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Taha
Although I may have made it sound otherwise, to be perfectly accurate, there was some discretionary time on my birthday almost a week ago that did not go to grading. My school had a visiting poet giving a reading that night; of course, I didn't have to go even as an English teacher, but I think it's just so cool that the school brings in visiting poets of national renown (as much as that can be said of modern poets) so I want to take full advantage of this opportunity. This year, we had the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali and his translator, Peter Cole, at our school, and even though they would be coming back the next day just for our students, I took time from my birthday and all the grading I had to go hear them read Taha's poetry.
Poetry--especially modern poetry--to me is very much like music in the sense that it's best experienced live. I think probably it was always so, but the older formal poetry had ways of drawing you in with the incantatory power of rhythm and rhyme that most modern poetry has given up for the freedom of free verse. This is one of the reasons I like going to a poetry reading like this. In some ways, this was even more true in this case, since he read his poetry first in Arabic and then his translator read the translated version. Even without understanding Arabic, there was something to be said for hearing the rhythms, the cadences, the varying pitches of the original--after all, even in the modern era the sound of poetry is sometimes as central as its meaning.
One thing that made the evening reading a different experience from the next day's performance is that the audience was largely adults and included a significant contingent of what I presume to be native Arabic speakers (though I also heard most of them speaking very good English, incidentally). I mention all this because it was an interesting part of the experience that we would get (usually) a translation of the title and perhaps some background, and then the reading in Arabic, to which some members of the audience would be reacting with fervent nods or appreciative laughter or whatever--it was like getting a preview of the emotional landscape of the poem, besides just hearing it in its original language. I imagine that it was a richer experience for someone fluent in both languages, but I appreciated it for what I could.
I read some of his poems before the reading, studying with my classes a few pages selected by one of my colleagues, and beyond this I had dipped into a book of his poetry that one of my colleagues had, but I hadn't intended to purchase a copy of his book myself. After reading his poetry, however, I changed my mind and used what was left of the $31 (for 31 years) my mother had given me after buying dinner that night for myself and Lauren and bought his collection So What, which Taha and Peter each signed for me. Taha's introductions in broken English to some of the poems added a depth to the poems and, at times, much-needed context.
I wish I could share with you some of my favorites of his poems, but I'm not eager to break copyright laws, so I will only share the few that I could find from other sources on the internet under the presumption that this absolves me of responsibility. On Youtube, you can watch them reading "Revenge" at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival:
Considering his experience as a Palestinian who became a refugee when his village was wiped out during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, this is a particularly interesting poem.
Over on the right side and down on this site you can read his bittersweet love poem "Meeting at an Airport," a poem which I think is absolutely beautiful on so many levels. On the one hand, it's a beautiful evocation of shy young love, from the feeling to the indirection of his answer (though a very poetic answer it is) to the girl's question "who do you love?" Then, with the chance meeting years later in an airport, there's the amazing surge of emotion that much a meeting with someone once loved can still, surprisingly, evoke, as well as the bittersweet realization of the lost years. Anyway, that's my take on it--it has a beautiful subtlety to it as well.
In case you didn't know, April is National Poetry month, so I charge you here to take the time to check out Taha Muhammad Ali's poetry--watch the video, go read the poem, whatever.