Claudia Saleeby Savage on Ancestry, Motherhood, and Erotic Coping Mechanisms

Welcome to season two of the In Three Poems Podcast with host David J. Bauman.

We're talking with Claudia Saleeby Savage, author of 4 books of poetry, including most recently: First You Must Destroy the World  (First Matter Press, fall 2025).

Her other books are Metal Used for Beauty Alone (from The Poetry Box for print + voice), Bruising Continents (Spuyten Duyvil), and The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable's History. Claudia also has recent work in Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, About Place, and River Teeth.

More Links: 

To Claudia’s Books

And her website

Poem 1:

“My Daughter Discovers Synchronicity,” by Claudia, read by David.

Poem 2:

“They Named their child Thawra,” from First You Must  Destroy the World, written and read by Claudia. 

Poem 3:

“They Said it Was Morning,” by Nathalie Khankan, as published in her book Quiet Orient Riot (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020).

Our Deep thanks to Nathalie Khankan and Omnidawn for allowing us to read the poem on the podcast. 

Transcript

David J. Bauman (00:00)
Can you believe it? This is season two. Welcome to In Three Poems, the podcast where we talk with a different poet each week. Read a couple of poems by them, and one by a poet whose work they admire. In between, we get to know each other and see how the poems talk among themselves. I'm your host, David J. Bauman, and in the coming weeks, we will talk and read with Crystal Simone Smith, Katie Manning.

Justin Strasser, Mai-Linh Hong, Carl Phillips, Chrissy Martin, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Don Lees, Jake Rose, Jessica Whipple, Daniel Laurie, and Ann Keeler Evans. Today we're talking with Claudia Salibi Savage about, well, many things, but in particular, her latest book, First You Must Destroy the World, published by First Matter Press. Frankly, we had so much fun chatting that I just want to get right into it.

David (00:53)
I'm talking with Claudia Saleeby Savage, author of First You Must Destroy the World by First Matter Press. And that came out in September, Now, Claudia, you and I first met on Instagram.

this past summer when you told me that your editor gave you a link to the podcast and you described, let's see, how did you describe it? You described your new book coming out in the fall as being about motherhood, ancestry, the Syrian refugee crisis and erotic coping mechanisms. And I thought, I'm hooked. I need to look this up. And so, yeah, I did.

and your readings are marvelous by the way. So I've really, I really enjoyed following you in a couple of places. I was watching a video from seven years ago of you reading, but been delightful.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (01:33)
Thank you, David.

I'm glad it's still

out there and there's interest. My hits, it's like, oh, it was 200 views, now it's 201. I'm very excited.

David (01:44)
Yeah!

I know.

I told somebody in one of the episodes in season one that I was a former YouTuber and their eyes kind of got this little light and I'm like, no, not one of those. Not like a Justin Bieber type that went viral or anything. I was just reading poems and having fun online

Claudia Saleeby Savage (02:06)
Thanks.

David (02:07)
I got to hear some other people read a poem of or two of mine that I didn't even know they were going to read. And that just kind of blows you away when you hear your own words and somebody else's lips. And I thought that I've often thought that would be fun in this podcast age to kind of return to those YouTube days and get a chance to read a little bit again and also hear some other poets read and talk about how the poems relate to each other,

Claudia Saleeby Savage (02:15)
Awesome.

David (02:32)
And so the way this generally works is I get to read the first poem and it's, do two poems by our guest poet, you of course, and then a poem by someone that our guest has chosen. I should also mention, you had metal used for beauty alone and

Claudia Saleeby Savage (02:46)
Hey.

David (02:53)
It seems like you've been writing on a theme for some time because there are themes in your new book that come up to that and we'll touch on it. But do you mind if I just jump right in and read the poem? My daughter discovers synchronicity. And then we'll talk about it. Thank you for being here. My daughter discovers synchronicity. If you cannot keep.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (03:04)
Yeah.

That's so wonderful. Thanks, David.

David (03:18)
that smell of rosemary on your palms, tea warm in your morning mug. Or stop your daughter's howl when the soup bowl tips. Swallow this sorrow and spit out birds. My daughter gulps air to better voice her throat's vibration. Her bellies' taut drum. The contours of my face mountain under her gaze.

Outside a woodpecker searches for rot in a telephone pole Her fingers enter the belly button a world tucked in worlds tucked in worlds in mine, there are borders of guns Refusals a veil could mean your children starve Sunlight honeys my daughter's hair

as I sponge the floor In the other room my husband's jaw works breath into his horn

Somewhere, someone always struggles more. Maybe it is you. Maybe this year's sorrow or anger held your heart underwater. The bitter, hot oolong feels necessary to my throat.

