Things I Didn't Know I Loved*

Naomi Shihab Nye's boy

2009-12-10T11:43:00.004+02:00

I challenge you to watch this and not grin from ear to ear.

I Do it For the Joy it Brings

2007-04-30T02:13:00.000+03:00

'I do it for the joy it brings
because I'm a joyful girl.
Because the world owes me nothing -
we owe each other the world.
I do it cause it's the least I can do,
I do it cause I learned from you.
And I do just because I want to...
cause I want to.'

Ani DiFranco

This post will be more earnest than I am normally comfortable with.

I recently met someone who, upon finding out I had a blog, asked me why I'd stopped blogging. I mumbled a half-chewed answer about communities, and allergies...I tried to make it sound good, sound right, then drifted off when it didn't. He also asked me why I had started blogging in the first place. This I knew: to have a place to collect my favourite poetry, to share my joy in it with others, and to have an incentive to keep discovering more poetry, new poets. The answer came straight out, clear.

The conversation made me realise that I'd stopped blogging because I had started to become so concerned with who was reading that I'd lost sight of why I was writing. Thank you, F, for asking.

I wrote this about a month ago in response to O's Charles Bukowski poem on writing.

I write to stopper tears
I write to bottle joy

I write to put a name to my pain,
to catch it in my headlight

I write to keep a piece of you

I write for company on trains and planes
and while waiting for friends to show up for lunch

I write when no-one else but the page will receive it
-It should be my first resort but is often my last-

I write to mean

I write to play

I write to pray

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

2007-03-22T22:53:00.000+02:00

If I stay there will be trouble

'Say goodbye to the old street
that never cared much for you anyway
The different-colored doorways
you thought would let you in one day

Say goodbye to the old building
that never tried to know your name...
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend
You won't be seeing me again.'

Patty Griffin, 'Useless Desires'

If I go it will be double

'You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets. And you will age in the
same neighborhoods; and you will grow grey in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other –
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.'

Constantine Cavafy, 'The City'

Nostalgia

2006-09-09T00:02:00.000+03:00

Another haiku'd (high cooed?) thought - this time, on nostalgia. 97% guaranteed literal and non-metaphoric, HV, bromise!

I am gonna miss
Egyptian men if I leave.
I won't if I don't.

Midnight Swim

2006-09-04T17:10:00.000+03:00

A haiku about the highlight of my weekend - of the past few weeks, in fact.

Warm salty midnight
swim in lake, beautiful man,
Half-moon red and low.

Small Packages

2006-08-28T23:46:00.000+03:00

"Good things come in small packages." - Japanese man

Yes, so I'm small. It's the first thing people comment on when they meet me/when they later describe me to the police artist. That, and lots of hair (on my head). I get: petite, tiny, little woman, wee (conveniently, also a play on my name) - I've even gotten 'teensy.' My friend La Boop, of forsooth fame – who, although a pain in the ass, is even funnier in person (which is why I keep her around) – is credited with the funniest description of me I've ever heard. It was a few years ago, and I was wondering out loud whether to get my hair cut. Her response: "Well, I love your hair, but sometimes it looks like you're growing on it."

As for the usual barrage of Cairo comments and catcalls, rather than fruity comparisons, mine always tend towards the 'soghayyar bass 7elw/bass zayy el 3asal' variety. I wonder what gives away my honey-sweetness? Is it the enraged flare of my nostrils, the murder in my eyes? E7taris man ektaraba min al ard*, asshole!

Small people are angry people. To wit:

Alexander the Great
Napoleon
Hitler
Mussolini
Stalin
Marquis de Sade
Sartre
Woody Allen

There are many great things about being small, though:

1. You don't have the advantage of periscope vision when in the middle of large crowds of spectators (think concerts, car accidents, etc.) but you can usually - with the God-given gift of elbows - wriggle your way to the front of anything.

2. You don't take up much space: my ability to curl up comfortably on a single (cheap) seat on a plane, bus or train is a frequent source of amusement - I mean, AWE - to sundry travelling companions.

3. You never have to factor in height when choosing men.
(i.e. I like tall men, but taller women always bitch me out when I mention this so I keep my preferences quiet.)

I'm five foot one. Here is a children's poem by the weird and wonderful Shel Silverstein. It reminds me that there are others in five feet dire-r straits than myself.

