UAE live poetry

p&g is in Dubai for the next week seeking out some local poetry.

Get in touch if you know where we should look.

Being a poet in UAE is a respected and sometimes quite lucrative profession - remember Nabati Poet Idol (http://poetandgeek.blogspot.it/2012/02/nabati-poet-idol.html). And poetry itself is also the subject of well-funded academic research in the Emirates.

p&g has a consistent fascination in Arabic poetic forms and how some drifted into western consciousness through the Islamic kingdom of Spain - of which we have spoken a little bit before here http://poetandgeek.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/muwashshah-poetry.html. And indeed Madrid is our next destination.

Plus we note that publications of translated pre-20th century Arabic poetry in its pure forms seem to bring out the Rudyard Kipling in the translators - I guess it is the desire to emulate the elaborate structure - we are sure there is good work being done maybe into languages other than English? French or Spanish? Again we would love to hear about this.

And beyond that we are hoping to have a thoroughly good time obviously...

A final drop of rain

The orphan by Muhammad al-Maghut

Oh!
The dream...
The dream...
My solid-gold car crashed,
The wheels scattered about like gypsies.
One spring night I had a dream
And when I woke
There were flowers on my pillow.
Once I dreamt of the sea
And in the morning
Fins and shells covered my bed.
But when I dreamt of freedom
Swords were pointed at my neck
Like a morning halo.
...from now on
You won't find me
In ports or on trains
But in public libraries
Sleeping on maps of Europe
Where my mouth touches rivers
And my tears run across continents.

1970 translated by Abdullah al-Udari

Nabati poetry anthology

This anthology of Nabati poetry comes from Ithaca Press. And was recently runner-up in the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Book Prize 2012.

The anthology was commended. "The translations work fabulously in English, showing a range of style, technique, sensitivity to the tone and historical context of the original. The work with rhyme schemes is nothing short of astounding!'

We have discussed Nabati poetry before here at poetandgeek.com. Poems emanate from the everyday people of the Arabian peninsula (and are shown on tv) and don't follow strict literary Arabic forms (the Quran is written according to these rules).

Some contend that there is a class element to Nabati poetry: "It is commonly translated as "vernacular, popular", but this may suggest that this type of poetry is the domain of uneducated, "backwards" segments of society, waiting to be eradicated by general progress towards modern standard Arabic. While purists may see it that way, the facts are otherwise."

See here http://www.brismes.ac.uk/book-prize, and here http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/the-nabati-poetry-of-the-uae-a-remarkable-anthology and here for more http://poetandgeek.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/nabati-poet-idol.html.

Muwashshah poetry

Andulacian muwashaha poets have inspired later writers in the tradition of Arabic poetry and beyond for their free interpretation of form - essentially a poem in several stanzas with a varied rhyming structure. This formal playfulness is normally associated with modern poetry and it is interesting (and perhaps provocative) to find that poets have always been playing with the rules.

The muwashshah or muwaššaḥ in Arabic: موشّح, literally "girdled") can be traced back at least to the 9th century. An ornamental belt, the wišaḥ was embroidered in alternate colours interpreted formally as the "answering quality"within the stanzas and refrains of the poem (similar to an ode). But is sometimes also interpreted as the single rhyme running through each burden, like pearls hung from the belt.

This is made clearer if we consider the technical bit: the muwashshah consists of 5 stanzas (bait) of four to six lines, alternating with five or six refrains (qufl); each refrain has the same rhyme and metre (this may vary unlike classical Arabic form which uses one rhyme),but each stanza has the same metre. The kharja (final in Arabic) appears at the end of the muwashshah and often seems to have been composed independently; it is often in colloquial Arabic. (Another form often associated with the muwashshah is the zajal developed at the same time in Andalucia but, like the concluding kharja, using colloquial Arabic dialect and the local Romance dialects.)

It can also refer to a secular musical genre using muwaššaḥ texts as lyrics.

btw some define muwashshah as strophic, the strophe is a feature of the ode in classical Greek poetry and this is why you will see muwashshah often defined loosely as an ode.

More information can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muwashshah
and http://www.alhewar.net/Basket/habeeb_salloum_arab_muwashsha.htm

The politics of analogizing language and music, New York USA 17 February 2012

A panel discussion following the premiere of Mohammed Fairouz's Symphony No. 3 "Poems and Prayers."

Panelists: Mohammed Fairouz, Jacqueline Rose, Sinan Antoon

World premiere of Fairouz's Symphony No. 3: "Poems and Prayers," which weaves together poetic texts from the Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew, followed by a discussion about music and literature to questions of translation and comparative composition, as well as the politics of analogizing language and music.

Sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and co-sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies.