Same as my girl holding her arms up when I least want to give. I'll lift her, inhale her cheek. Love is already too brief.

I love this piece. I'm so happy you selected this one as a suggestion.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (04:48)
David, it's so amazing to hear it like read by you. Now I just want from now on for all my poems to just be read by other people. It's so beautiful. Really.

David (04:55)
that is so sweet.

It's a fun, you know, I did worry about that when doing this podcast. I thought, that going to sound arrogant that I'm wanting to read one of their poems, you know, in the thing, because I'm not, I have 12 years of small town radio and weather broadcasting and that kind of stuff, but it's just so much fun and it's fun to hear.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (05:06)
No!

it.

David (05:19)
the poet reacts to hearing that. You said about your husband being a jazz musician. Now, are you a musician as well?

Claudia Saleeby Savage (05:23)
Yeah.

Well, I am so I'm a poet because I'm a recovering classical musician. So I started playing the piano at four and was very serious about it. I did concerto competitions and all sorts of things. I don't often admit this, David. See, I'm admitting this to you because normally I'm like, I'm like a little I'm like, I'm not going to talk about that. But I think it's. I think I think it's part of the reason.

David (05:34)
Gotcha.

Well, I'm glad we talked a while. We put all your walls down.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (05:55)
Well, it's one of the reasons that I connected with my husband. We met at an artist residency and he showed me a score like and he's like, you probably don't know what this is. And I was like, actually, I do know what that is. Let me take a look. And we had a whole great conversation and whatever about music and about how my father used to take me to hear jazz and all these things when I was a kid. So it's one of those things that, yeah, that was sort of a foundational thing for me. And I think because I'm not formally trained in poetry, I

I've studied with a lot of different people, but I don't have an MFA. It's one of those things where I think the music is the thing that I'm always like grounded in when I do my work and it makes sense to me and I want, I love things that only exist on the page sometimes, but I actually want it always to exist in the air, right? Like always.

David (06:29)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right. Even there's a

friend of mine who I've brought up his name before But Raymond Lukczak, who is deaf,

And it sort of challenged my feeling of always thinking that poetry means to be read out loud.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (06:54)
Yeah, yeah, I'm looking, hold on, I'm looking. no, I have another Raymond that is up on my shelf.

David (06:56)
And.

okay. So what he does

it's maybe not out loud, but doing these wonderful videos with sign language in the translations. And it just, something about what you said coming off the page, whether it's audio or some sort of performance, in season one, I talked.

with Monica Prince, who is a choreopoem scholar. that was new to me, to even know that choreopoems were becoming that big of a thing or what they even were. But choreographed and acted out verse in the form of a play at times. And it was just wonderful to see poetry come off the page. Because I think those are our roots, whether we go back to Beowulf.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (07:35)
Yeah.

David (07:50)
or any of those oral traditions. And so that music ends up on the page. And I'm glad you mentioned music because the music shows up in this poem that I've read in multiple ways. One is the slant rhymes that is something that I love. I love playing with sound within and between lines. And you have it in like the first and second lines between palms, warm, morning, those sort of slant rhymes.

but also howl and bowl, swallow and sorrow, out, harkening back up to howl. But also in what, what's evoked in the language of the poem, because you've got her belly as a taut drum, and then in the next line,

You've got the woodpecker who is, know, as a birder, that's what we call when we hear a woodpecker. We don't call, you hear that pecking? It's called, you you hear that drumming? You know, that's, that's a pilliated or that's a, I'm actually not as good at identifying them by their drumming yet. I'm working on that. I have been learning.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (08:50)
That's awesome.

I had no

idea, I had no idea David that that was a thing, that I even did that. Thank you for telling me I did that. No.

David (08:58)
you did! No, from now on just tell everybody I'm really

glad that you noticed that I put that in there.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (09:05)
That was so intentional.

David (09:08)
Of course it was. Well, truth is truth and it finds itself

no matter how how did Mitch Nobis said it? We used the term woohoo or woo woo

Claudia Saleeby Savage (09:18)
I'm all about the woo woo. I am woo woo. I mean, I think

this is it. How can you be a poet and not like not feel, you know, people always talk, I have synesthesia or whatever. And I'm kind of like, well, but I think making art is you're connected on a deep level. Like you are. My husband and I, we had started a recording project where we were like, we're going to name it Thrum because we both kind of feel like this is

how you feel when you're making art is this sort of like low-level humming. Yeah, and attention. yeah, yeah, there's a lot of birds in this book, actually, a lot. They're moving.

David (09:48)
Mmm. I love it.

