Reading Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the New Millennium I stumbled across a section of Arabic poets who published from 1956 to 1964 as the Tammuzi poets, taking their name from the ancient Mesopotamian god of seasonal decay and rebirth. These poets were born in many places in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Iraq and their poetry is a nod to classical Arabic forms, yet informed by the spirit of inquiry brought about by exile, post-colonialism and avant-garde movements elsewhere.
Chief among these poets is Adonis who was born Ali Ahmad Said in Syria in 1929 (see this interview for more). He sort of set the stage for Tammuzi poetry with a journal called Shi’r (meaning “poetry”) which published 1956-1964 in Arabic. In a later book called Poetry and Apoetical Culture Adonis wrote of the group’s poetics:
Reading is not an act of consumption; it is an act of creation. Therefore, after the problem of easiness comes the difficulty engendered by poetic investigation. The light such investigation may cast on the unknown only enlarges the unknown’s dimensions, announcing its depth and its extremity as if light were transforming itself into night. And if this light opens the horizon to the night of the world, the limits it makes poetry cross open poetry to the unlimited. As if the darkness were amplified by the very movement of the light, as if poetry knew only its own limits. The dark work that is illumined is the very thing that leads poetry toward an even darker world.
– Adonis, quote in Rothenberg and Joris, Poems For the New Millennium vol II, pp 182-83
This poetics is captured equally elegantly in a poem from the same collection by Yusuf al-Khal, Adonis’s Lebanese co-editor:
Cain the immortal
by Yusuf al-Khal
(translated by Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo)
by Yusuf al-Khal
(translated by Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo)
When you turn at the road’s
last bend
you eat the distance with your eyes
as if it were an idol raised to heaven.
You can go back,
you will wither and fall
or reach the crossroad
until some oracle is appears
like an image on the wall.
Perhaps the oracle is nothing
but the fist of god
dropped open with a sign?
No,
you are leafed with worry,
devoured by stares,.
Grumbling, you pierce the dust
with a curse
like Adam’s rib,
and wander off
into forbidden grounds
into a cleft between
two shores —
the region of your death.
Not knowing
where you belong.
Your pallbearers are carrying
no one in your coffin.
Cain cannot die.
I�m collecting more Tammuzi poetry at the Parking Lot Wiki, where I will eventually assemble another collection.
Share:
For more documentation of the devastation of Hurricane Juan in PEI, visit Steven Garrity’s blog, Acts of Volition. Here’s hoping everyone gets up and running quickly on PEI.
Share:
My old pal Peter Rukavina runs a company on Prince Edward Island called Reinvented, Inc. They do websites and stuff.
This year he landed the job to publish the PEI provincial election results online in real time on election day. Sounds fine, except that election day this year coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Juan to PEI which knocked out power, servers, polling booths and governement offices.
Did this deter the hardy Islanders from boldly forging on? Not on your life. Over 80% of them voted. All the talk about election weirdness from the bastion of democracy to the south, what with hanging chads, Supreme Court rulings and invalid voting machines seems strangely indulgent when you read Peter’s log of the part he played in PEI’s efforts to hold a successful provincial election in a hurricane.
Peter’s daily log, starting at 2:00am, just before the eye of the hurricane arrived takes you through the whole day of workarounds, patches and fixes to ensure that people first of all knew where to vote and then later could have access to the results. The log ends just before midnight, as Peter crawls into bed, after just another day of democracy in the face of disaster.
Why aren’t Prince Edward Islanders helping Iraq get their government up and running?
Share:
From Fast Company comes a short article about failure, called Failure Is Glorious:
“The area of the ‘possible’ is the area in which we develop products that the customer will love and buy. The area of the ‘not possible’ is represented by the new projects that people are not yet ready to understand or accept.
Working close to the borderline is very risky, because you cannot see it with your eyes. It is not clearly drawn or marked. You can only feel it by using sensibility and intuition — two characteristics rare in industrial organizations that are led by technology rather than design. One step more, and you risk falling into the not-possible area. So most car producers, for example, work as far away as possible from the borderline. And step by step, they all end up producing the same car.”
Organizations willing to ply this borderline need robustness in all areas, including a robust purpose, vision and structure. That way when ideas fail, the entire enterprise is not called into question. Facilitating this kind of attitude means cultivating a culture of trial and error, where mistakes are allowed to happens and risks are encouraged. The trick is that everyone wants to be open to the great results that come from risk-taking, but very few people have the stomach for the magnitude of failure that can result. Using processes like Open Space Technology encourages a practice of working with the unknown. That practice, at both the individual and the corporate level helps develop a culture where failure and success on large scales can be tolerated, encompassed and learned from.
Thanks to Pure Content for the link.
Share:
My friend in Montreal, Bob Hunt of Way Down Here, dropped everything he was doing and played this elegant little applet the other day. Taking his advice, I did the same, and was rewarded by an amazing little game. What is it that makes this so appealing? The music? The whimsy? The simple animation? Play it and then leave me a comment with your opinion. I want everything in my life to work this well.
That link is why Way Down Here is one of my favourite Canadian blogs. In the spirit of lists, and inspired by Pollard, here are some more:
- Reinvented from my old friend and fellow ex-Peterborough resident Peter Rukavina, which is a blog full of reflections of life on PEI
- Riley Dog, by Steve Laidlaw out of Kamloops, BC, being and electic survey of a couple of pieces of cool writing a day, with images
- Dave Pollard’s aforementioned How To Save The World, from near Toronto
- Fellow Bowen Islander John Dumbrille’s new blog Bowen…Bowen…Bon, which captures perfectly his sense of humour and place
- The standard setting wood s lot from Mark Woods of Perth Ontario. One of the best known and most-read arts and culture blogs on the web.
- Rob Patterson’s blog, documenting his engagement with knowledge management and contributing to a healthy overrepresentation of PEI webloggers on this list.
- Vancouver-based tea and lit blog at Caterina.net from Caterina Fake.
- Seb’s Open Research, from Sebastien Paquet who is now in New Brunswick I think.
- Another Bowen Islander, Marian Bantjes, who blogs on her renovations and her design work and many other things besides.
- Saskatoon-based hockey fan Jordon Cooper, who’s blog runs the gamut but sticks close to it’s Christian and social justice roots. It’s one of the few Christian blogs I read regularyly, mostly becasue Jordon is ENGAGED. With capitals.
- Tony Tross in Whitehorse, Yukon represents North of 60 with his weird and amazing abuddha’s memes
- Hockey Pundits, a group blog about the NHL written by a bunch of fans, including yours truly.
I’d really like to have a representative smaple from accross the country. So which are the best blogs from Alberta, NWT, Nunavut, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Eh?