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October 2, 2003 By Uncategorized

Reading Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the New Millennium I stumbled across a section of Arabic poets who published from 1956 to 1964 as the Tammuzi poets, taking their name from the ancient Mesopotamian god of seasonal decay and rebirth. These poets were born in many places in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Iraq and their poetry is a nod to classical Arabic forms, yet informed by the spirit of inquiry brought about by exile, post-colonialism and avant-garde movements elsewhere.

Chief among these poets is Adonis who was born Ali Ahmad Said in Syria in 1929 (see this interview for more). He sort of set the stage for Tammuzi poetry with a journal called Shi’r (meaning “poetry”) which published 1956-1964 in Arabic. In a later book called Poetry and Apoetical Culture Adonis wrote of the group’s poetics:

Reading is not an act of consumption; it is an act of creation. Therefore, after the problem of easiness comes the difficulty engendered by poetic investigation. The light such investigation may cast on the unknown only enlarges the unknown’s dimensions, announcing its depth and its extremity as if light were transforming itself into night. And if this light opens the horizon to the night of the world, the limits it makes poetry cross open poetry to the unlimited. As if the darkness were amplified by the very movement of the light, as if poetry knew only its own limits. The dark work that is illumined is the very thing that leads poetry toward an even darker world.

– Adonis, quote in Rothenberg and Joris, Poems For the New Millennium vol II, pp 182-83

This poetics is captured equally elegantly in a poem from the same collection by Yusuf al-Khal, Adonis’s Lebanese co-editor:

Cain the immortal
by Yusuf al-Khal
(translated by Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo)

When you turn at the road’s
last bend
you eat the distance with your eyes
as if it were an idol raised to heaven.

You can go back,
you will wither and fall
or reach the crossroad
until some oracle is appears
like an image on the wall.
Perhaps the oracle is nothing
but the fist of god
dropped open with a sign?
No,
you are leafed with worry,
devoured by stares,.
Grumbling, you pierce the dust
with a curse
like Adam’s rib,
and wander off
into forbidden grounds
into a cleft between
two shores —
the region of your death.
Not knowing
where you belong.
Your pallbearers are carrying
no one in your coffin.

Cain cannot die.

I�m collecting more Tammuzi poetry at the Parking Lot Wiki, where I will eventually assemble another collection.