“Miss Poem” of Hamra Street, in addi­tion to “Jardin des poetes,” a plant nurs­ery on the high­way out­side Byblos, and “Poeme,” a lin­gerie store near the bottom of the Chouf moun­tains, tes­tify to the world­wide rel­e­vance of peignoirs, green­ery, and dream­ing women (”over the seas, to silent Palestine”) to the work that poetry does (that is, if it is work, and not some kind of, well, cheese­cake). I want to say some­thing like, well, rage and crisis are not the end-​all of poetry, it’s the rêve, is it not?

And then I read about women’s ritha’ (elegy for fallen kins­men) in pre-​Islamic poetry, and how the cliches of the bereaved are tran­scended only in the part of the elegy des­ig­nated the tahrid, or call to vengeance. That is, by West­ern stan­dards of orig­i­nal­ity in poetry, the women really hit it when inspired not by grief but by blood-​lust.

One can’t help think­ing of rage, too, while look­ing on per­haps the oldest text we have writ­ten in the Phoeni­cian alphabet—the mother of all linear alpha­bets.

A guest post by Ben Tausig.

I. The enter­prise of writ­ing about music/sound has recently entered an awk­ward stage, one of those moments when tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments make us want to retreat to old habits, but when it nev­er­the­less becomes obvi­ous that we should instead move for­ward by exper­i­ment­ing with the con­tours of the medium. Specif­i­cally, in the last few years it has become pos­si­ble, thanks to increased stor­age space and faster inter­net con­nec­tions, to flu­idly inte­grate sonic exam­ples within tex­tual reviews.

II. Music crit­i­cism has always been a fraught matter, about which many people are skep­ti­cal. I’m slightly embar­rassed to dredge up the truism, “writ­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture,” although there’s no deny­ing its pur­chase. It means, of course, that in order to know some­thing worth know­ing about music, one should just go hear it rather than wast­ing time pon­tif­i­cat­ing. Music is best felt rather than thought, and the two approaches are inher­ently incompatible.

III. In def­er­ence to this prej­u­dice, online music writ­ers (full dis­clo­sure: like me) who pro­vide audio sam­ples offer them in a “ta-da!” fash­ion, as an object about which noth­ing can be said directly.

Poets and poetic the­o­rists, a sin­cere request for ped­a­gogy: what does it mean to speak of “narrative” in con­tem­po­rary poetry?

I’m coming at this ques­tion obliquely, from the field of visual art, a piece of which I recently co-​made although I don’t con­sider myself an artist by any stretch. Still, I hope to work, beyond my narrow literary-​historical sphere, one day on con­tem­po­rary art, and I’ve become inter­ested in the place of nar­ra­tive, and the cri­tique of nar­ra­tive, in the art world.

From what I’ve gath­ered, to describe a work as nar­ra­tive is to deploy a term of tacit pejo­ra­tion, inso­far as “narrative” is opposed–in this here dis­courze–to “conceptual,” which sits on top of the generic hier­ar­chy (also inter­est­ing here is the fre­quency with which nar­ra­tive and “figurative” become inter­change­able or at least co-​morbid; a friend of mine was in a show at Deitch Projects last summer called “Conceptual Figures,” the title of which was sup­posed to be sug­ges­tively oxy­moronic).

Pietà
Fayaz Aziz/Reuters/Taliban
Oct. 28, 2009
Car bomb on newsprint
Peshawar, Pakistan