One Inch Tall

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school.
The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool.
A crumb of cake would be a feast
And last you seven days at least,
A flea would be a frightening beast
If you were one inch tall.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door,
And it would take about a month to get down to the store.
A bit of fluff would be your bed,
You'd swing upon a spider's thread,
And wear a thimble on your head
If you were one inch tall.

You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum.
You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb.
You'd run from people's feet in fright,
To move a pen would take all night,
(This poem took fourteen years to write
--'Cause I'm just one inch tall).

Shel Silverstein

*Arabic proverb, roughly translated: "Beware those close to the ground."

Sense and Sensuality

2006-08-23T13:16:00.000+03:00

Today I blindfolded a near-stranger and passed aromatic spices under his nose. The room was silent, save for the shuffling of spices and this single-word exchange.

Me: Cumin
Him: Kamon
Me: Kyoo-min
Him: Cumin
Me: Yes

Me: Cardamom
Him: CardaMOOM
Me: CARDamom
Him: Cardamom

Me: Cinammon
Him: Cinabon
Me: *laughing* yes, that’s the name of the pastry chain. This is Cina-mmmmon
Him: Cinammon

Him: Uhh…cumin?
Me: Try again…
Him: Wait wait wait wait…cardamon!
Me: Yep! Carda-…?
Him: mom. Cardamom.

I am, among other things, an English teacher to adults; a great one, but often recklessly – unadvisedly – creative. I came up with this particular activity in a food-themed class with another group a while ago, with half the students “dispensing” and the other half “smelling”. It worked beautifully, but was an intense experience for all involved – I’d forgotten how intense. And now, here I was, trying it out in a one-to-one class, slowly realising my mistake. The room was hushed, thick with focus, and intimate – way too intimate.
Note to self: stick to the coursebook on occasion.

On my way home I remembered, years ago, going to a ‘attar (loose translation: apothecary) in Old Cairo, with someone who was then very special to me. I was bone-tired and didn’t want to be out, but he asked and I couldn’t resist him then. We were in search of the perfect perfume oil blend. I remember the ‘attar dabbing essential oils on the back of my hands, all along the pale vein-streaked skin inside my wrists, and up my inner arms. He was leaning in to sniff jasmine in the crook of my elbow, lavender in the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. We walked out of there after close to two hours, with a tiny bottle, in a drunken haze, heads spinning, nostrils tingling. I looked across at him, with this huge ridiculous dazed smile on his face and that look in his eyes; I must’ve looked the same. It’s not one of my favourite memories of us together – the perfume was for another woman – but definitely one of the most bittersweet.

Today, I got home from my class to this poem (I am not, in the eternal words of Dave Barry, making this up) in my inbox.

The Cinammon Peeler

'If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.'

Michael Ondaatje

Some of my favourite smells: strawberries; just-ground black pepper: good, earthy, pungent;
fresh wet mint leaves (their fragrance is fully released with moisture); minced garlic crackling in hot oil;
that sweet smoky smell of burnt candlewick just after a candle’s been blown out – reminds me of childhood birthday cakes.
And cinnamon, of course.

Being a boy

2006-08-18T21:15:00.000+03:00

I have a male alter ago called William. Just a long-running joke among friends, with endless comic possibilities (start with 'Willy' and take it from there). Can't even remember how it started, and never really thought about it too closely: nope, no penis envy, I love being a woman.

Yesterday I watched a friend's little son (the friend being yet another one of those overworked, too-busy-making-his-fortune-to-be-a-father fathers) sitting in my dad's lap. They were getting along like a house on fire: their heads drawn close together, two conspirators chattering away, my dad answering the kid's unending stream of strange, curious-child questions in that gentle, random way of his. And I wondered if, instead of two feisty females, he might've liked to have had a boy.

The Little Mute Boy

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket's clothes.)

Federico García Lorca

Suheir Hammad

2006-08-08T12:46:00.000+03:00

'Where has my language gone?
The poet searches for words to wrap around these times
Make them sense Make them pretty Make them useful'

from 'Beyond Words'

I went to see this girl/woman read in Cairo about two months ago.
I was blown away. I am rarely blown away.
Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American, born in Jordan and raised in Brooklyn. Above and beyond all that, an incredible poet and performer. (She's even won a Tony award for her work on a Broadway show, Def Poetry Jam). I'm tempted to call her a musician - her poems have such a strong beat to them, and she has such rhythm when she 'reads' ('raps' would be more accurate). Won't even try to do her justice - you can just watch her here.

