Samih al-Qasim
Quick answer: Samih al-Qasim craft guide: defiant refrains, compressed lines and poems addressed to power, and how Palestinian resistance poetry can sharpen your work.
Samih al-Qasim wrote poems you can carry in a pocket and say aloud at a checkpoint. Born in 1939 to a Druze family from Rameh in the Galilee, he remained in his homeland after 1948 and became, alongside Mahmoud Darwish and Tawfiq Zayyad, one of the defining voices of Palestinian poetry written inside Israel. He was imprisoned and placed under house arrest for his activism, edited the newspaper Kul al-Arab, and published dozens of collections before his death in 2014.
What makes him a craft lesson rather than only a historical figure is compression. Where many political poets swell, al-Qasim cuts. His most famous pieces are short, spoken to a single adversary, and end on a turn that quietly flips the power in the room.
The signature moves
Three techniques recur across his enormous output, and each one transfers directly to any poem written under pressure.
What you can learn from him
Try writing to a you who holds power over your speaker: an examiner, a landlord, a border officer, an illness. The second person converts complaint into drama, and drama is what keeps a reader in a political poem. Then build a refrain that does not merely repeat but accrues, changing meaning as the material around it changes.
Above all, practise his discipline of length. Draft the angry poem at full size, then halve it, then halve it again, keeping only the lines that would survive being spoken aloud to the adversary's face. Structure and emotion, two of the criteria contest judges weigh, both improve under that kind of pressure, and a poem this compressed makes a strong Writory entry.
Where to start reading
Seek out the short poems known in English as Travel Tickets and End of a Talk with a Jailer, both widely anthologised, and his poem on the events at Kafr Qasim. The English selection Sadder Than Water: New and Selected Poems (2006) gathers a career's worth of work in one place.
What poets can take from this
- Address a poem to someone with power over the speaker and never break the address.
- Let a refrain gain a new shade of meaning at each return instead of repeating identically.
- End a poem of protest on a reversal, not a summary.
- Cut a political draft to half its length, twice.
- Replace every abstract noun of outrage with one concrete detail an eyewitness would notice.
Try it yourself
Write a short poem spoken to someone who is deciding your speaker's fate: an official behind glass, a doctor with a folder, a guard with keys. Use one repeated line three times, and let the final repetition mean something different from the first.
Questions
What is Samih al-Qasim known for?
He is one of the major Palestinian poets of the twentieth century, famous for short, defiant poems of resistance written from within Israel. His work pairs political urgency with sharp formal compression.
How is al-Qasim different from Mahmoud Darwish?
The two were friends and are often read together, but Darwish tended toward long lyrical and mythic structures while al-Qasim favoured brevity, direct address and ironic reversal. Reading them side by side is a course in two kinds of political poem.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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