Words Heard, By Accident, Over The Phone with Jazra Khaleed
We are pleased to invite you to a series of phone calls with distant poets hosted by Simon Asencio. A way to eavesdrop on what is being written, published and organized elsewhere while staying close to the prosody of poetry. A way to mingle the lyrical with the conversational.
Each phone call will be preceded by a reading-group session for those who wish to get acquainted with the author’s work before the conversation.
For this second installment we welcome poet, filmmaker, performer and translator Jazra Khaleed as our guest.
Schedule
16:00-17:30 Reading group
18:00-19:30 Phone call with Jazra Khaleed
Location: rile*books, Rue des commerçants 62, 1000 Brussels
Please note that it is possible to come at 18h and attend only the phone call with Jazra. The reading group is organized for those who would like to get to know Jazra's writing but it is not a precondition for the call. Tea and light snacks will be provided.
About
Jazra Khaleed is a poet, filmmaker, performer and translator. He lives in Athens and writes in Greek. His work explores working-class experiences and cultures, homeland and belonging, migration and war, and is an indictment of racism, social injustice, and classism in contemporary Greece and Europe.
His most recent publications are Mein Körper ist kein Land (parasitenpresse, Germany, 2026) and The Light That Burns Us (World Poetry Books, USA, 2024). His poetry has been widely translated and published in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, Lichtungen, Modern Poetry in Translation, Tripwire, Die Horen, Nioques, and many other publications.
He is a founding editor of the Athens-based poetry magazine ΤΕΦΛΟΝ (Teflon), which publishes cutting-edge poetry from around the world. His short films have been screened at film festivals worldwide.
Simon Asencio lives in Brussels. He reads, writes, publishes, translates, teaches, dances and creates performances. His research focuses on forms of sociability generated by textual practices.
The title of the event is borrowed from Silvia Plath's poem
Words Heard, By Accident, Over The Phone
O mud, mud, how fluid! —-
Thick as foreign coffee, and with a sluggy pulse.
Speak, speak! Who is it?
It is the bowel-pulse, lover of digestibles.
It is he who has achieved these syllables.
What are these words, these words?
They are plopping like mud.
O god, how shall I ever clean the phone table?
They are pressing out of the many-holed earpiece, they are looking for a
listener.
Is he here?
Now the room is ahiss. The instrument
Withdraws its tentacle.
But the spawn percolate in my heart. They are fertile.
Muck funnel, muck funnel —
You are too big. They must take you back!