Oh, did I mention that she's hot?

What I Will

I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin beak for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain't
louder than this breath.

Suheir Hammad

Update Uno: Watch Suheir Hammad read 'First Writing Since' [Sept 11] at Def Poetry Jam here. Her words are harsher - less 'poetic', less abstract, more directly political and exacting - but her demeanor is more understated somehow . Muchas gracias, Os.

Update-at-Gunpoint Dos: Thanks to Booboo for combing the (eih?) Commonwealth of Canada for me for Suheir Hammad's latest poetry collection, 'Zaatar Diva'. (Sa7 kida?) Sorry - including CD!

The Waking

2006-08-04T19:39:00.000+03:00

Sleep is my drug of choice.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

Shedding

2006-04-25T04:02:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking a lot about shedding lately. Spring is here and with it all that rebirth malarkey.
So many things I want to let go of, want to ease off my shoulders. I've been wriggling for ages - but half-heartedly, and so it clings back on. Yesterday I took proper hold, and began to slough all that dead weight off. I feel lighter already.

This post is also inspired by rockslinga's wriggling. Happy shedding to you all!

Shedding Skin

' Pulling out of the old scarred skin
(old rough thing I don't need now
I strip off
slip out of
leave behind)

I slough off deadscales
flick skinflakes to the ground

Shedding toughness
peeling layers down
to vulnerable stuff

And I'm blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing
By the rock I rub against
I'm going to be tender again '

Haryette Mullen

Doing

2006-04-23T22:50:00.000+02:00

Hate this poem but I envy the man. I don't even know people like this: doers rather than thinkers.
It makes for crappy poetry, but good living. I think.

A Busy Man

'This crowded life of God's good giving
No man has relished more than I;
I've been so goldarned busy living
I've never had the time to die.
So busy fishing, hunting, roving,
Up on my toes and fighting fit;
So busy singing, laughing, loving,
I've never had the time to quit.

I've never been one for thinking
I've always been the action guy;
I've done my share of feasting, drinking,
And lots of wenching on the sly.
What all the blasted cosmic show meant,
I've never tried to understand;
I've always lived just for the moment,
And done the thing that came to hand.

And now I'll toddle to the garden
And light a good old Henry Clay.
I'm ninety odd, so Lord, please pardon
My frequent lapses by the way.
I'm getting tired; the sunset lingers;
The evening star serenes the sky;
The damn cigar burns to my fingers . . .
I guess . . . I'll take . . . time off . . . to die.'

Robert W. Service

Things I Didn't Know I Feared

2006-04-14T22:30:00.000+02:00

My worst nightmare came true on Thursday. But she didn't die, I was given a second chance, and I pray I'll remember, daily,
all the lessons learnt.

How To Deal With Terrible News

'Imagine yourself in a space suit, floating through dust,
and that you are the only life on a spinning planet,

because whatever the news, you are still alive,
and you can still tell jokes. Tell the doctor a joke.

Or turn back time, and live in a pressure pot of memory.
You can do that. You can ignore calendars and clocks.

Denial is useful. So is a kind of grinning madness.
You are very lucky to live in a warm house, and think

of your vast bath, and the way that you lie in it, gazing
at the clouds shifting, the pigeons flying home. No one

can take that away from you. And your mother.
Not many women have a mother like yours, brave,

original, who tends your universe, and the future.
Sometimes I think there is no such thing as terrible,

only blocked things, lost words, souls that missed the train.'

Julia Darling

Her blog and her obituary.

Spring is here!

2006-04-10T15:42:00.000+02:00

Yes! Yes! Y e. e. s!

'yes is a pleasant country
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear'

e. e. cummings

Boredom

2006-04-04T00:56:00.000+02:00

This post is inspired by (i.e. nicked from) my dear magical friend Chi, who herself is a whole other story for a whole other post.
That's not to say she bores me - far from it. (Can't say that. I have fear, you know. I fear the flipping faces of the Gemini.)
She and monassar just got me thinking about boredom. (Dig self out of self-dug grave, quick!)

Here's what she - Chi - well, technically, John Berryman - has to say about it:

Dream Song 14: Life, Friends is Boring

'Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind me, wag.'

Wendy Cope has a slightly different take on the matter. I can't decide whether it's a more positive or a more negative one.

Being Boring

"May you live in interesting times." - Chinese curse

'If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion-I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last,
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you're after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.

I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don't need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I've found a safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.'

