1. Trailing Smoke of Stories
~Naomi Shihab Nye~
“For me the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.”
“Facts interest me less then the trailing smoke of stories.”
Dana Rafferty, Christina Yerdon, Meagan Davis, Nicky Fraebel

2. Biography
Read half and half poem

3. You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian on the first feast day after Ramadan. So, half-and-half and half-and-half. He sells glass.  He knows about broken bits, chips.  If you love Jesus you can't love anyone else.  Says he. At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa, he's sweeping.  The rubbed stones feel holy.  Dusting of powdered sugar across faces of date-stuffed mamool. This morning we lit the slim white candles which bend over at the waist by noon. For once the priests weren't fighting in the church for the best spots to stand. As a boy, my father listened to them fight. This is partly why he prays in no language but his own.  Why I press my lips to every exception. A woman opens a window—here and here and here— placing a vase of blue flowers on an orange cloth.  I follow her. She is making a soup from what she had left in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean. She is leaving nothing out.
Half and Half
TINA

4. Born - March 12, 1952
Half Palestinian and half American
St. Louis, Jerusalem, San Diego
B.A. English and world religions
“Wandering poet” – Storyteller
Songs and novels along with poems
Married 1978

5. Style Imagery (visual, kinesthetic, organic, auditory…)
Words flow like a storyteller
Metaphors
Repetition

6. Theme
Culture-clash
Religion
Death
Fear
Unity
Making a fist

7. Making a Fist For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
DANA

8. Review by Brad Bostian…
“These talents are wonderful, but they’re the powers of someone with a superior eye and tongue.”
Review by Brad Bostian…
“As with most collections, Fuel is too long, and sometimes quite ordinary. This tendency to get watered down by saying too much comes with the age we live in, but doesn’t become a sage.”
She is courteous, even ladylike, but equally bold in thought.

9. Interview with Bill Moyers…
“Naomi Shihab Nye, is an American, an Arab, a Poet, a parent, a woman of Texas, a woman of ideas.”
Interview with Bill Moyers…
“Hidden”
Read her poem Hidden.
Moyers found comfort in her poetry while in the hospital.
“Her poems speak of ordinary things – things we take for granted until it’s too late…”

10. Hidden
If you place a fern under a stone the next day it will be nearly invisible as if the stone has swallowed it. If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it it becomes blood sigh the little sucked-in breath of air hiding everywhere beneath your words. No one sees the fuel that feeds you.
MEAGAN

11. Great poet – writes about every day things
We Agree
Woman of ideas
Comforting
Great poet – writes about every day things

12. Boring for this day and age
We Disagree
Superiority
Boring for this day and age
Doesn’t evoke emotion

13. My Palestinian grandmother gave me a laugh and a tilt of the head.
Influence in Poetry
“My German-American grandmother gave me a powder puff that when tapped 30 years later, still emits a small mysterious cloud.
My Palestinian grandmother gave me a laugh and a tilt of the head.
My Great uncle Paul gave me a complete sewing kit, 100 years old and 1 inch tall.
Whenever people have asked, ‘Where do you get ideas to write about?’ I wonder, ‘Where do you not?’”

14. Blood “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”
my father would say. And he’d prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.
In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.   
I changed these to fit the occasion.
Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn’t have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,   
“Shihab”—“shooting star”—
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”   
He said that’s what a true Arab would say.
Blood
Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.   
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root   
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.
I call my father, we talk around the news.   
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,   
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
NICKY

15. How does the poet’s gender/life experiences/cultural background influence his or her poetry (3-4 slides)