2:00 PM Faculty House, Garden Room #2, Center for Palestinian Studies, Columbia University, New York, USA

More information here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/palestine/programs/

A year of poetandgeek.com

poetandgeek.com will be a year old in a week or so and we are celebrating.

First, we have made 3 issues of our magazine; the third of which is coming soon crammed with juicy art and poetry. All can be found at poetandgeek.com central.

Second, our posts on poetry, place and informatics that have gone beyond what is offered anywhere else in the world. Here Ginsberg rubs shoulders with Zora Cross, Sir Walter Scott takes a bow to Daniel de Cullá. We were talking about new poetry apps and what good they might be to writers from our earliest posts. And looking at the machine-speech-poetry interface not to mention the bird-musical instrument-sound art interface. And look a little closer and you will find everything from tweet poetry - first defined here - to Arabic free verse and the new ballad. Like this sort of stuff? Want to know what a hemistich is? Poet and geek? Then stick around for 2012.

And that brings us to our third and most important element: our readers who join us via Nintendo, Android and iPod and browse on everything from SimplePie to Opera and Firefox, who have come from every continent bar Antarctica (and that is only a matter of time) and half of the world's countries ranging from China to Oman, Micronesia to Suriname, Scotland to Nigeria. We like you reading our stuff so thank you and please keep visiting. Send poems, ideas, images, wishlists, what you think you want to see...and we will try to make it happen.

We are free here to do what we like. (Not owned by any national organisation and funded solely by a bequest from a Dublin fashion designer that gives us a few brief years of life.) And we hope to do it brilliantly.

Thank you.

Roots of Arabic free verse

Ameen Rihani ( أمين الريحاني‎) (1876 - 1940) was a Lebanese Arab-American writer, intellectual and political activist. He is considered to be the founder of "adab al-mahjar" (immigrant literature) or mahjar literature after living in New York, USA and Lebanon and exposure to both literary traditions.

It was perhaps his reading of American poet Walt Whitman that encouraged him to experiment with free verse in works in his native Arabic. But he also drew inspiration from the Jahili (pre-Islamic) and Sufi concept of the poet as a visionary introducing (along with Gibran Kahlil Gibran) two new poetic forms which he called shi'r manthur (free verse) and qasidat al-nathr (prose poem). His first free verse poem was published in 1905 in the magazine Al-Hilal. This new poetry was influential in the Arab world and continued to be so after Rihani's death in 1940. It has been said to be the origin of modern Arabic poetry.

Rihani explored neglected rhythm structures (taken from Arabic form), his stanzas are irregular with lines of different length, no or variable meter (depending on how you define meter) and a non-standard rhyme scheme. Some have compared his style to that of Qur'anic verse. Sadly his poetry, in spite of its revolutionary impact, is hard to find online but here is a sample:

I am the East.
I have philosophies, I have religion, who would exchange them for airplanes.

You can find out more about Ameen Rihanni here http://www.ameenrihani.org/.

Omani poetry

Folk poetry origins - ballad and song - can be traced to the voice of ordinary people. Oman`s rich culture and its seafaring traditions are an inspiration for their poets throughout the ages. Its influence is felt in the work of modern Omani poets including Abdulhamid al Dawhani, Hilala al Hamdaniya and Ahmed bin Hilal Al-Abri. And its subject matter is still grounded in the the life of the everyday Omani.

The cultural history of Oman is not unaffected by other cultures. Portuguese explorers arrived in Oman and occupied Muscat for a 140-year period, between 1508 and 1648. And remnants of their colonial architectural style still remain. The Portuguese were evicted through indigenous revolt, but a century later, in 1741, forces from Yemen combined and took over led by an ancestor of the current ruling sultans. The Persians invaded briefly in the late 1740s, but Oman has been self-governing ever since.


Sa‘ida Khatir Bint al-Farsi is an Omani poet and academic born in 1956 who uses literature as a window into society and the forces — economic, political, and religious — that transform it.  Writing poetry, Sa‘ida says, has helped her understand Oman's progress since her own childhood.  Women access to the public sphere has been enhanced, as Sultan Qaboos’ massive development program stresseded the education of all citizens, female and male.  Sa‘ida quotes one of the Sultan’s most famous public statements: “We will educate our children, even if  we have to do it under the shade of trees.”

Other female Omani writers and poets include Tahirah bint Abdalkhaliq Al-lawatia, Ushra Khalfan Al-Wahybi, Badriyya Ash- Shahhi, the author of the first Omani novel, Zuwayna Khalfan At-Twayya and Rafia At-Talai.

Find out more in the book Modern poetry and prose of Oman 1970-2000 by Barbara Michalak-Pikulska (hard to get hold of - let me know if you are successful) and here http://www.mei.edu/Portals/0/Publications/Omani%20Poets.pdf.