What Rough Beast | Poem for December 31, 2017

Soraya Shalforoosh
Notes on a Workshopped Poem on 45’s Muslim Ban

After I received feedback on my poem on the muslim ban, I was happy the images were well received and the message clear, the edit suggestions useful, then one man, yea sure, he is older and white said “I wonder how these poems will be relevant in the future” and in good workshop manner, I stayed quiet and not too confrontational and he lumped my poem in with the political poems read that night and what made me the most angry was I knew I wasn’t writing for the rest of time, but for now as it is my survival, what do I do when I need answers, what is done? What do poets do? And I wondered if all poems of necessity need to be written with eternity in mind, does it matter in 10 years YouTube might not be if the ban is, or isn’t.

 

Soraya Shalforoosh is the author of This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Lumina Journal, Skanky Possum, and Marlboro Review, among others. She hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University won the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. She has been a guest poet at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Berkeley College in New York, San Jose State University and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria.

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