Poetry is an arrogant form of literature. Perhaps due to the widespread conviction of its existence since the beginning of time, preceding any other literary form, or perhaps due to the aura cast on it by its composers and readers. What is certain is that it refrains from revealing its inner meaning until you work tirelessly to understand it.
Mistaken is he who reads poetry only with his mind, just as mistaken is he who writes it only with his mind. By saying this, I do not deny the rational arguments contained within poetry, but it is superficial to only take them into account. Poetry must be written and read with the heart, with love. Reading poetry requires a kind of double presence on the part of the reader to enter the world of the poem with his soul and mind, and to submit completely to its world, until he becomes a part of it, or at least its companion. By achieving this, the reading process, as we delve deeper into the text, will turn into an internal process rather than an external one that takes place in the eyes only. This double presence can only be achieved through a certain amount of preparation and self-discipline.
There are various approaches to learning how to properly read poetry. While some believe that the key to poetry is studying its era and context, others believe that the key is developing an awareness of its meanings and an understanding of its goals. I believe that learning the poet’s biography solves much of the ambiguity of the poem and dismantles its mysteries, allowing the reader to attach and project any meaning to its words.
Interpretative books and critical studies of poetry often provide us with external tools that can guide us to the door of the house, not the living room. As for the biographies of poets, they are the ones that hold our hands take us step by step to the inner world of the poem, into the mind of the creator himself, so we learn about the nature of his life, the motives behind his words, and the justifications for his creation. After that, we will be more able to wander in the world of the poem, through its bright or dull shadows, its poetic rhythm or lack thereof, how each word was used and spoken, and the significance of the imagery. Most importantly, we will be able to comprehend how these elements united and created a new entity beyond any single element, but rather the sum of all these elements melted together, embellishing the poem with the uniqueness that distinguishes every original work.
By understanding the poem through the biography of its composer, I do not intend to limit its meanings to the poet’s personal experience, but rather to open the window of interpretation to wider areas based on that experience. Understanding the poem, why it was written, and the state of its composer does not necessarily mean limiting its meanings to what the poet intended. The text is more spacious than the essence of its writer, open to diverse interpretations beyond the poet’s original intent.
Understanding prose requires grasping the ideas that inspired it, but understanding verse requires being overwhelmed by the same forces that inspired it. Sartre believes that prose is essentially utilitarian; The prose author is defined as a man who uses words, but words in poetry are completely different, as they always aspire to be immortal, as if they are the ones that use the poet to express them.
Definitions
A number of poets wrote autobiographies related to their poetic experiences – which are few compared to general autobiographies – in which they search for influences in their upbringing, answer questions regarding their writing process, and discuss issues in poetry and theory. This orientation towards self-reflection would not have been prevalent if not for the cognitive transformations set by the free verse poetry movement. Before this, self-reflection related questions and their answers were implicit in the poems. This is what caused the delay in the emergence of independent autobiographical literature in the Arab heritage that relied heavily on poetry. The answers began to appear in the form of theoretical introductions to poetry collections, then developed into testimonies in literary magazines, eventually evolving into autobiographies about the poet’s inner self, his poetry, and his experiences. The autobiography of poetry discussed herein can be defined as a prose narration by the poet about his poetic experience in both reading and writing, in both theory and practice, without elaborating on matters unrelated to his poetry. Because these writings are confined to a limited aspect of the poet’s personal life, some critics exclude the autobiographies of poetry from the genre of autobiographies, where generality and comprehensiveness are often stipulated, thereby labeling them as partial autobiographies. However, the reader of autobiographies sees that they are selective in nature due to the difficulty of addressing all crucial moments of life, let alone the marginal ones. The autobiographer often selects the most prominent events from his life – ones that are of greatest interest to the reader. Because poetry is the most prominent aspect of the lives of poets, it is natural for it to be highlighted in their autobiographies.
