Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Introduction to Almallah's 'Bitter English'
Ahmad Almallah, Bitter English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 87 pp.
He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us. He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” — not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”? The typical poetic existential “here I am” becomes a matter, always, of forgetting and remembering both. (It’s significant that one of the muses here is the poet’s mother, she who suffers from memory loss.)
He stumbles as he says pretty much anything to himself — always while successfully conveying such stumbling to us.
He feels that he owes everything to one place but knows that that place is “not here” — not the here of the place where he writes, not even the new “here”-ness the poem makes. How can a poet occupying the space of a page, the classic “here” where even a lost poet can call home, be alienated even from that “here”?