Yeah.

And yeah, some of those I discovered along the way.

I am not an academic poet either, although I came very close. Although I came so close and veered off into libraries.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (10:06)
You came so close. Yes.

David (10:11)
where I'm still doing education, but in a very different way. And I just, I love what I do. So it's neat to be able to be at a poetry conference sometimes and everybody has their university lanyard and mine says whatever public library system I'm at. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (10:25)
I love that. I love that. Yeah, you

know, it's funny. I got my master's in literature and I didn't then go further. I didn't get a PhD or anything because I kind of was like, that's good. I loved all those conversations. I'm gonna go get another job. Thanks. Yeah, I think, right. Right. Deep, deep research. probably, you know, David, like the way we read a book.

David (10:41)
Yeah, masters of library science and information science, I get it.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (10:50)
like probably knocks people out, right? That's part of it, like how deep we go in terms of like, I can connect that to 20 other things that I've read and thinking about and the world and.

David (11:00)
And that's why I have to edit

some of some of these podcasts because I I go off on some tangent that later I realized that really didn't quite fit.

to the other musical element I wanted to bring out was the form that you chose

when I first heard you read it, on YouTube and then looked at it and I thought, Ooh, Oh, she's using, she's using sentence fragments here in a really beautiful way. whereas, you know, if when you look at this one on the page, it adds this other element. If you cannot keep that smell of Rosemary on your palms. Period. And then the last two.

words of the line, the enjambed line is, tea warm in your morning mug. And that's a full sentence. And I thought, oh, this is fun. I love this sort of thing. love, I love sentence fragments and the way that you used periods almost as a similarly to the way you've used cesura is in the middle of a line you mentioned in some of the poems. So the form itself has the music, the word choice has the music and the content of the poem.

has this lovely music through it. And then you have this turn after these lovely images of the belly button. You've still got swallow and sorrow and her howling. And then later you're going to have to be sponging up the floor from whatever was spilled.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (12:22)
Great.

David (12:23)
But that sudden change, think, that takes it even a step more serious is a world tucked in worlds, tucked in worlds, and then in mine there are borders of guns. A veil could mean your children starve. And this is a theme, of course, one of the main themes of the book. I wonder if you want to talk about that a little bit, about what brought you to write.

First you must destroy the world and maybe where that title came from.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (12:49)
Yeah, you know, this is a really, I have to tell you David, I had a moment with what's happening in the world where when I was told that this book was gonna come out, because you know how it goes, it takes forever. And I mean, I had many finalists, many semi-finalists, the whole thing, but I started writing this book when my daughter was a baby, so it's been 13 years now. I was writing it mostly because,

David (13:03)
yeah.

Yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (13:18)
many mothers can understand, you you're up late at night, like two in the morning, nursing your child, exhausted, kind of whatever. And for me, I unfortunately was reading news. Don't recommend that, okay? But I think part of it was this feeling of, you know, sleeplessness, I think encourages us to kind of, I don't know, we get in this strange dreamlike state. And for me, I felt

David (13:45)
Mm-hmm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (13:48)
sort of a veil between what was real and what was not real. And I felt very close to my ancestors with my daughter. And I just was having these dialogues at two in the morning with my grandmother, frankly, and kind of going, what is happening in the world? Like with the Arab Spring and just the conversations that the two of them had had. I have one grandmother who was Jewish and her

David (14:00)
Hmm.

I was about to say, yeah, you...

Claudia Saleeby Savage (14:14)
Her family was killed in the Holocaust and another grandmother who was Arab and her family went through the Lebanese Civil War. So you would think that these two people would not love each other, but as we were talking about earlier, I think what I want the American dream to be is I want it to be that people who are refugees, people who come from places where there's deep struggle and horror can sit together.

David (14:24)
Mm-hmm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (14:40)
and see their children get married to someone very different from them and have respect and love for each other because they share that. And so I think that's an oversimplification of their lives. Okay, they had complicated, sad, deep lives, but I was seeing what was happening and definitely, you know, having my daughter, I was like, I want to go visit Lebanon. I want to go to these places. I want to go see family and...

David (14:42)
Yes. Yeah.

Sure.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (15:05)
and experience all these things. the Syrian refugee crisis, the Syrian war was right over the mountains from where my family was. And many, many refugees were in that part of Lebanon in the beginning. And so I started writing these poems. And I got to tell you, David, I felt, I don't know how other people feel about this, but for me, at first I was like, who the heck am I to write these poems? Like I'm not surviving what's going on over there.