Shafiq Jabri wrote Anā wa-al-shiʻr (Me and Poetry), Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati wrote Tajribati al-shi’riyya (My Poetry Experience), and Salah Abdel-Sabour wrote Ḥayātī fī al-shiʻr (My Life in Poetry). Nizar Qabbani was not satisfied with writing one autobiography, giving his readers two autobiographies instead, My Story with Poetry and From My Anonymous Papers … A Second Autobiography. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi published Sīra shiʻrīyah (A Poetic Biography) before his more comprehensive and important biography, A Life in Administration. Adonis captured the history of an important era in the development of modern Arabic poetry in his cultural poetic biography – as he described it – Hā Anti ayyuhā al-waqt (Here You Are, Time). Al-Jisr wā-al-hāwyh (The Bridge and the Abyss) by the Moroccan poet Mohammed Bentalha, and Qalb al-ʻaqrab (Scorpion’s Heart) by the Palestinian poet Muhammad Hilmi Al-Risha came recently. One of the sweetest autobiographies of poetry is A Child Playing with Theology by the Iraqi poet Ahmed Abdel Hussein. Nizar’s autobiographies can be considered the closest match to complete autobiography.
The French critic Béatrice Didier notes in Le journal intime that poems are the complete opposite of diaries, as they lie beyond the individual and beyond time, while diaries are momentary and do not exceed the boundaries of the self. This, in her opinion, led to the scarcity of writing diaries of poetry, i.e., expressing the moments of poetic birth and detailing its aspects in the form of a diary. This can be seen through the texts at hand, as they are all retrospective biographies that draw the lines of the poetic experience from the corridors of memory, and they are written in a format similar to essays or open narratives far from the formation of a new genre.
In her thesis Autobiographies of Poetry in Modern Arabic Literature, Dr. Asmaa Al-Janoubi believes that autobiographies of poetry represent an independent literary genre that appeared in modern Arabic literature to meet the needs of the creative mind, the recipient, critics, knowledge, and the era altogether, and it came in different forms that accommodate differences in those needs. By tracking autobiographies translated into Arabic, we find a number of works that can be included in this genre, but what makes forming a new genre lose its importance is that the author himself does not classify his biography as a biography of poetry, even if it primarily details his poetic experience. Among these is A Fly in the Soup by the American poet Charles Simic, Bʻḍu ḥyātin wa-shiʻr (Some Life and Poetry) by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and most significant is the autobiography of the Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov, for which he chose the title My Dagestan, written with extraordinary writing skills and it represents a valuable lesson in critical theory.
However, there are many general autobiographies that were not limited to the poets’ experience with poetry only, one of the most enriching of which is My Memoirs by the Iraqi poet Al-Jawahiri and Shaṭaḥāt lmntṣf al-Nahār (Midday Ravings) by the Moroccan poet Muhammad Bennis, one of the most beautiful autobiographies. A number of poets violated the condition of “prose narrative” for autobiographies set by Philippe Lejeune, as they wrote the story of their lives in the form of “biographical poems,” allowing the “poetrification” of this genre. Mahmoud Darwish wrote an entire collection of poems inspired by his childhood, Wadih Sa’adeh reconstructed his narrative in Another Reconstruction of Wadih Sa’adeh’s Life, the Egyptian poet Muhammad Afifi Matar wrote his autobiography in his own handwritten collection Malakūt AbdulAllāh (The Kingdom of Abdullah), the Saudi poet Jassim Al-Souhaih wrote his autobiography in a number of poems, and there are many other examples. This genre of poetry is worthy of attention and research. Researcher Haya Al-Thunayan contributed to this field with a research study entitled The Autobiographical Poem in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
Justifications
“Separating the biography of poetry from a poet’s autobiography is an extremely difficult task,” Ghazi Al-Gosaibi wrote in his autobiography, claiming that poetry cannot be isolated from the rest of one’s aspects. However, he focused on what is relevant to his life as a poet who went through several developments and different stages of formation and maturity, intending, through this work, to help researchers and ordinary readers by making it easier to read and understand his poetry. This affirms the importance of the poet’s biography in understanding his poetry.
Nizar Qabbani justifies writing My Story with Poetry by saying: “I want to write my story with poetry before anyone else writes it. I want to outline my features with my own fingertips, because no one can draw my face better than me. I want to unravel the curtains of my being by myself, before the critics take me apart and scrutinize me as they please – before they re-invent me.” However, his face was still not spared from the tampering of others and the interpretations of critics. Nizar does not want his biography to be history in the academic sense of history, because history is the science of dead events, the science of events that have ceased to actively exist. Nor should the book be used solely to study the material and substance of his poems. Poems, as he sees it, are not ancient Roman or Phoenician pottery that incline us to merely read the inscription engraved on them, poems are infinitely incomplete, not a fleeting point of time. Poetry, rather, is a bridge that extends over everyone and everything.
