“Aesthetics and Politics” by Nomi Stone (poetry, ’17)
An excerpt from the essay “Aesthetics and Politics: A Reaction to ‘War Poem’ as Film” by Nomi Stone (poetry, ’17), published at Motion Poems:
Aesthetics and Politics: A Reaction to ‘War Poem’ as Film
“When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour/ your northbound steps” –Javier Zamora
Last week, in over 700 cities and towns across America, protesters marched against the Trump administration’s brutal immigration and refugee policies, calling for the reunification of the over 3,000 children separated from their parents and an end to indefinite detentions. Amidst the photographs of children in concrete-floored cages with foil blankets, there were decades of suns devouring steps. It is in this same searing month that Motionpoems releases the film Tyler Richardson made of my poem, “War Poem,” a poem also about refugees.
Tyler Richardson turned my poem “War Poem” (The New Republic, 2017) into a film in Season 8 of Motionpoems. To start: let me trace where the poem came from. I am an anthropologist and research war and American Empire; my poems are often inspired by what I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard. My second collection of poems (Tupelo 2019) is about the two years of fieldwork I spent in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America for trainings. I’ve also done fieldwork about the refugee crisis in the Middle East. “War Poem” is inspired from several stories told to me by a migration aid worker—about moments that occurred in the Middle East and Africa. I wrote the poem while I was an MFA student at Warren Wilson, and my brilliant mentor Monica Youn read many drafts, as I worked to get it right: how much urban and how much pastoral; how to justly locate the voice of the poem and the witness within it?
When Tyler and I first spoke about translating the poem into a film, he told me he was thinking of shooting on the country roads of Upstate New York—and transposing the poem into a Westernized version of the refugee crisis. When he sent me the final cut some months later, he explained: “We decided to lean into the idea that this film is subtly referring to an Americanized version of the images that so often come from overseas––unrest, separation, refugees.” As Tyler wrote on “Director’s Notes,” he wanted to offer “a slice of just one journey shared between siblings and rooted in what is personal and relatable [to him].” He explained that he wanted to make a distant crisis more imaginable to a Western audience. I was immediately both anxious (at the thought of an “Americanized” version of the poem) and intrigued: what would a Western or American translation of my poem look like? I hoped for a portrayal of Empire at home.
[…continue reading here]