I'm not in conflict. I'm not with my child trying to run and feed them and the whole thing. Poet as witness is a very complicated idea to me and I think I'm still struggling with it. Even when I do readings where I'm like, what do I talk about? I want to talk about pathos. I want to talk about where I land witnessing what's happening in the world.

I have to talk about that from me. And so I approached all these poems as a new mom and kind of what would I experience? And I wrote a lot of poems strangely about fathers and sort of like this idea of we have this idea, I think of people in the Arab world. I saw this comedian recently, he was talking, a Palestinian comedian, he was talking about how, you know, we're seen as

David (16:07)
Mm.

Mm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (16:29)
terrorists or victims but when you have this idea of like How do I witness as a poet and not eat the dead? How do I witness and

stay true to a story that I can talk about that's still mine and not, you know, like steal someone else's experience. So I think it took me forever to write this book because I kept coming back to these dialogues with my grandmother. It's like, let me talk about you. Let me talk about...

David (16:49)
Hmm.

Right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (17:03)
you know, seeing a picture of a child washed up on a beach, like that's my initial poem, Slip of Light. And that poem took me almost a decade to like get right because I want to put myself in that space. And we used to call it like a persona poem. Do people even write persona poems anymore? They're so scary. my gosh. I don't, it's so scary to do that. Yeah.

David (17:21)
I, yeah, I know it can be very tricky because gay man, seeing somebody write a poem about my experience that has an experience that it gets tricky.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (17:38)
Yeah, it's sort of, it's a tricky thing and I think also we're in such a time where people feel very afraid, like both on the one hand, in my opinion anyway, David, there's people who are writing about experiences that they're not experiencing, right? Like I think part of the reason I chose, and we'll talk about this later, but I chose a Palestinian poet is because I feel like if we're gonna talk about that conflict, we need to talk about it from the perspective of a person who has, you know.

lived in those places. And so I just, I think I didn't approach my book that way. I approached it more as somebody witnessing this and feeling like I have so much sorrow that this part of the world that my grandmother cried in 1982 on the couch and I talked about that and she would still be crying if she was alive. And like that sorrow, I just feel what's happening with the refugee ban and all these things happening in this country, like

they got me. And so I think I wanted to kind of write something. And that's why I named the book, First You Must Destroy the World, because it feels a little bit like that. Like, what are we doing? Why do I know so many people too, David, who have been doing peace activist work in that part of the world on the Israeli side, on the Lebanese side, on the Syrian side, like all these people who have been trying to make things better for a long time. And then you have...

Americans with opinions, myself included, you know, and I don't know if those are valid. I'm not sure. I'm still working through it. Maybe that's it.

David (19:08)
before you read another poem.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (19:09)
I like that

you've talked about the poem. I had no idea it was gonna be like this. I'm sort of like, ooh, someone's analyzing my poetry. This is interesting. I don't know that I've ever experienced that before. Yeah, because I mean, I've had people tell me that they taught poems of mine in classes and things like that, you know what I mean? But I don't actually know what is discussed. I'm just like, ooh, thank you, I appreciate that.

David (19:17)
I try not to... really?

Claudia Saleeby Savage (19:32)
it was funny because that last line, love is already too brief. It was one of those that, that's my apology line because it's so hard being a parent. And sometimes you're like, I don't wanna hug you right now. You've been screaming for 20 minutes. Like my, I am done.

David (19:43)
my heavens.

Yeah

Claudia Saleeby Savage (19:51)
But

that's when we have to be full grown-ups. So I don't know, I think about that a lot. That piece, always hits me hard because I'm like, yeah, I know exactly how I was feeling this early. And I think the whole collection is kind of like that. Like this is really tough stuff. So either let's hug it out or, you know, the other poems where I'm like, or have sex, one of the two. Like, you know, like hug it out with your sweet daughter or little kids that you just want to love and be like...

David (20:03)
Yeah.

There you go.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (20:20)
it's going to be okay or with my husband I'm like or we can just avoid the whole thought process altogether. That's right. That's right. That's right.

David (20:26)
different coping mechanisms for different situations.

So you have another poem, and this one you're going to read for us, about a child. And go ahead and tell us about this poem. just read it and then we talk about it, or you can tell us a little bit about the poem first. Either way.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (20:46)
Oh yeah.

I think I'll just read it. The only part about a child is the title, which is kind of foggy. I do like to say the word Thawra means revolution. And so this is, I saw an article about, yes, that a Syrian family had named their child revolution right at the beginning when people thought, we're just going to do this peacefully. This is going to go well.

David (20:51)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (21:16)
Yeah. this is called, They Named Their Child, Thawra. Thick muscle, pliant bone, we hollow out the spine in the morning. Crack greeting to the sun, while the finches tremble their home awake. Unaware of our relationship with forsythia. There are things we won't let grow. We horizon a hillside of holly.