The Egyptian poet Salah Abdel-Sabour was more generous in taking the reader into the corridors of his poetry. In his autobiography, which he entitled My Life in Poetry, he delved into his poetic and cultural aspects, bringing the reader with him into the writing journey, showing him the creation of sentence after sentence, until the poem and then the collection were completed, as opposed to many poets who consider the poem to be a war secret that must remain hidden, fearful to ruin the text and reveal the secret of its craftsmanship.
Nizar wrote to us about his life as well as his poetry, walking us through the rooms of the consulates in which he worked around the world. Salah Abdel-Sabour did not write his autobiography, but rather wrote a biography of the mind and heart, with which he tried to understand himself first, and then the world and poetry. He begins with a quote from Socrates: “Know thyself.” He believes that this quote changed the trajectory of humanity, “as this philosopher sought to deconstruct the cosmic atom called man. The harmony of its components forms what we call society, of its movement what we call history, and of its ecstasy what we know as art.” This means that you must know your roots, which are the same roots of all humanity. The history of human knowledge in its rational, intuitive, and experimental sense is nothing but the history of man’s self-contemplation. As he explains, self-reflection is the greatest transformation of human perception, and self-reflection here does not mean being self-reliant, but rather regarding oneself as a reflection of the universe.
As for Ahmed Abdel Hussein, he believes that it is “common sense that poetry influences its author, and that it leaves a mark on every aspect of his life,” and because his life was closely intertwined with poetry with no markings nor boundaries, his biography had no index nor chronological order. He wanted his biography to be as scattered as his life was.
Beginnings
Childhood is an important element with primary presence in autobiographies. Equally important is the role of memory in reconstructing this childhood when you are unable to retrieve it accurately. We find a theoretical justification and even encouragement for this reconstruction by the autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune, who believes in abandoning logical scenarios and welcoming the freedom of imagination in narrating one’s childhood. It will then not be a matter of recollection, but of creating a childish voice according to the effects it can have on the reader. This is what gives importance to the motives behind writing autobiographies and highlighting some at the expense of others.
Ghazi Al-Gosaibi’s passion for poetry began early during his elementary education in Bahrain. It arose from his extensive reading of literary works, encouraged by one of his teachers and by his warm family environment. This passion increased in high school – where there was a poetry club – until he decided to listen to the voice within. Al-Gosaibi began his attempts to write poetry at the age of fourteen and continued to do so for the next two years, fueled by the jealousy swarming within him from seeing one of his classmates being marked as the “poet” of the school, respected by teachers and students alike. He admitted that jealousy was his main motive for writing poetry, and that he began writing “to contest his poetic monopoly,” until the situation developed into poetic debates that were not devoid of competition, satire, and veiled criticism. He talked about the early influences that dictated his early poems, including Nizar Qabbani, through whom he discovered the world of modern poetry freed from the monotony of rhyme and rhyme, and Omar Abu-Risha, considering meeting him a turning point in his poetic path more than any other instance. His connection to poetry strengthened when he came across the works of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, but he failed to enjoy the poetry of Al-Bayati and Adonis.
Nizar Qabbani believes that “the poet writes, but he is the worst at explaining the process of writing, and when his ink dries out, he cannot justify his poetic death.” Nevertheless, he tries hard throughout the autobiography to provide something that untangles his poems and clarifies their basis, returning first and foremost to his hometown where he was born, “We must return again to talk about “Ma’azanet Ash Shahm” (neighborhood in Damascus) because it represents the key to my poetry. Without talking about my hometown, the picture remains incomplete and torn from its frame. Do you know what it means for a person to live in a perfume bottle? Our house was that bottle. I am not trying to bribe you with an eloquent simile, but rest assured that with this simile I am not doing the bottle of perfume, but rather our hometown, injustice.”
