Current reading - Omar Sakr

It's Wednesday somewhen.

Somewhere recently -- (searches) -- oh, on The Poetry Magazine podcast, the terrific June 20th episode on ""queer use, cynicism,and falling in love" -- I ran into the work of poet Omar Sakr and went to look for more of his writing.

This is from his essay "Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet," from the collection This Arab is Queer: an Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers, edited by Elias Jahshan. It's a numbered list -- like tweets, of course, but also like a religious text.

4. All things being equal, be a fox or an otter; the former for its cunning, its dashing color, and the latter for its softness, the ability to sleep in rivers holding onto each other, a lesson in holiness even the prophet Isa never learned.
5. Do not mistake cynicism for criticism, or criticism for intelligence. Rid yourself of cynicism, which is self-loathing projected outward. It's an inability or unwillingness to account for one's actions and intentions without condemning yourself, and so you damn everyone.

I like it a lot -- it's aphoristic, as you can see -- sometimes lyrical, often urgent. He quotes, and wrestles with, Ammo Adonis throughout, from An Introduction to Arab Poetics, so I have impulsively ordered that from a reputable online used bookstore. Which is the sort of thing a friendly corrective hand (antique-style pointer) can direct me to when I puzzle over why I am always broke, but I am just now convinced I need it. For research.

Queer use, also mentioned on the podcast, itself seems like a beautiful way of thinking. I would like to order that book (Sara Ahmed's What's the Use?) but cannot find it for impulse-buy prices. (The University library does not have it, though they do offer access to an e-book of Ahmed's Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (2006). The college library doesn't have it either, but they do have Complaint! (2021) and Living a Feminist Life (2017). But it's this idea of queer use, strange use, repurposing, beyond bricolage, that appeals to me.

{rf}

Morning reading: "The Windhover" marginalia

Someone in my used and patterned Penguin of Gerard Manley Hopkins (a selection of his poems and prose curated by one W.H. Gardner) -- patterned like a salmon-pink abstract eye (a good era for Penguins) -- has underlined in "The Windhover" the words falcon and buckle. I don't know why, except that they have a beautiful clattering alliteration, if more than half a poem apart.

Also, softly pencilled and circled beside the word sillion: earth.

They have also made some notes in "Carrion Comfort": "despair is a kind of comfort -- this need to wrestle with it" (personal communication, p.60, n.d.)

Other penmarks highlight the final, devotional, triad of lines (rather than the first three flashy ones) of "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"; flag in "Henry Purcell", the phrase "it is the forgéd feature finds me"; an indeterminate mark of attention or inattention accompanies "Duns Scotus' Oxford" (40); and on p. 35 mark just the word "rose" -- noun or verb? Is the ambiguity intentional? Oh, it's "The Wreck of the Deutschland" so yes, rose would fold in on itself, or out, rose into risen.

That has kairos just now, the moral excavation of a wreck.

"Rose" took me to Eliot, but he felt too dry after Hopkins.

* * * * * *

Re-reading "The Windhover" now, I hear how Hopkins' control of sound, which amounted of course to an obsession, truly is unearthly (pun intended) -- that falcon and buckle are among only a handful of hard K sounds in the whole poem: I caught, king-/dom, Falcon, ecstasy, skate's heel, act, Buckle, breaks, makes -- more midrhymes -- blue-bleak -- the rest has that rolling, flowing, blowing wind-current sound -- it's almost magic how he does it, almost incantation, though he would call it hymn, dedicated it to Christ our Lord.

And on top of all that the thing's a bloody sonnet. (Though with those wildly over-riding lines, that willful excess of magnificence.)

We'd better have it here:


The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.