We tear old lilacs to ribbons. The neighbor's base holds our bedroom hostage at night. So you blast your saxophone naked, 6 a.m. in the backyard, ankle deep in fallen leaves, while they fever whiskey dream. According to the chord you choose, their bricks may crumble, like 1989, when we heard the wall come down.

the radio's hammers pulsing hope. Unlike now. Now, the news, a series of Syrian artillery torture, Filipino flood, Puerto Rican flood, Miami flood, everything from the White House to Baltimore to California to our backyard, smoking, choking fire. You come back inside to blow the room, body swoon,

Vibration, lung, tune. Exhale and unwound before the room contracts the universe. Reverse big bang. Boom.

David (22:54)
This is a very jazzy poem. I love it.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (22:56)
It's a very jazzy poem, I know, I chose that one because I love reading at least one poem that invokes my husband John because, you know, he's always playing the saxophone and when we play together sometimes people are like, whoa, I'm like, it's a saxophone. It is whoa. You back up.

David (23:03)
Hahaha

Exactly.

Yeah. And I love the fact that I wrote notes in the margin that I can't read. I was so excited.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (23:24)
David, this is the best. See, this is it is. You know, I, my students used to say when I used to teach privately, they used to say, you inspire improvisation. We never know what's going to happen. We just get in the river and we go down it. I'm like, that's what I like to hear. That's just what should be happening.

David (23:27)
You

Yeah,

if it means anything, it's a line I can't read next to naked at 6 a.m. So that inspired me.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (23:46)
Well, I mean, yes,

he just he's all and my husband and I can't believe I'm to say this on a podcast because all the little middle schoolers are going to do it. My husband's six, seven. So six, seven, you know, the little meme that all the kids are doing is ludicrous. But he's a very big dude. And so it's one of those things where he is is definitely a gentle giant in general.

David (23:58)
gotcha.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (24:12)
But at that time we had a small baby and we were exhausted and we had a neighbor that was having parties until four in the morning. It was epic. So he was just like, are you guys sleeping it off now? At 630? Because we're awake. Enjoy.

David (24:17)
Yeah.

Hmm.

great.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (24:33)
I've been thinking a lot, so people, because I have my epigraph in the book is from Wanda Coleman, who I adore. what did she say one time? She said something about how I'm writing these poems to seduce you, which I definitely think that's kind of...

David (24:46)
yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (24:49)
That is definitely how I feel about it a little bit. But it's not to seduce like, you know, let's have sex, but it's more like it's this seduction of, I want you to be interested. I want you to be charmed and I want it to feel mysterious and you want to keep reading and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, yeah.

David (25:02)
Yeah.

Right.

And I loved one of the one of the blurbs in the book from Alexis Latham. If you're

Claudia Saleeby Savage (25:13)
yes, Alexis.

my goodness, she is the most beautiful non-fiction writer. I just will put that out there. She just wrote a book about her sheep farm in Vermont. Let's talk about Alexis. She doesn't get enough love.

David (25:21)
great!

She said, if

you are feeling numbed by the daily horror of headlines, as we've talked about, this book is the elixir that will quicken your deepest humanity. what a blurb. was envious. just really glad that your editor, thank your editor for me personally.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (25:46)
I will, the beautiful Lauren Paradis. See now I'm just name dropping because I want to get all the love out there. She's a gorgeous poet. So thanks David. Let's talk about her.

David (25:49)
There we go. That's great.

Well, that's

just one of the many things we get the chance to do in this, you know, for the community of poetry. And because there's so many connections, we don't do any of this. I've said this one before. We don't do any of this in a vacuum, even though the writing itself is a solitary act, you know, where we may need to shut the children out or in my case, now that my children are grown, it's the dog and the cats. you know, there's this,

Claudia Saleeby Savage (25:57)
I know, it's good, it's so good.

David (26:20)
community of writers that were influenced by, sometimes without even knowing it, as well as the long history over multiple cultures in language. And that's just so much of this that to me makes this sound so much fun to do. I'll give you a chance to say anything more you want to about this poem before we move on, but.

I couldn't help but think about the walls of Jericho, which are referred to in the last poem that we'll read by another poet, you know, with him playing the saxophone. And that's a fantastic allusion whether you intended it or not.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (26:55)
you know what's funny?