The influence of Nizar’s hometown and upbringing is clear to the reader of his poetry. He says, “my encounter with beauty was daily, if I stumbled, I would stumble on the wing of a dove, and if I fell, I would fall into the arms of a rose.” He also tries to link his upbringing with the Islamic conquest of Andalusia, and how the enchanting nature there influenced Islamic poetry. “This neighborhood left its mark on my poetry. Just as Granada, Cordoba and Seville left their mark on Andalusian poetry. When the Arabic poem arrived in Spain, it was covered with a thick crust of desert dust, and when it entered the land of water and cold in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the shores of the Guadalquivir River – and penetrated the olive groves and vineyards in Cordoba province – it shook off its crust and threw itself into the water, and from this collision between thirst and irrigation, Andalusian poetry was born. This is my only explanation for the radical change in Arabic poetry when it traveled to Spain in the seventh century. It simply walked into an air-conditioned hall, and Andalusian ‘muwaššaḥāt’ became nothing but ‘air-conditioned poems.’ What happened to Arabic poetry when it traveled to Spain happened to me. My childhood was filled to the brim with water, followed by my notebooks, and thus my words.”
Salah Abdel-Sabour brings us even closer to his poetry when he describes the journey of poetry as the meaning’s journey to the poet, not the poet’s journey to the meaning, expressing this in one of his early poems. Little by little, Abdel-Sabour tears himself apart in order to pull himself back together, speaking about how the poet starts off by being subjective. He remembers that when he was a student, he collected his first collection of poetry in a small notebook. It contained one poem with a social purpose, while the rest were blatant subjective outbursts. He traces this excessive tendency toward subjectivity back to the books of Al-Manfaluti and Gibran. One of the important stages in his life, which left its mark until his death, was the stage of doubt and denial of Allah Almighty that he went through at the age of fourteen, which he tries to explain by saying, “Just as life and death take root within the body – a sperm or a germ – denial was born within me. I do not recall how it was nurtured until it demanded to come out, but it came out as strong as a denial can be. Perhaps what pushed me to the other side was reading how Darwinism explains the story of Moses, and seeing Nietzsche terrifyingly cry, ‘God is dead!’ I began to take pride in my denial, collecting evidence from all philosophies, like a prosecutor collecting evidence for a case, and I was content – or I tried to be content – about my stance.” Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali delved into describing his contemporaries at the beginning of the sixth century, who were fascinated by Greek mythology and tragedies to the point of abandoning science to embrace the same philosophical ideologies in order to share the prestige of Greek eminence! “I have seen a group that believes to be superior,” Al-Ghazali says, “they rejected Islam and believed in the great names they heard, such as Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, swayed by the exaggeration of their followers in describing their minds and knowledge. Despite their sobriety they denied Islam, taking pride in their denial when those stories hit their ears.” How many times have we come across those who, as Abu Hamid describes, take pride in their denial? Among those who repeat the slogans of the dominant Western culture, not out of a comprehensive understanding of them, but out of romanticizing them, was Salah Abdel-Sabour in his adolescence. After that, he began to be described as a “metaphysical poet,” according to Dr. Louis Awad, and Abdel-Sabour comments on this description by saying, “In fact, I became interested in the idea of Allah before I learned the word ‘metaphysics’, like most children that are surprised by death and life, the multiplicity of religions, heaven and hell, and the permissible and the forbidden. We cannot escape the idea of Allah, and perhaps this is what Kierkegaard meant when he said that human existence is essentially religious torture.”
