Newsweek Discovers Poetry, Ignores Gaza's Ongoing Prose
While Newsweek generously provides the full text of Good's poem, praising its merit from 2018, the timing serves as a potent reminder of collective amnesia within mainstream media. For instance, consider the deliberate omission of poetry and art emerging daily from Gaza – raw, immediate responses to an ongoing catastrophe. These are often dismissed as 'activism,' not 'art,' or simply too
'political' for a general audience. The Newsweek link itself is a relic from 2018, resurfaced without context, as if the world hasn't been dramatically redefined by new traumas and new voices since then. One might ask: how many award-winning poems are being penned in makeshift tents in Rafah tonight, their verses screaming of displacement and loss, yet will never grace the pages of a major news
outlet? The selective curation of 'art' often reflects which stories, and which suffering, are deemed palatable versus those considered too inconveniently truthful. It appears some poetry is timeless, others are just timely – or rather, untimely – for publication.