They will not save them­selves if, coming as they have from the street and not out of the muse­ums, they do not have the courage to speak words that can go back into the street again. — Euge­nio Montale

Hom­mage à Susan Howe
New Orleans Streets Depart­ment
11/23/09
Road sign, unhinged
New Orleans, LA

In the photo (bor­rowed from Illu­mi­nated Meat): Kenny Gold­smith, Rod Smith, and someone’s edi­tion of Day.

“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.

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