Salah Abdel-Sabour’s close friend, the poet Ahmed Abdel-Muti Hijazi, also wrote his autobiography of poetry entitled Poetry is My Friend. The free verse poetry movement in Egypt is embodied within these two figures. The first basically focused on pure art, while the latter mixed in political and artistic aspects. Salah Abdel-Sabour remained residing in Egypt, unlike many writers who were forced to flee to other countries under the weight of Sadat’s persecution of cultural figures and intellectuals. While most intellectuals were driven outside the country, Salah was left alone to struggle with his existential crisis in complete and utter silence, until his fight against authority caused him many problems from which he died. Hijazi went to Paris on a trip that lasted over fifteen years, ending shortly before Sadat’s death. The first half of Poetry is My Friend focused on theorizing poetry: “the modern rhyme – an attempt to understand rhythm – the modern poem and the illusions of modernity – poetry as balanced speech – confessions about meaning,” while the autobiography was limited to the second half of the book, beginning with “coming out of the myth.” Hijazi later shares his expertise regarding “vision and experience” and reveals previously unknown details about his relationship with Salah Abdel-Sabour, who worked with him at the Rose Al-Yusuf Foundation back in the day. He also included letters exchanged between him and the poet Amal Dunqul, and an unintentional and unplanned dialogue that took place between him and Adonis in Morocco. According to Hijazi, the revelation begins with time, from noon “from which a person escapes to daydream.” During those hours, his child self would wake up to the sound of his mother, alone in a spacious yard, crying for her four brothers who had died young. The image and sound of mourning were a source of poetic inspiration for Hijazi. Even as he glorified life, he admitted that he tried in several poems to capture these sorrowful moments, but he repeatedly failed.
Ahmed Abdel Hussein does not dwell on his beginnings nor his cultural upbringing. He only expresses, with great poetic abilities, the beginnings of his search for meaning, his passion for history and geography, and the book he read – ignorant of its title and the name of its author – seeking to replace his father, who betrayed him with his death, “Every death is a betrayal. But the death of one’s father is the collapse of the dam that shielded the child from the inner monsters that escaped (laughing) the day the father closed his eyes forever.” Ahmed’s autobiography goes back and forth between the unknown and the known, theology and humanity, revealing his double-sided inner conflict: between Allah and poetry, and the implications of the dilemma that haunted throughout his life: Shiism.
Reflections
In the biographies of poets, we find ourselves facing hidden facts that only the poet has access to, facts that shaped the poet’s life. From this, Saint-John Perse’s quote, “There is no history but the soul’s,” can be viewed as the lamp under which the biographies of poets are written.
Many poets prefer not to talk about the moment of writing, as if they do not want to reveal the mystery of their poetry to the public, as Mahmoud Darwish says. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi was unlike other poets, as he spoke at length about the birth of his poems, stressing that “talking about the birth of the poem moves us from poetry to magic. The birth of poetry is almost magical.” Perhaps this is due to Ghazi taking pride in the uniqueness of his poetry compared to his peers, considering these moments to be among the poet’s most enjoyable moments. As for Nizar Qabbani, he does not view poetry as heavenly nor sacred. He believes that the sources of poetry are human, and that writing is a human activity, thereby completely rejecting the idea of divine inspiration, which many poets cling to in order to preserve their integrity, fearful of crowding the playing field. The moment of inspiration is merely a moment in which awareness and dream, training and talent, and culture and skills are united. There is no poem worthy of consideration, as the Russian critic Juri Lotman says, without some degree of awareness and hidden insightful will.
When weighing the importance of innate talent, which is what many of those who talk about poetic inspiration refer to, against the importance of hard work and cognitive achievement in the process of generating poetry, I prefer to quote the words of the Moroccan poet Mohammed Bentalha in his autobiography Al-Jisr wā-al-hāwyh (The Bridge and the Abyss). He believes that “the creation of the poem may begin by chance. But its plot is only accomplished by craftsmanship. The science of tricks is useful here. The possibilities are endless: line breaks, narration, storytelling, description, polyphony, collage, and so on.” The poet does not just write, but rewrites – needing to continuously erase and scratch through the involuntary actions driven by intention.
Bentalha’s autobiography came in seven focused chapters, with a thoughtful language and a paradox that mixes theoretical contemplation and cognitive research about the self. Quite a few sections appeared to be similar to poetic sequences or poems. The book was, essentially, entries written by the poet at intermittent intervals about his experience with poetry, observing his own developments and influences. The poet wrote a part of it in French, addressing a foreign reader, which created different stylistics that governed the ideas he tackled.
Many critics and poets believe that the poet’s biography is limited to his poetic experience only. However, Salah Abdel-Sabour has another opinion. He believes that “the poem exists independently of its author. It has its own life. If the poet grows a head for it, he must also grow arms and feet. In this sense, those searching for the personal biography of poets in their poetry are steering away from realism by viewing the art of the poet as a base, while it has its own logic.” Whether we consider poetry biographical or not, studying the biography or autobiography of the poet alongside studying his poetry remains an important process for understanding the poet and drawing a complete picture of him, as many poems are erased from collections after they are published, and some the meanings of poems cannot be understood without knowing the context in which they were written.
