I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit – a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language . . . that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation. —Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was born in the village of al-Birwa, in the Galilee, Palestine. He became a refugee at age seven. He worked as a journalist and editor in Haifa and left to study in Moscow in 1970. His exilic journey took him to Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, Paris, Amman, and Ramallah, where he settled in 1995. He is one of the most celebrated and revered poets in the Arab world. He published more than thirty books, and his poetry has been translated into thirty-five languages.
Even if you are a lover of poetry, you may not have heard of Mahmoud Darwish, despite his work—poetry and prose—being celebrated and translated into thirty-five languages. Translation into English was late in coming. And there is so much culture to taste and consume that it may be incidental ignorance of Arab poetry in general and Palestinian poetry in particular that has kept it out of sight.
Sample praise:
“Darwish’s poetry is an epic effort to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.” —Edward Said
“The most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world.” —Adam Shatz, The New York Times
“Did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness.” —Peter Clark, The Guardian
“No poet in our time has confronted the violent tides of history with greater humanity or greater artistic range than Mahmoud Darwish. ―Michael Palmer, author of Company of Moths
“A world-class poet . . . Darwish has not only remade a national consciousness; he has reworked language and poetic tradition to do so.” ―Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
“Darwish, beloved as the beacon-voice of Palestinians scattered around the globe, had an uncanny ability to create unforgettable, richly descriptive poems, songs of homesick longing which resonate with displaced people everywhere.” ― Naomi Shihab Nye
“No list on Palestinian literature is complete without the acclaimed poet Mahmoud Darwish.” —Esquire
“Mahmoud Darwish is perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century.” —Tablet
There are too many books to feature just one. Please consider giving Mahmoud Darwish a try.
I don’t know whether it reads right to left, left to right, or up to down. I don’t know the language, I don’t know that it is a language. I know it is a message, one time, never to be repeated.
Fun fact: Search the Poetry Foundation, a repository of poetry, and you find 5,042 poems about clouds.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was one of the most innovative and beloved twentieth century lyric poets. The poems are uniquely and unmistakably his, with an idiosyncratic use of words, punctuation and form that served his love of language, life and love.
One of his most quoted lines, one that I’ve repeated often is not from a poem. It is from the Introduction to his book New Poems (1938):
“Always a beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”
It is rarely quoted in context (see the complete Introduction below).
Cummings did not live to see AI. Though he did experience World War I firsthand, as a medic in France (he was a pacifist) and as a prisoner. Since World War I was as significant as AI in changing the world forever, he and other artists of his time were profoundly affected and incorporated the experience into their art.
Generative AI operates by instructions and queries. But what does that have to do with beautiful questions leading to beautiful answers?
First we should determine exactly what a beautiful question is. Not surprisingly, and very meta, I turned to my preferred AI partner Claude:
Q: What is a beautiful question?
A: A beautiful question is a thought-provoking inquiry that encourages deep reflection, challenges assumptions, and opens up new possibilities for understanding and exploration…. Ultimately, a beautiful question is one that engages our minds, touches our hearts, and inspires us to explore the depths of our own understanding and the world around us.
If you do ask that sort of question of AI, then yes, there is a chance that the answer will approach the depth, engagement and inspiration intended. To put this in extreme perspective, the reported prank question to Google AI “How many rocks should I eat?” is not a beautiful question, nor is the advice to eat one small rock a day a beautiful answer.
Do ask AI to do things for you or to increase your knowledge. Always keep in mind the possibility and opportunity for beauty.
Leading up to the famous quote in the Introduction, Cummings wrote this:
“We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.”
E. E. Cummings Introduction to New Poems (1938)
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
I forgot that 2023 is the Year of Poetry. I should remember, because it was me who declared it back in December. You probably didn’t notice.
Poetry seems very distant from the events and concerns of the past weeks, and from the weeks and months to come. But it shouldn’t, not for me, not for anyone.
Here are a couple of celebrated writers talking about the role of poets. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read some poems instead of news reports.
What is [the poet’s] function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their readers to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. Wallace Stevens, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words (1941)
The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man. While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet—whom Plato banned from his Republic—may rise up to save us all. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize Lecture (1978)
This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.
Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
It is one of those days unusually when I am making breakfast just for myself. e.e. cummings came to mind.
one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:
by e.e. cummings
one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more
minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)
one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they’re loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow
deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
All lose,whole find
The White House would benefit from many visitors. The founders of the republic, particularly the authors of the Federalist Papers. Abraham Lincoln would be a welcome presence. Above all, the current White House needs poetry, most especially the poet who most embodied, ahead of his time, the spirit of the ages taking form in the present American ideal.
As it happens, Walt Whitman recently visited the White House. This is how it went.
DJT: Who the hell are you? How did you get in here?
WW: I am large, I contain multitudes. I am Walt Whitman. I live here in Washington and work for the Attorney General. I am also a poet.
DJT: You work for Barr? (picks up phone) Get me Barr. Bill, there’s some homeless guy here who says he works for you.
WW: Let me read you a poem about an election.
DJT (hangs up phone): About my election?
WW: It is called Election Day: November 1884
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:
—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:)
the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the
heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
DJT: Yeah, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, they’re going to swell my sails! My heart pants, I get it. Napoleon, I like the sound of that. I’m going to tweet about you right now. How do you like Wild Walt?
WW: Another poem:
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.
DJT: Resist much, obey little!? (picks up phone again) Get this bum out of here!
It is one of those days unusually when I am making breakfast just for myself. e.e. cummings came to mind.
Bob Schwartz 