“He didn't hesitate to publish everything he wrote.”
Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef. Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
I recently finished reading Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems by Iraqi poet Saddi Youssef. These poems were written or published by Youssef between 1955 and 1997. Considering how history has unfolded since then, I picked up the collection mostly to learn something about how poems age in a lifetime. That is, in what ways can and should we read and re-read poems decades after they’re written, particularly if they were written as real-time reactions to historical realities?
That’s why I initially went to the book. I’m still thinking about those questions, but they’re not the subject of this post.
Instead, I want to say a few things about a specific poem in the collection: “How L'akhdar Ben Youssef Wrote His Last Poem.”
I have an ongoing interest in work that blends prose and verse, so when I read this poem, I felt there was much to take away from it as a writer and reader.
First, I’ll try to describe the poem.
It begins with a prose paragraph, in which the 'speaker' writes in third person about L'Akhdar Ben Youssef and his inability to write. Yet even if he cannot write a poem, "... because his mind is scattered, and because he didn't sleep for six days ..." he still writes down his scattered thoughts, believing that if doesn't, he will forget them. (Youssef has spoken in interviews about how Ben Youssef is a double or mask of himself).
Following the prose paragraph is the list of "Notes," each offset by a dash. The list is not strictly speaking a 'poem,' but visually, it is a switch from block prose to lineation. This back-and-forth between prose and not-prose is a common feature of prosimetrum. Here the effect is magnificent, because the notes are evidence and refutation of Ben Youssef’s claim to have not written a poem. The 10 'Notes' themselves may not be poems in a conventional sense, but they are quite 'poetic.' Together, they ‘look’ like a poem. Individually, they exhibit compressed language, aphoristic qualities, and other markers of types of poetic speech.
Following the 'Notes' is a poem with the title of one of the notes: "Do Not Live in the Words of Exile When the House Becomes Too Small." Were you to pluck this poem from this context and publish it in a book, it would hold up as a standalone piece.
Following the poem is another prose paragraph. Then another poem, another prose paragraph, another poem, another prose paragraph, another poem, and finally a brief lineated section that concludes the overall text. Although related to the content of the prose paragraphs, it can be read as an envoi that collapses the separation between prose and verse:
“L'Akhdar Ben Youssef is still unbalanced, his mind still scattered because:
He hadn't slept for six days
He couldn't write a poem.
He didn't hesitate to publish everything he wrote.”
(As an aside, I love how this poems ends. As I ponder the questions posed at the beginning of the post, one initial thought is that poets themselves should not care so much about how their poems could or will be read in the decades to come. They should not hesitate to publish everything they write.)
Observations / Affirmations
The poem intrigues me because it unfolds simultaneously as a description of the writing process and an outcome of that process. Or maybe I should say ‘outcomes?’ As a single text with an umbrella title, the poem is an outcome. But within the text are four individual poems, generated from the list of ‘notes’ that appear in the beginning of the poem. What does it say that from the 10 'Notes,' only four have become poems?
I admire the way the 'list' of 'notes' functions as an interesting deviation fro the prose, as if to demonstrate technically how prose and lineation are not opposed, how in our minds they are not in opposition, as in how are minds, how are cognitive experiences are not played out in prose, but in some semblance of fragment and whole.
I admire the tension between content and form. The work is about a poet who cannot write a poem. The content of the poem is a poem written by a poet who cannot write a poem. The work is something composed about composition, writing about writing. It is a poem (an object) about the process of writing poems that become objects.
It fascinates me how the list of notes represent at least 10 possibilities, but there only four subsequent poems. Any one of the notes 'could have been' a poem, but these four made the cut. These are the four that emerged from the list of possibilities to become poems. How and why these four? There is no explanation given in the work itself. The process is opaque — to the reader if not the writer (but probably also to the writer).
This is a poem, first and foremost, a work of art, an aesthetic object, but it is also a guidebook, a exemplar of the writing process, insofar as it demonstrates the cognitive processes at work in composing a poem. It does not present the object as some fully formed poem that sprang from the poet's mind, on one hand. On the other, it does not answer any questions about how the poems came to be. No matter how detailed the account of the process, there is always an element that defies description. There will always be lacunae, a leap across the gap from idea and thought to finished external object. The writing process is always and ultimately a mystery.
A Conclusion: Art in general is a reminder that we don't know. The accidental function of art, whether it is analyzed historically or formally or structurally or expressively, and so on -- is to be an insistent reminder of our lack of knowledge. There is no art that does not resolve in the statement: On whatever ground your knowledge is based, it will be upended.