The poet Salah Abdel-Sabour was criticized for being a poet of sadness due to the darkness of his poetry and its constant mentioning of death. Critics also demanded his exile to avoid him spoiling their dreams and aspirations with the seeds of doubt he planted regarding the prosperity of Egypt’s future. He responded to them by saying, “I am not a sad poet, I am a poet in pain. This is because I do not like the universe, and because I carry within me – as Shelley said – a desire to reform the world.” His response was not meant to please the critics, it was a statement of opinion regarding the miserable world in which he lives, because he believes that “the opinions of critics who come from a non-artistic point of view are not worth the attention.” The poet’s relationship with thought, as Abdel-Sabour sees it, does not stem from his awareness of intellectual issues, but rather from him taking a stance on them, “the poet does not present opinions, he presents a vision.” He believes that the real advantage of civilized art and literature is that they are an extended heritage, benefitting the future with the wisdom of the past, with each artist building on the artistic experience that preceded him, in a group effort shaped by the spirit of responsibility for humans and the universe. Hence, T.S. Eliot does not find it objectionable to quote Dante or Baudelaire. As for those who still bring up literary imitation, perceiving literature and art as fancy adornments that can be worn and torn such as clothes and hairpieces, do not understand the essence of art. Abdel-Sabour says: “The artist is born in art, lives in it, and breathes through it. Every artist who does not feel that he belongs to the world heritage and does not try hard to stand on one of its giants is a misguided artist. Every artist who does not know his artistic fathers up to the ninth century cannot be part of the world heritage, nor can he fulfill his role as a responsible human being in this universe.”
Salah Abdel-Sabour concluded his work about his poetic experience by speaking about his play, The Tragedy of Al-Hallaj, which “was an expression of the great faith I felt, which remained pure and flawless, a picture of complete and utter faith.” As for Hijazi’s book, the biographical chapters were not long enough for it to be classified as an entire autobiography, although it included important confessions. When Hijazi strove to renew poetry and abandon its old rhythms, he stated – explaining the motives and backgrounds of many of those calling for renewal across various issues – “I now admit with all objectivity that our knowledge of ancient poetry at that time was not any better than our opponents’ knowledge of our modern poetry.” This does not come as a surprise, since it is the manifestation of the old saying, “Anger comes from ignorance,” regardless of other justifications.
Hijazi suffered, when it comes to criticism, from the inability to escape the rating of his first publication. He was being constantly stereotyped by critics and readers, and he found it difficult – sometimes even impossible – to change this view no matter how many publications he published. When his first collection, A City Without a Heart, was published, critics assigned him the responsibility of writing about the city and the countryside in contemporary Arabic poetry, but his subsequent collections came as a shock to them – as the amount of poems written on this topic began to decrease, “and so they fell into the rabbit hole of searching for another specialty for me, but most of them emerged unsuccessful, and the first collection remained their main reference when talking about me.” Although, as he says, he was not the first poet to choose the city and the countryside as a theme, but he was the pioneer in dedicating an entire poetry collection to this theme, in an attempt to introduce novel elements to it.
Ahmed Abdel Hussein did not care about the critiques he received apart from his friend’s, whose approval was instrumental for finalizing Ahmed’s verses. His friend contributed to his poetry by providing his honest opinion, not by merely reading them. He believes that “poetry is like clouds that have no rain if not written by two people: the poet and his friend.” “I am not a poet if it were not for my friend, I would not even be a fraction of a poet if it were not for him. His presence motivated me to continue writing. Through him alone I saw my poetry, and perhaps my passion for poetry echoed his passion for it. I did not read my writings with neutrality, he read them on my behalf and taught me how to love my own poems, which perhaps were not that grand.”