No, I think I think I just I'm into I just I hear those threads, right? Like I don't it's not conscious at all. So I'm glad you noticed that because I think I do think about, you know, in 1989 I was in high school and it's one of those things where

David (27:03)
Yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (27:15)
I distinctly remember being on the, you know, being on the silly little like bus with the tennis team and my tennis coach had the radio and she was like cranking it up because they were, the wall was coming down and I was eating my Wheat Thins. Like I remember it so distinctly eating Wheat Thins and she was just like, she was also our literature teacher and so she was just talking about, listen to this. This is like the people doing this. Like nobody is hurting anybody. Like they are.

David (27:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (27:43)
And yeah, so I think that whole idea of revolution, this is what this poem made me think about because I thought I saw the pictures, I heard the stories from my friends who do activist work in that part of the world with people with their kids on their shoulders walking through the streets, and saying, Assad, you have to go. that feels like such an American story, right? Like it feels like the story of like,

yes, we're going to do this and we're going to protest and we're going to make a difference and do it and we're not going to hurt anybody. And sometimes I think when then those things devolve and people, other countries get involved with their military, because the story of Syria is a story of all of us. Like people, know, a of people think this has started with Palestine, all these things. No, this is bigger. These are international.

David (28:27)
Yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (28:29)
decisions that are being made about human beings and they are long running.

David (28:35)
It's something that we had a great deal of responsibility for happening in the first place as well. And all those.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (28:42)
Yes, I was going to say many,

many, many countries involved. Right. It's not just, yeah.

David (28:47)
yeah, yeah.

if you can't handle the stress of being steeped in all of that, like everything else that's going on in our country, It's important to connect to that humanity all over. And you're gonna find yourself learning a lot of geography lessons and saying, I didn't realize where the border was.

for this and all I did.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (29:03)
where

the border was now versus, and who drew those borders after the Ottoman Empire? These are the sorts of things like I do not claim to be an expert, but I'm just saying from my family's discussions and There's a poem about a great grandfather of mine who was kind of like.

David (29:09)
Mm-hmm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (29:20)
Do you choose the French? Do you choose the English? Why am I choosing either? Why don't I choose this? Like this idea of who do we align with? And I think people in this country as well are feeling that very keenly who am I aligning with that will do the right thing by my family? If you just go that granular, right? And why am I having to make that level of granularity, that choice?

David (29:23)
Hmm.

Hmm. Yeah.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (29:48)
know, poetry is super necessary, but it's also making art is necessary deeply to keep us like sane and alive. But I also think it does come from a place of privilege that I have anything left at the end of the day with my job and after caring for my family that I can make art. yeah. Yeah.

David (29:56)
Mm-hmm.

So you chose a poem by another poet as we get to the third of the three poems here. Tell us about this or give us a brief introduction and go ahead and read it.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (30:16)
Yes.

Okay, I'm making it about me, but this is a, because I, so I have multiple sclerosis and I have treatments a couple times a year, supposedly to help progression of my disease. That's the theory, even though there's no cure. And when I am dealing with my treatments, which are all day long, I tend to bring poetry with me when I'm not falling asleep. I read poetry, it's really.

David (30:25)
I love it.

Hmm.

Mm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (30:49)
soothing and wonderful. And so I read Nathalie Khankan Quiet Orient Riot, which is gorgeous and from Omni Dawn. And this book is fascinating. It's one of those poetry books where you can definitely read it all in one sitting and I think

possibly want to go on that journey. she is a Palestinian, I believe she is Palestinian and Danish and she is now an American, but she was writing about her infertility and how she was living in Palestine and was going over the border to Israel for fertility treatments.

David (31:04)
Mm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (31:25)
And so this is the last poem in the book that I'm going to read. It's called, They Said It Was Morning.

They said it was morning. I translate a poem in vatic light from Jericho. Stay human says the wall. I loop like the smoke rolling still in your mouth. The street becomes a street that fills up with spring and sheep, curves and carob trees. I stretch my right knee.

At home, a new child waits along with blue eyes and hair. Where she is born is a fine thing. Scabiosa Palestina. I need to put a load in the washer. I don't always look up when you walk by. Collected, grafted, warm root. I feel possibly covered like a book.

drawn in that coffee shop for men. And then I feel right in every corner like a table.

I love that poem, Natalie, that poem. The whole book is just luminous because, okay, David, I didn't know if you wanted me to just start gushing, but I'm gonna start gushing. So I'm gonna gush. So one of the things is Scabiosa palestina. So my husband is a pretty intense gardener and I had to look that up because I was like, that's something, it's a flower, it's an herb, what is it? It's an herb and it grows in...

David (32:56)
that's fine.

