Hythe+ #8 For my great friend poet Aaron Kent by Abdul Kader El-Janabi

John Welson, ‘Movement in Time’

There is a poem down there,
In the reveries of the barricades, 
In the wreck of prose, 
At the funeral of the muse, 
In the folds of nonsense,
In the blasphemy, the nobility, and the rage 
At the bedside of the rhyme.
The poem is a drum 
At the whim of the madmen,
A dodo bird, a coin for the outcast.
The awareness in a moment of desolation!
It is wherever
Reason is on its knees,
Sufi is annihilated
And all senses are active. 
The poem is always a whizz
That makes more work than noise.
Its glory is not in the acclaim, 
But in its transient bloom
Breaking through,
Once and for all, 
The comprehension of the world!

*

Iraqian-born, Parisian-based, rode the winged horse of the rebellious sixties with a flower in his hand to stab his silhouette with, Abdul Kader El-Janabi set off, at the beginning of 1970, for London looking for the fog which, through American movies, represented for him the veil between an Orient of certitude and an occident of doubt. To write poetry then was to perforate this veil in order to create new poetic correspondences. A whole world of a voluntary exile showed him the need to go beyond dualities and simple contradictions. He founded in Paris, in 1973, Le Désir Libertaire, the first surrealist Arabic review, banned in the Arab world for its critical approach to social and religious issues. But his involvement in surrealism at the time was in no way to poke around in the linen closet of surrealism’s obsolete inventions, but a real attachment to Breton’s theoretical mind behind the poem. For he knew that to become effective surrealist was first to outdistance the repetitive, then to be ready to doubt even the ideals that our founding fathers have struggled for. Author of many collections of poetry and essays, a translator into Arabic of many American and European poets such as Paul Celan, René Daumal, Joyce Mansour, William Carlos Williams and recently an international anthology of prose poem, Abdul Kader El-Janabi has also published into French many anthologies of modern Arabic poetry.

*

The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.