Whose vision terrifies you more? Vote!

The Last Word

2006-03-26T08:47:00.000+02:00

Roger McGough on relationships:

You and I

'I explain
quietly. You
hear me shouting. You
try a new tack. I
feel old wounds reopen.

You see both sides. I
see your blinkers. I
am placatory. You
sense a new selfishness.

I am a dove. You
recognize the hawk. You
offer an olive branch. I
feel the thorns.

You bleed. I
see crocodile tears. I
withdraw. You
reel from the impact.'

Bjork vs. e.e.cummings

2006-03-22T22:43:00.000+02:00

A match made in quirk heaven.

Behold cummings' poem, a thing of beauty:

'it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be-
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.'

Then listen to Bjork's gorgeous rendition, 'Sonnets/Unrealities XI'.

Mmmmmm...

Chinua Achebe

2006-03-21T23:37:00.000+02:00

Depressing Mother's Day-themed poetry, anyone?

Refugee Mother and Child

'No Madonna and Child
could touch that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon will have to forget.

The air was heavy with odors
of diarrhea of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in labored
steps behind blown empty bellies.
Most mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's
pride as she combed the rust-colored
hair left on his skull and then -
singing in her eyes - began carefully
to part it... In another life
this would have been a little daily
act of no consequence before his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.'

Another famous novelist-cum-underrated poet.
Read more here and here.

Ahmed Al-Aidy

2006-03-18T19:58:00.000+02:00

I'm not actually sure I love him yet. But I've heard plenty of interesting things about his (hmm, can a book be called a sleeper hit?)
ان تكون عباس العبد , now translated (by Humphrey Davies) as Being Abbas el-Abd.

And I'll be soon be finding out. On Wednesday, the American University in Cairo's English & Comparative Literature Department will be hosting a reading by Al-Aidy as part of their (often but not always interesting) Emerging Creative Voices Series.

So that's:

Ahmed Al-Aidy

Wednesday 22nd March

AUC Blue Room on the Greek Campus

5.30pm

(Image nicked from signandsight.)

After that, at 7pm, you can mosey over to the Townhouse Gallery to check out:

...part of their Borrowed Film Series (aka: films you would never otherwise see in Cairo).

The IMDB synopsis begins: 'Safe has been described as a "horror movie of the soul", a description that director Todd Haynes relishes.'
A user review is titled: 'Seen it several times, and still don't know what to think.'

Intriguing, non?

Roll on Wednesday!

Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble

2006-03-12T02:11:00.000+02:00

Mijke. Half-Dutch, half-Scottish, grew up in Oman. Currently living on a nature reserve in South Africa studying baboons.
Ultimate Frisbee* champion. Brilliant storyteller and famous children's writer to be.
Remember: you heard it here first.

*yes, it took her a while to convince me that's actually a sport, and now I'm a convert

Both photos taken in Winchester, England; Summer 2005.

Things to Bolster Your Sometimes Sagging Faith in Egypt

2006-03-10T20:11:00.000+02:00

Salah Jahin

غمض عينيك و ارقص بخفة و د لع
الدنيا هي الشابة و انت الــــــــجدع
تشوف رشاقة خطوتك تعبــــــــدك
لكن انت لو بصيت لرجليك ....تـقع
!! عجبي

I love him. He makes everything okay.

25 pages of Rubaiyat here.

The Last Word

2006-03-08T22:31:00.000+02:00

D.H. Lawrence on Self-Pity:

'I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself. '

Good selection of D.H. Lawrence poems here.
Check out 'My Naughty Book', second from the bottom - Lawrence's hilarious,
embittered and profanity-infested rant about the reaction to Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The Last Word

2006-03-08T03:36:00.000+02:00

John Hegley on women:

Pat

I said Pat
you are fat
and you are cataclysmically desirable
and to think I used to think
that slim was where it's at
well not any more Pat
you've changed that
you love yourself
you flatter yourself
you shatter their narrow image of the erotic
and Pat said
what do you mean FAT?

Margaret Atwood

2006-03-07T23:43:00.000+02:00

I don't understand why this woman is better known as a novelist than as a poet.
(I take this as an indication of the general huge disparity in numbers between fiction readers and poetry readers,
rather than of the relative quality of her two - for lack of a less uppity phrase - 'forms of expression'.)

Read: strongly disliked the couple of her novels that I read, but love a lot of her poems. Here's one of my favourites.