Me too.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (33:13)
both parts of, I mean, in that part of the world overall, and it will thrive in desert soil. there's a feeling of like, how do we, where do we want our children to feel connected to the land? What land do we want them to feel connected to? And I just, these stories in this book are so subtle and quiet. I always think about this, David, for me, I tend to be loud power as a poet.

but I love quiet power so much. I just kind of like, Natalie, you are so much quiet power. I mean, it's called Quiet Orient Riot, but so much quiet power where it's just the subtlety of this book. feel like everyone who is just full of rage about what has been happening in Gaza, I just kind of feel like sit a moment, read this book.

understand complexity. It doesn't take away the apartheid. It doesn't take away our complicity as a country. But it allows for this idea that like, let's stop demonizing each other. Let's try to find humanity because these Israeli doctors helped her have her children and it's beautiful. It's complicated. I'm not going to

I'm not going to speak for her, it's complicated, but the way in she articulates it has so much beauty and complication that I just thank you, Natalie, for writing it.

David (34:48)
And I found the phrase pincushion flower, it's sometimes called. And when you think about scabiosa Palestina, if you think about English implications from that scientific name, a Palestinian and the word scab and implying wound and all of that in there, it's just so brilliantly done.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (34:53)
I didn't know that. Whoa.

I know.

So brilliant.

So.

David (35:16)
And when it comes

to, yeah, when it comes to the form, I don't know if, I think I mentioned this when we were chatting at the beginning, there's some similarities here to your poem, My Daughter Discoveres Synchronicity Whereas in that one, you had the sentence fragments and in this one, there's no punctuation at all, but, know, lines are divided with.

like a visual cesura a slash right in the middle of lines. And starting out with that vatic light, sort of a prophetic thing and speaking from whether it's the ruins of Jericho's wall to also then back to that sort of everyday life thing of I've got to put a load in the washer, you know, because all of that is all mixed up in this.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (35:40)
Yeah.

Right. Right.

David (36:06)
all the time. I feel possibly covered like a book. As a librarian, I appreciate that.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (36:14)
I didn't know I was gonna get little points for this poem. I'm so happy, David. It's like making me so happy. I'm like, yes.

David (36:22)
And we don't have any

birds in this one, but we've got we've got plants. I was I was out in the woods this weekend taking photos of Trillium. That wasn't my whole purpose. I was out looking for birds and wood warblers and such because they're migrating through and some of her. But yeah, usually I only find a couple when I'm on a hike. And usually it's this time of year in May. I found a whole patch full of them. I was taking photos. It was wonderful.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (36:30)
don't...

Williams.

They

literally are the most magical flower. That's the flower like, cause my husband and I met this time of year. So every time we see the trillium, that's like our happy flower. We're like, this is us. This is us with our kid. Like this is not where the trillium and you know, there's yeah.

David (36:57)
weird thing is those Facebook

memories that come up, they'll say like, it shows you a picture of then and then you get to put one in that says now and it came up. Apparently I took a picture of a trillium seven years ago up in Northeastern Pennsylvania and that came up and I'm like, I took this this weekend. So I'll put another one.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (37:09)
Whoa!

You're like, and nobody

picked the flower and so it's still there. Isn't that the most, like if you pick it, won't, that's the part that kills me. If you pick a trillium, it won't come back for seven years. Is that, that is so, I don't know if it's true, but I want it to be true. That's it. We should write that poem. Let's write that poem together.

David (37:19)
Yes. Yeah.

I have heard that, don't know if it's true.

McFarland, who did the artwork on a couple of my chapbooks But he knows a lot about plants. I'll run that past him as well.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (37:44)
Yeah, but I

know that's...

David (37:45)
He did a beautiful

painting of jack-o-lantern mushrooms for the chapbook I wrote with my son, Mapping the Valley. So we have sources other than Wikipedia that we can turn to as well.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (37:58)
I know, we have people,

I have many people, many friends who are big, big plant nerds out here in the Pacific Northwest.

David (38:04)
Do you ever find

yourself doing this though that I have a friend of mine who's a historian too that for some things sometimes I want to reach out and ask him and I think I could have looked this up but it's more fun to ask this guy who I know is a local expert on things you know.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (38:16)
I know.

It's way better to do that. know. And also just, I know I just missed where you had to like go searching. So you understand this is a librarian. I missed the search. I missed the, okay, I looked it up here, but wait, this is leading me down to this book. I'm going to read this one. I'm still the nerdy person who, when I read a nonfiction thing and then they have all the sources in the back, I'm like looking at all of them going, do I want to read that too? Is that, will that be helpful? So I'll know more. Yeah. Yeah.

David (38:39)
Yeah!

