Poets and Poems: Yahia Lababidi and "Desert Songs"

For millennia, the desert has been a place of both severity and serenity. Its landscape – stark, unyielding, and often brutal – entices as often as it repels. It is a place that allows life only to that which can adapt to its harsh conditions. It is this “life stripped to bare essentials” that has attracted hermits, prophets, and seers. Three of the world’s major religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – began in or adjacent to a desert landscape. The Bible and the Koran are filled with desert imagery and stories. 

It is to the desert, writes Yahia Lababidi in the preface to his newest collection of poems, Desert Songs, that he would periodically visit to empty himself of the noise of Cairo and lose himself. These pilgrimages of purification and renewal were underscored, he said, by the sense that he would find a part of himself that he would not find anywhere else.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Yahia Lababidi and "Learning to Pray"

In his introduction to Learning to Pray: a book of longing, poet Yahia Lababidi writes that he’d been considering a book of prayerful writing, or “unconscious spiritual autobiography,” for some years. “For some,” he says, “poetry is how we pray now.” With organized religion in decline, and a plethora of substitutes ranging from cults to political parties offered in its place, Lababidi is asking a question that many of us are asking. We can fill our stomachs with food and our lives with stuff, but how do we fill the vacuum in our hearts? 

He asks questions that have been asked for millennia; the biblical book of Ecclesiastes is some 3,000 years old, and it asks many of the same questions Lababidi is raising on Learning to Pray. And it is written in a poetic form, too, suggesting that the questions asked in 1000 B.C. are not unlike the questions being asked in 2021 A.D. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wisdom Literature: The Aphorisms of Yahia Lababidi

The irony of the writer is that of a private person in a public profession.

Aphorisms, those simple expressions of general truth, are as old as literature, and not only literature of the written word. They have a long and rather distinguished pedigree – Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Hesiod, Erasmus, Pascal, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, and countless others were known for their pithy, witting one-liners that expressed a great truth. And aphorisms have long been collected as a group and published, as the proverbs of the Old Testament Bible, the Islamic hadiths, and the Hindu Sutra testify.

Fables endure, but truths are revised.

The fact is, we love our sharp, pointed one-liners that often encapsulate whole philosophies and beliefs. And aphorisms are also something else as well – an integral part of the world’s wisdom literature, folk wisdom, and what poet Yahia Lababidi calls “the poetry of the streets.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Yahia Lababidi and “Balancing Acts”

Egyptian-American poet and writer Yahia Lababidi is in love with words.

That sounds like a trite thing to say – shouldn’t most poets be in love with words? – but in the case of his Balancing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1993-2015, one is struck by poem after poem of a love for language and for words. Whether he’s writing of the Arab Spring of 2012, a meditation on a mountain, about poet Sylvia Plath, or rejections, his poems exhibit a conscious sense of a love for words.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.