism, diaspora, Palestinian diaspora?

IZ: Yes. So, oh, how much time do we have? I've been thinking about this a lot. In fact, we have a panel on this coming up at AWP that I'm really excited about. It’s exploring the concept that all poetry is political.

James Scully has a book called Line Break. The “political poem” has such a negative connotation and spent a lot of his career trying to dismantle that. I think that's a weird American thing, or at least, a Western thing, because in so many traditions, there is not that desire to separate the political and the poetic. Even in the American sense, or the Western sense, I think it's fairly, fairly new.

From what I've been reading, intellectuals after the war really wanted to distance themselves from political poetry. Western literary elites had a strong post-war anti-Stalinist lean. And then, of course, no one wanted to be associated with the dubious politics of the modernists. From what I've been able to tell, it comes out of that era.

But where I land is that all poems are basically political, and it's a matter of legibility. The very medium we use: language. Language is political. It's often the (capital T, H, E) tool of institutional power. It's so obscured and corrupted by that power. Our medium is inherently political. Many of the image systems we use, the mythologies we inherit, are political. The formal choices that we make are often political.

I went through the exercise with every poem I read asking, is this a political poem? I lean towards yes. And maybe you can make a more precise argument that poems are modes of sociality. It's not really political.

But then I would argue, think about every aspect of sociality. It's like the Wanda Coleman quote, you know, every aspect of sociality is legislated, at least in this country, like who you can love, who you can marry, where you live, whether you live or die (and whether anyone cares if you live or die). You know what I mean? All of those are political realities.

I didn't always feel this way. I used to try to really create distance in my poems from a political self. But I'm embracing it. I think so-called “political poems” are just much more interesting. If a poem is not contending with some aspect of power, it's not that interesting to me. Anyway, I'm not saying political poetry is a specific kind of aesthetic mode. It could be very different modes. Does that hopefully begin to answer?

SL: Yes, it begins. It begins to answer. I like what you said about language and poems using language and rhetoric. It's very hard to separate even the social from the political, the personal from the public as well. I think that's a great answer.

IZ: And our relationships, right? Our relationship to a work evolves. What was once political is not political anymore, or vice versa. Like the pastoral poem, right? How many anti-pastorals have you read? Now it's become political because writing in the pastoral mode can be seen as an extension of privilege. To be able to write a landscape is to be able to write from a privileged position.

There’s this great Robert Hass essay where he's writing about his relationship to Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” At first he calls it “supremely delicious” or something like that. He's a young college student when he encounters it. But then as he gets older, he's awakened to the realities of the world, of Vietnam and so forth, and what he learns about Wallace Stevens and his stances, his racism and so forth—the poem takes on a different valence. His relationship to the poem changes. He sees the politics in it, or maybe his evolving politics changes the poem for him. When we think about political poetry, a poem may not be political as I read it at the age of 20, but it might be quite political at the age of 45, or the other way around.

SL: What have you been reading lately? Do you have any recommendations you’d like to pass on?

IZ: I spent the second half of last year reading all of Baldwin's fiction chronologically. That was very special. I would highly recommend that. Whether it's Baldwin or not, it’s a great way to engage with the work of a major figure.

Then I started exploring the ‘capaciousness’ topic. What are some capacious works? I just finished Moby Dick and I'm reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, which, to my knowledge, is the first woman who's translated The Odyssey into English. If for nothing else, picking up that book to just read her translator’s note is really amazing — about the ethics of translation and going from one cultural context to another.

What else? My Pinup by Hilton Als. He's meditating on his love for Prince, who I also love, as a greater reflection on tenderness and masculinity.

I feel like I’m emotionally ready to start reading about Palestine again. A book that I started thumbing through is Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims And the Politics of Appeal. That's from Haymarket. It’s giving me permission to be a little more bold in my stance as it relates to the struggle and ideas of victimhood.

Those are the things I've been reading in the last six months. They're really wonderful, and I recommend any of them.

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Sara Lieto is a 2023 graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland.

Issam Zineh is a Palestinian-American poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Trio Award, Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel Press, 2021). His most recent work appears in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, Columbia Journal, Split This Rock, and elsewhere. Check out Issam's website here.

If you’re planning to attend AWP this year, catch his two panels: Theories of Vastness: On Capaciousness in Poetry and The Politics of Imagining: Poetry as Social Practice

Want to know even more about Issam Zineh and his poetry? Read the full interview here (you can either convert to a paid subscription or use a one-time free pass to read premium content):