Yeah,

I go down in rabbit holes like that sometimes just for one line of a poem so I don't make a fool out of myself. Like, is this exactly how a swan cleans its feathers? Well, let me look.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (38:59)
That's,

well this is why you're, this is like the most amazing podcast, David, because like who knew that, yes, that I looked up that flower because I was like, I don't know what this plant is for sure. But I think, yeah, all these sorts of things are really, it's really, adds depth to what's happening. It shows that you're reading with a lot of intention. It's beautiful.

David (39:09)
Yeah.

Yeah,

well, it's a delight to be able to do this and to have you here. And like you said, a privilege to be able to get the chance to do this even after a long day. Although I did take a nap before this episode, I will say.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (39:34)
You didn't know you were talking to a West Coaster was like, what do mean?

David (39:37)
Yeah, what time

zone are you in? okay.

So what else do you wanna tell?

our listeners before we sign off, you've been doing, still doing the readings and promotion of the book or are you already working on something else?

Claudia Saleeby Savage (39:48)
Yes,

I'm doing both. mean, I always have a lot of, so I have like a couple manuscripts that are, I don't know what they are. I write and I have things, you but I think right now, yeah, I'm still kind of moving along. Like a very dear, my dear friend Stephanie Height, see I gotta plug my poet friends who's in Detroit. Stephanie.

David (40:10)
Absolutely.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (40:11)
told me, she's also a person who deals with disability and she said, gotta like, crip up your book tour. And I'm like, I have no book tour. That's how crip I am.

And so she was like, but go real slow. So yeah, so on the one hand, I have like a number of things locally here in the Pacific Northwest that I'm doing in the next few months, including one reading at a friend's farm where I'm donating all the proceeds and I'm gonna cook Lebanese food. So if you're in Portland, come, it'll be amazing. I'm gonna cook my grandma's recipes. But I am donating.

David (40:48)
That's a fantastic

idea!

Claudia Saleeby Savage (40:49)
Isn't

that great? I'm donating to the farm. They do a lot of amazing outreach with the community where they live. It's mostly a refugee and immigrant community there, newly to the United States, or as new as we're allowed to right now. And then the other project I'm working on is dealing with my disability to some level and then also just kind of feeling like I want that to be

perhaps more performative with things with my husband. So we're talking through it. I think when you're dealing with any kind of illness, it's hard to contain it. there are many people who've done it brilliantly, many poets, gorgeous poets that have contained whatever they were experiencing to the page. But for me, I want something more visceral, I think. And I've had a couple of those poems published recently.

David (41:20)
Mm.

Mm.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (41:43)
about my MS. But you know what David, they're not there yet because they are mean. They are mean poems and I do not want them to be that mean. And I kind of feel like I got to get to the point where I'm not expressing that level of sorrow and anger. So what I would like to be doing is like writing a romance novel or something. Like I want something that is just joyful and ridiculous. So wish that for me.

David (42:12)
All right, well, I don't want you to totally give up on mean though, because sometimes that is very helpful to read a mean poem that's like, yes, yes, get them.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (42:20)
I know. They have, there's main, there's big bite in them. think cause you

know, when you have a disease where you feel it's controlling your life and there's so much that is unknown, yeah, you're talking about that. Like, do you write to get better? I think right now I'm writing to work through questions about

What is it I think about what's happening to me and with my family and is there a way to work through it to find beauty through it? So that's where I'm at.

David (42:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

Thank you so much for taking such a huge chunk of your evening here with me. we will put all those things in the show notes. There'll be links there.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (43:09)
This has been completely delightful. If we lived closer, I'd take you out for coffee. This is ridiculous. So fun.

David (43:14)
that sounds

marvelous. Coffee or wine, either way is good. It's a little later where I am now.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (43:19)
Okay, I understand. That's right, that's right. was like, it's

like, you know, six o'clock here, but yeah, yeah. my gosh, thanks so much, David. I appreciate it.

David (43:26)
This is 9 19 here. So.

Thank you for being here, Claudia. and have a great evening. Thanks.

Claudia Saleeby Savage (43:34)
You too, take care.

David J. Bauman (43:36)
I'm David J. Bauman, and you've been listening to the In Three Poems podcast. Our guest this episode was Claudia Saleeby Savage. Check out her books and poems at the links in the show notes and also at Claudia Savage. It's actually Claudiafsavage.com. We're going into the Fourth of July weekend here in the U.S., and as we think about where we are as a nation, we look forward to next week's guest, Crystal Simone Smith.

Who will read with us and talk with us about her new book that just came out this year from Beacon Press? It's called Common Sense 1776, addressed to today's citizens of America, an eraser. That's right, an eraser poem. We will see you on Thursday.