Heartbreaks
The most personal chapter in Hijazi’s autobiography is the one in which he talks about Salah Abdel-Sabour. I coincidentally read this chapter a day after reading Salah’s own autobiography. This chapter represents an important key to understanding the nature of the relationship between the two poets, which ended with the death of one of them in the other’s house. Hijazi says about Salah: “We were very complementary colleagues and sometimes competitors. I learned a valuable lesson from him: our need to dream does not always protect us from the occurrence of a nightmare.” Their first meeting was dull, and this dullness remained until they were brought together in one workplace. Hijazi says regarding their ambiguous relationship: “When we first met, I was a young man of twenty, too proud of my own talent. I had read Salah’s avant-garde poetry, who was four years my senior, which at that time seemed to me like simple prose compared to my symbolic poetry, but Salah achieved fame, and I was only a novice poet.” Then he says: “He was twenty-five when the dream came true for him: fame, prestigious work, rewarding wages, and approval. He was chosen by the state over others in his generation for various medals and awards, and he was entrusted, since the mid-sixties, with the management of a number of the state’s most important cultural institutions.” In a sorrowful tone, Hijazi writes: “I understand Salah better now than I did in his life, and for this reason I feel intense remorse. My feeling of loss is magnified because I did not make the effort to understand him while he was by my side.”
The Iraqi poet Hamid Al-Iqabi began his biography with this poem, choosing the last verse of the poem as the biography’s title:
“His sits alone with his memories,
turning them over,
amending them,
reforming them,
like a kiss searching for lips,
he searches for a spot for them amidst the crowd,
but the questions keep growing,
suspicious,
obsessive,
igniting,
turning to ember,
before they die out and turn to ashes
while he remains listening.”
He did not wait long for the reader to become familiar with him before taking him through the corridors of his life. He surprised him from the beginning by declaring his confessions, as if he were saying to the reader: Here I am, listen to me, for I have much that you need to listen to. Some critics consider this act a way to “seduce the reader,” an attempt to woo him early by direct confessions, honest complaints, and entreaties, to ensure his later acceptance of the details of his biography and the trivialities of his life.
The first of his heartbreaks shocked and disturbed me. I pondered it a lot and put it on my list of letters to my poet friends. I was satisfied enough to close his autobiography after just this confession. Hamid says: “Thirty years have passed, and I have published many collections, but I cannot count the losses that the phrase ‘He is a poet’ has caused me. I lost a bright future that was filled with hope, and I was deprived of the courage that once brought me pleasure. Every time I turned to write a poem; I lost a woman. I was satisfied with what little life threw my way. I failed in every profession I practiced. The hammer in my hand does not know what nail to hit, and so I pay the price for my oversight in bruises and disappointments, right in front of my wife. Then I hear the wall laugh ‘he is a poet … he is a poet.’ I lost many friends. I was content with my isolation and changed my lifestyle to accommodate the loneliness and time required to birth a poem. I lived life according to the advice of poets, so I memorized the years by heart, then I forgot them, continuously repeating my mistakes until I accidentally became a gray-haired old man. I lost hope and my homeland, citing a verse written by Al-Mutanabbi. How many times had I left my house to take refuge in the forests on Danish winter nights, taking Al-Farazdaq with me, shouting at the jinn ‘your brethren, your brethren.’ Too many losses to count, perhaps the worst of which was that I was too distracted to write the poems I was honored to envision.”
As for Ahmed Abdel Hussein, he concluded his autobiography with a text entitled “Regret,” which he started by saying: “We will regret everything, wasting our time and effort, and the moments in which we did not devote ourselves to doing what we love. We will regret both the lack of our experience and experiencing what lies beyond our passions. We will regret whatever is lost because it was lost, and the existing because we destroyed it with excessive use. We will regret our moments of stupidity that scarred us and kept us awake at night, and our moments of intelligence that set us apart from ourselves and the world.”
There is no escape from regret, there is no shelter from heartbreak, and there is no life without losses. The question remains: Will we truly feel regret, or will we not find time to regret? Will regret affect our decisions?
Purposes
Philippe Lejeune wrote in The Autobiographical Pact about what leads the author to write an autobiography, and he mentioned among them: nostalgia, finding pleasure in memories, and search for value. What Lejeune did not talk about is what motivates the reader to read an autobiography, which can include: the desire to “construct one’s own identity” by charting a personal path based on what he has read and found suitable to his own environment and context, choosing the ideal boat to sail in his life’s journey.
