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.