Variations on the Word Love

'This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions.
There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
This word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.'

More Atwood-the-poet here.

Khaled Mattawa

2006-03-04T23:31:00.000+02:00

Borrowed Tongue

'Maybe I'm a fool
holding two threads,
one black, one white,
waiting for dawn
to tell them apart.
But I'm only practicing
my religion which
I neither borrowed
nor stole.
Maybe I'm a fool
thinking of a better answer
than the transplant patient
who said I'm sorry
someone had to die.

No, I haven't outgrown
my tongue. It's a coat
your mother gives you,
crimson or cobalt blue,
satin inside, the collar
wide enough to cover
your whole neck.
All winter you wear it
then spring comes
but never goes.
That's Arabic to me.
I wear a white shirt now--
thin gray stripes,
top button gone--
and it fits.'

Khaled Mattawa is a poet and translator, Libyan by birth, who emigrated to the US as a teenager.
I attended a reading in Cairo a few years ago, and his poetry is even better read aloud by him. You wouldn't think so, but this is in fact (fact being my opinion) an exceedingly rare thing - it's been my experience that most poets suck at reading their own poetry.

Dive into some more of his work here.

Update: Thanks to rockslinga, you can listen to Khaled's signature Southern crooning here.
'Tis true, slinga, not quite the same as seeing him in person, but as I always say: Pre-Recorded Mattawa is better than No Mattawa At All.

My Spiritual Parents

2006-03-03T23:27:00.000+02:00

Not biological, but better.

Taken near Chateau de Biron in Dordogne, South of France; September 2005.

Pablo Neruda

2006-03-02T02:34:00.000+02:00

This man is at least half the reason I'm learning Spanish.

Morning XVVII

'Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
you have moon-lines, apple-paths:
naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you have vines and stars in your hair;
naked you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church...'

More.

The Guardian, for sentimental reasons

2006-03-01T15:59:00.000+02:00

They demand to know
Why I love thee, The Guardian:
Let me count the ways...

Scoffing, are we? Think you can do better?

Try The Guardian's Daily Haiku.

Alaa al-Aswany

2006-02-28T00:43:00.000+02:00

'In Egypt and in the Arab world, being a novelist doesn't mean you can make your living from your writing. Before HarperCollins [decided to publish the translated version for wide release in Britain], what I got from The Yacoubian Building I consider as covering the price of the cigarettes and coffee I bought while I was writing it.'

Interesting writer, but a few dodgily-worded remarks: 'Writing is a part of our battle for democracy' and 'For the past two decades Egypt has adopted...a very closed, not at all tolerant - a kind of Taliban interpretation [of Islam]'. Is Alaa polishing potentially profitable* Western apples, or is that just my cynicism getting the better of me again?

Read Al-Aswany's hot-off-the-press interview with The Guardian.

*no alliteration intended

Gwendolyn Brooks

2006-02-27T02:38:00.000+02:00

We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

'We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.'

Not to just be read.
Listen to the author (singing/chanting/jazzing) it.

Wanda Coleman

2006-02-26T13:15:00.000+02:00

Bedtime Story

bed calls. i sit in the dark in the living room
trying to ignore them

in the morning, especially Sunday mornings
it will not let me up. you must sleep
longer, it says

facing south
the bed makes me lay heavenward on my back
while i prefer a westerly fetal position
facing the wall

the bed sucks me sideways into it when i
sit down on it to put on my shoes. this
persistence on its part forces me to dress in
the bathroom where things are less subversive

the bed lumps up in anger springs popping out to
scratch my dusky thighs

my little office sits in the alcove adjacent to
the bed. it makes strange little sighs
which distract me from my work
sadistically i pull back the covers
put my typewriter on the sheet and turn it on

the bed complains that i'm difficult duty
its slats are collapsing. it bitches when i
blanket it with books and papers. it tells me
it's made for blood and bone

lately spiders ants and roaches
have invaded it searching for food

Sound familiar?

John Hegley

2006-02-25T14:22:00.000+02:00

'poetry - language on a spree
I want to be
a leaf on the poetree
poetry is good for me
I think I'll have some for my tea'

Read more on dogs and glasses...

oh, and let's not forget potatoes.

Nazim Hikmet

2006-02-24T22:00:00.000+02:00

The name of this blog is taken from a poem of the same title by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.

A little taste:

'it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

...

I've written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there's a lantern in the servant's hand
and I can't contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky...'

Read the rest.