We may agree that nobody presented the reality of life as much as poets did, who wrote down a lot of advice for living it. However, although they reflected the reality of life in their poems, they were far from living life authentically, and their biographies prove that. Abbas Al-Aqqad, whether you perceive him as a poet or not, mentioned this in his diaries: “Those with poetic inclinations do not enjoy life like other people do. Their entire lives either revolve around hope for a better future, or the memory of the romanticized past. It is rare for their souls to settle in the present moment, for it always differs from what they desire.”
Poets write their autobiographies to make sure that they lived life after living for years in their writings. They dedicate their whole lives to poetry. They go through life with preoccupied minds, formulating and reformulating their poems. The poet Chawki Bazih revealed this hidden purpose on their behalf when he said:
“In order to introduce (the river) into poetry, one has to lose the river,
in order to introduce (love), one has to lose the woman he desires,
and for (the dream), one has to lose peaceful slumber,
and for (the house), one has to lose the family,
and suddenly, he finds himself happy to betray for fame, or to see in writing what he cannot see unfolding in the real course of his life, exchanging his fleeting days with useless vocabulary,
he then finds himself recalling the stages of his life that he betrayed with poetry, until life became a graveyard of words, envisioning death – clothed – in his completed works.”
I don’t write poetry, I live it. I turn my days into poems and epics. The world sometimes comes to us in the form of a poem, demanding us to embrace it and live it in that form. Heidegger believes that man lives in language and uses it to reshape life, and that the philosopher walks towards the poem. Man, according to Heidegger, exists in the world as a poet. The poet here is every artist active in his field of creativity.
We learn life from writing poetry, not from reading it. This is what I call “living through poetry.” Biographies of poetry were laboratories for writing, generating, refining, and producing ideas, which yielded useful instruments for capturing words, expressions, and images. If we took those tools and invested them in life, we would have been reading about the life of poems, not the life of poets.
Poetry only emerges after long contemplation, and life is only lived after long reflection. Poetry is the most innocent act, as Heidegger affirms the words of his favorite poet, Holderlin. The poet lives an innocent life, open to life without any reservations, refusing to be an ordinary commodity in society. Rejection is a necessary requirement for poetry: rejecting what is prevalent and common, overcoming the ordinary, renaming things. Poetry is born after long contemplation and suffering. It embellishes the poet with calmness and tranquility amidst the useless acceleration of life. Poetry convinces you that there is beauty beyond the limits of utilitarianism, and that words have a bigger role than merely the exchange of information between creatures.
Writing modern poetry is an approach to learning silence. The modern poem no longer depends on filling the pages, but also leaving them blank. It restored the value of the page, forcing the reader to notice the vacant spaces, affirming that the unwritten is equal to the written, that a page filled with black ink is only for the blind, and that the page should reconcile between darkness and light.
The poet has many questions, waiting for him on the sideroad at times, blocking his path at times, and taking him off the road many times. Poetry is the parent of questions, and life is a search for answers. Poetry is the most diligent literary genre in revealing the unknown, in diving into the depths and extracting hidden secrets. This diligence increased in this era through what is known as detailed poetry, which was founded by the Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos and introduced by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef to the Arab world by translating the Ritsos’ poems and writing similarly to them. This poem stops at the simplest things in order to present them to the reader as if he were seeing them for the first time with his own eyes. The life gained from this poetry confirms that the small daily details are the real essence of life, and that your life is essentially what you capture from what others ignore,
Poetry is the child of passion, constant bewilderment, and living under the weight of beauty that enters a person’s senses and flows out of his being, sweet and fragrant. Poetic life makes you cling to what amazes you outside the dull routine. Poetic renewal requires good knowledge of the old in order to move towards the new, and poetic life requires good knowledge of the rules before breaking them. Poetry existed long before the rules, it is above them, free from critical restrictions. The poem is a never-ending resource that feeds the imagination of critics and overwhelms translators, escaping any final interpretation. Poetry is unstable, it is an update that keeps updating, it does not guarantee completeness and finality. The journey of towards the poem often seems more beautiful than the poem, and the poet’s suffering often seems greater than his poetry, but do not let the beauty of the road distract you from arriving to your destination.
T1692
