Miss Poem
“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.
It comes from the sarcophagus of King Ahiram, written by his son, promising total annihilation to anyone who disturbs his father’s grave.
Then, near it in the Beirut National Museum, there is a much later gravestone (from Hellenistic times!) that reads, simply, “Good Robia who never harmed anyone, farewell.”
It’s not really a poem, no, but it haunts.
Miss poem. One does.
Okay. Welcome to Hamra.
Might be good to mention here that Hamra means RED. Hamra is not referred to as “Hamra Street” but merely, “Hamra”. It used to be the red light district.
Ah how I miss Beirut sometimes.
“After I’d finished this sonnet, a miraculous vision appeared to me, in which I saw things that made me swear not to say anything more of this blessed woman until the time that I could more worthily treat of her. To reach that point, I study as much as I can, as she truly knows. And so, if it pleases Him through whom all things live that my life should last for a few years, I hope to speak of her things that were never said of any woman.”
(Dante, Vita Nuova)
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
@BB: “When the Provencal poets fled after the brutal crushing of the Albigensian heresy by Simon de Montfort, spreading their love poetry to other parts of europe, Tuscany was particularly receptive. The Tuscan poets took over much of the Provencal imagery and forms, their conception of love becoming fused with Neoplatonic doctrines of light, possibly Arab in origin.” (The Verse Revolutionaries, Helen Carr)
@Lilac: Hamra vs. Hamra Street — this is shorthand for the vastly different ways a New Yorker and a Beiruti approach urban orientation! A subject for another time, definitely!
@mr: Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map.
That’s the dream.
Indeed (sigh). Hey, is that Carr book worth buying? It is tempting but also unavailable except as expensive item from the UK.
It’s a good reference work. Exhaustive, actually. “A good addition to the scholarly library.”
@AM: “In the medieval Italian context, the deployment of soteriological attitudes and rhetoric as a way to discuss erotic love first developed as a recognizable trope among the Stilnovist poets. It seems plausible to explain the emergence of the trope as a conflation and development of two traditions: on the one hand, that aspect of the courtly love tradition that Joseph Bédier names “le culte d’un object excellent” (whether one wants to see this cult, as Dronke does, as compatible with Christianity, or wants to follow C.S. Lewis’s characterization of it as a heterodox “religion of love” is another question), and on the other hand, the growing Christian devotional tradition that identified the Virgin Mary as the mediatrix of human redemption.
“We can see this conflation most clearly in the way that the Stilnovists attributed ultramundane, and sometimes semi-divine, qualities to their lovers. They made frequent use of a pair of conceits–one that described the lover as a particular favorite of the heavens (especially of Venus) and another that described her appearance in miraculous terms–to insist that their woman, this woman, was unlike any other. As Robert Klein and Giorgio Agamben have demonstrated, these metaphors drew philosophical support from ancient medical theories that discerned spirits in the human body derived from or analogous to celestial bodies, and hence uniquely susceptible to their influence. It hardly mattered that Albertus Magnus would condemn these philosophical speculations unequivocally; in the Middle Ages the conceit of the heaven-sent woman became as ubiquitous among the troubadours and the Latin love poets of the courtois tradition as it had been in ancient love poetry.” (RPB, dissertation in progress)
With Dante at least, you have to wait for the Convivio to get your Arab-inflected Neoplatonism.
Ange,
Just curious, have you had yet the opportunity to meet Lebanese poets? Or to learn anything of the poetry scene over there? What some of them think of, know about, U.S. poetry (which I assume, generally speaking, is a hell lot more than we know about Lebanese poetry)?
An “outsiders” report to DE sometime?
You have the stilnovist turn from love-to-elegy-to-love… but then you have Dante’s further turn toward Virgilian “epic”… which goes back to an older heroic concept, which also unites love & elegy, from another (military) direction… I mean the “Chanson de Roland” & all the pre-12th-cent. chansons de geste (cf. Henry Adams on this)… which circle back toward the more archaic love-&-vengeance motif, with which you began…
I still don’t understand what Miss Poem sells or why it’s called Miss Poem.