I’m not putting an end to anything
I don’t have any illusions about that
I wanted to keep on writing poems
But the inspiration stopped.
Poetry has acquitted itself well
I have conducted myself horribly.
— Nicanor Parra, “Poetry Ends with Me,” trans. Miller Williams
1
You rummage through your wardrobe, the pockets of your gray winter coats, the kitchen drawers. You contemplate the clothesline, then upend the empty vase on the table. You stick your head under the sofa and peel up the rug before finally giving up and sitting down, powerless, surrounded by chaos, wondering, What am I looking for? Have I totally lost it?
Don’t worry—it’s poetry you’re craving.
You rush to close the living room windows. You put on an extra sweater. You start up the electric heater, watch your toes turn blue, and feel chills run through your body despite the July heat. You obsess about the flu and your iron deficiency.
Don’t worry—it’s poetry you’re lacking.
Everyone goes to war in uniforms and combat gear, and you stay home, dressed in your loose white shirt, a peaceful river in your hands. They fight with rare valor on the battlefield as you water the potted plants on their abandoned balconies. They feel powerful, and you start doubting your courage.
Don’t worry—it’s poetry you’re defending.
2
Why poetry? And why now?
Because we live under the rubble of humanity. Here in this spot on the globe, where faces crowd the rooftops, looking down, and the air is dense with the smoke of heavy engines and the scent of decay, we point fingers at each other, and heaven, where our children play, is filled with vain intentions.
Because love is scarce and silence is delicate and what is the difference between poetry and love, as Ounsi el-Hajj said, except that the first gives words to silence and the second gives it action.1
Because poetry is a way of making the world mean something, or as the Chinese poet Lu Chi put it, “we [poets] wrestle with non-being to force it into being; we beat silence for an answering music.”2 And we are not alone, in our spot on the globe, to want to restore being, to find true meaning.
Because poetry, according to Aristotle, is an imitation “of things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.”3 I feel no guilt for removing “[imitation] of things as they were or are” from this definition, not because poetry exists in a bubble, as some theorize, but because I want the dreams of poetry to fly, far beyond the ceiling of this spot on the globe.
3
The poets’ crisis, a myth.
Good poets fill the earth, the world celebrates their poems, and we stone them in our countries with rock-sharp criticism and even sharper judgment. We put fresh and rotten eggs in a single basket because they’ve diverged from tribal conventions or, really, because we refuse to accept poetry as a child of its time, one who speaks that time’s language, carries its concerns, and keeps pace with its rhythms.
We threaten to strangle the prose poem in its cradle, somehow overlooking its silver tresses and deep wrinkles, and the sharp disputes of its heirs.
We bemoan new poets’ abuse of Jahiliyyah love poetry, how far they’ve fallen from singing the greats’ praises, and how they’ve abandoned truly potent poems for everyday Western gibberish. The same new poets who flee terrorist bombings with small leather cases, running from one rented apartment on the ninth floor to another one, ramshackle, on the verge of collapse. They bury a new group of loved ones in a mass grave every day. Looking into shattered mirrors, they stare loneliness in the face. They live on pizza and hamburgers in dark airport lounges.
4
The poetry crisis, a mess of papers and poor judgment.
Modern humans are the ones in crisis, not poetry. The frantic running, our smartwatches, the death toll in the breaking news ticker, the oscillating stock index—all of this and more has increased the distance between us and the immensity of poetry. The innocence of poetry. The purity of it.
The human crisis is global, not Arab. But we bury our heads in the sand and settle instead for eye-catching headlines on March 21, International Poetry Day, about the made-up poetry crisis, as myriad collective and individual efforts are made worldwide to support poetry.
The Portuguese writer Afonso Cruz introduces us to the protagonist of his novel Let’s Buy a Poet, a girl living a dry life ruled by numbers, the laws of profit and loss, and the commodification of human beings, relationships, and feelings. “It was a beautiful morning,” she writes. “The air, as they say, smelled of dollars.” Then poetry begins to spread light and warmth: “My mother shouted out three words I found incredibly poetic: ‘I’ve had it!’” As a result of that epiphany, she says, “Our lives changed dramatically—and so did I.” Finally, as she wipes the condensation from a mirror: “I tried to clear the fog from life, as the poet told us to, scrubbing away at reality until a smile appeared. I know it’s hard work—there’s too much fog, and it blurs life and distorts it. But I’ll keep trying.”
Antonio Skármeta, meanwhile, invested his time and talent into a false biography inspired by poetry, creating the world of his astonishing novel The Postman. The hero of the novel is poetry—not the poet Pablo Neruda—and normal people who become inspired, like the Chilean postman Mario Jiménez, who gets dizzy when he first hears poetry. “I was like a boat tossing upon your words,” he says, before asking the question that leaves Neruda open-mouthed, his chin “ready to drop right off his face”: “Do you think the whole world is a metaphor for something?”4
Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) motivates me, personally, to shred all the strict critical beliefs that stunt poetry’s development. I want to be like Professor John Keating (Robin Williams), who persuades his Wilton Academy students to rip up the preface to their English textbook: Dr. J. Evans Pritchard’s key to judging poetic quality by graphing. Now I dream of including Professor Keating’s advice on our syllabi one day: “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Finally, director Jim Jarmusch, in his movie Paterson (2016), gave us a cinematic prose poem based on his love of the American poet William Carlos Williams, and Williams’s poem of the same name. The film’s protagonist, Paterson, a bus driver, writes poetry that celebrates the ordinary and marginalized. Until his dog Marvin eats his poems, he focuses on the beauty in the tangible: the brand of a matchbox, people’s daily conversations, and more.
5
When Plato banned poetry in his utopian republic, he justified his point of view by saying that the poet is like the painter, who mimics phenomena that deceive the senses without understanding their Forms, or true nature, and thus that poetry, too, is an imitation, three degrees removed from the truth.
If we reluctantly accept Plato’s opinion, we also deserve to know the motives behind banning poetry, killing it, and mutilating its corpse in cities Plato didn’t build, in a spot on the globe like this one, a thousand degrees removed from the truth.
The epigraph is from Nicanor Parra, “Poetry Ends with Me,” trans. Miller Williams, in Antipoems: New and Selected, ed. David Unger (New York: New Directions, 1985), 43. Copyright ©1972 by Nicanor Parra and Miller Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
1. Ounsi el-Hajj, خواتم (or Rings; Beirut: Elrayyes Books, 1991), aphorism trans. Addie Leak. ↩
2. Lu Chi, “Rhymeprose on Literature,” trans. Achilles Fang, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 2004), 185. ↩
3. Aristotle, “Poetics,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69372/from-poetics. ↩
4. Antonio Skármeta, The Postman, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: Norton, 2008), 13. ↩
“على تخوم المدينة الفاضلة” © Lana al-Majali. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2024 by Addie Leak. All rights reserved.
