Tripwire Series: Safaa Fathy, poet and filmmaker in person | Friday, April 19, 2024 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. PT
Friday, April 19, 2024
7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. PT
Free and open to the public
Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Contact Email poetry@sfsu.edu
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series welcomes poet and filmmaker Safaa Fathy, presenting her work in both poetry and film, and joining in conversation with her audience. This rare appearance by the Egyptian-born artist, visiting from her home in France, is presented with our gratitude to UK and US publishers Pamenar Press (Ghazal Mosadeq) and Litmus Press (E. Tracy Grinnell), whose translated editions of Safaa Fathy’s works, Al Haschiche, and Where Not to Be Born, recently appeared. Her work appears also in Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (ed. Omar Barrada & Sarah Riggs, Litmus, 2024). Please join us for this Friday evening program in the Mission, presented in conjunction with Tripwire journal and ATA.
Artists’ Television Access (ATA) is located on street level on Valencia at 21st Street; nearby parking often available in the municipal lot across the street on 21st at Barlett.
VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.
- “Revolutions threaten poetry with loss of the intimate and the aesthetic. Safaa delves into this threat head-on in order to produce a book that is both beautiful and intimate, where the revolution becomes the daily gesture: “when the tear gas entered my lungs, I decided to start smoking again.”… When the world gave up on the notion of revolution, the Tunisians and Egyptians filled the streets to revive it. Revolution goes through walls is political poetry at its best, intimate telling. Where a poet doesn’t scream her revolt, she murmurs it.” —Maged Zaher
Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt, and is a poet, essay writer, and filmmaker. She is the author of Al Haschische (Pamenar Press, 2023, translated by Patrick Love, with the author), an experimental book of poetry existing in relation to her 2007 film Hidden Valley. Where Not to Be Born (Litmus Press, 2024, translated by Rawd Wehbe) brings together poems from four original Arabic-language books published between 1989 and 2010, encompassing a selection of works representing Fathy’s wide-ranging, richly allusive, and cinematically-inflected poetic practice. An earlier book of poetry, Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts, 2018, translation by Pierre Joris), was first published in Egypt, then in France, Brazil, and the US. Her plays Terror and Ordeal were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she co-wrote Tourner les mots. She also experiments with the visual texture of poems in filmic forms. Name to the Sea, a film-poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). She has been writing a novel in English for the past five years.
Safaa Fathy participated in the 47th Annual Poetry Project Marathon with a short piece entitled “I Would Like to Say,” and in the recent 24-hour International Reading for Freedom of Expression & Solidarity with Palestine, by way of an introduction to and screening of her outstanding 1996 film portrait of French-Jewish historian of Islam and Arabic peoples, Maxime Rodinson Atheist of the Gods. Fathy’s films are made available by Tamaas.org.
Screenshot of Momtaza Mehri and Zoé Samudzi in conversation with alex cruse: March 13, 2021
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, presented in conjunction with Tripwire: a journal of poetics, focuses on cultural and poetic work seen from outside narrow nation-state points of view, presenting poets and related artists often deeply engaged in the poetics and politics of translation and offering models for practice. Launched in Fall 2018, with Antena Aire (formerly Antena), a language justice (more). To access the archived readings, click here.
John Pluecker and Jen Hofer: September 26th, 2018
The Poetry Center presents poet-translator-activists John Pluecker and Jen Hofer, reading and in conversation, to debut the Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series. John Pluecker reads from Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016), poems from an unpublished manuscript, Green Go Home, and poems from an untitled unpublished work in progress. Jen Hofer reads from her translation of Virginia Lucas’s Amé.RICA (tu valor de cambio), as Ah.me.RICH.ah (your exchange value) (forthcoming, Litmus Press, 2019), followed by an unpublished manuscript of new works, titled conditions. The poets’ interlaced performances are followed briefly by a conversation with the audience.
Antena: Jen Hofer and John Pluecker: September 27, 2018
For the second event in The Poetry Center’s premier Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, we present Antena, a language justice and language experimentation collaborative, represented by poet-translators Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, reading, in performance, and in conversation. Antena enact their collaborative practice by engaging in topics chosen through audience feedback, free-flowing association, and discussion of current and past projects, culminating in a performance of improvised interpretative poem-making using excerpts out of June Jordan’s Naming Our Destiny: New & Selected Poems (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989) and Antena’s own RECLICLADOS LANGUAGES リサイクルされた LENGUAJES RECYCLED 言語 (Libros Antena Books, 2016). The performance is followed by a conversation with the audience.
Cardboard House Press: Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, José Antonio Villarán: November 7, 2019
The Poetry Center presents Giancarlo Huapaya (with translator Ryan Greene), Omar Pimienta, and José Antonio Villarán, of Cardboard House Press/Cartonera Collective, reading from their work and conducting a collective experiment in exchange with the audience, then engaging in conversation regarding their poetry, the work of the press and bookmaking collective, and the cultural politics of translation. This is the first event of two in The Poetry Center’s 2019 Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series.
Cardboard House Press/Cartonera Collective: Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, José Antonio Villarán, and Friends: November 8, 2019
The Poetry Center presents Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, and José Antonio Villarán, along with members of the Cartonera Collective—Ryan Greene, Raquel Denis, and Claudia Nuñez—at The Green Arcade, San Francisco. Pimienta reads from Album of Fences/El Album de las Rejas, translated by Villarán (Cardboard House Press, 2018); Huapaya reads from his forthcoming book Gamer, with translations by Greene; Villarán reads from unpublished work; then Greene, Denis, and Nuñez present their bookmaking workshop and translation work, reading from Chilean poet Raúl Hernandez’s Unemployed Poems, translated by John Burns (Cartonera Collective). This was the second of two evenings in The Poetry Center’s 2019 Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series.
Momtaza Mehri and Zoé Samudzi: March 13, 2021
The Poetry Center, in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, presents two of the more outstanding younger Black writers and intellectuals at work in the US and UK, in this remote-access program. Momtaza Mehri, appearing from North Africa, reads from her poetry, and Zoé Samudzi, appearing from the Central U.S., reads a selection of others’ poetry and prose, prior to the two writers joining in conversation. Mehri and Samudzi are introduced and accompanied by alex cruse, emcee, with David Buuck speaking briefly regarding the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series and its collaboration with The Poetry Center, and of Tripwire journal and the Tripwire Pamphlet Series.
Etel Adnan, a Memorial Tribute: May 14, 2022
The Poetry Center, in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, presents a Memorial Tribute to Etel Adnan, at Medicine for Nightmares, their gallery space, in San Francisco. Participants in the program include, in order of presentation: David Buuck, Zaina Alsous, Naz Cuguoğlu, Fady Joudah, Stefania Pandolfo, and Camille Roy, with Steve Dickison providing introductions.
An excerpt from Etel Adnan’s film Motion (2012; video incorporated into Pandolfo’s talk) appears by kind permission of Simone Fattal.
Alana Marie Levinson LaBrosse and Shook: May 6, 2023
The Poetry Center, in conjunction with Tripwire: a journal of poetics, and together with our friends at Medicine for Nightmares, presents this latest program in the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series. Our honored guests are Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse and Shook, prolific poet-translators whose work is devoted to persecuted languages and endangered literatures, with an emphasis on a relational, not extractive, approach to translation. They are joined by their friend and co-worker Zêdan Xelef, poet-translator and presently graduate student in the MFA writing program at SF State, as interlocutor and representative of The Poetry Center. David Buuck, publisher of Tripwire, opens the event with a brief greeting and statement, then turns the mic over to Xelef.
Tripwire 