Copy Writing

I am writing content for a few friend's websites. The experience is invigorating. I learn and write and learn and write, doing the best I can to intrigue. 

To be intriguing is not as rational as one would think. There is something poetic about it, something emotional and raw, deriving from the gut instead of the head. 

I say "We need you" instead of "we can be of service." 
I say "Let's do it together" instead of "we can help."
And I say "We can help" instead of "our services are..."

Its actually really fun, but it makes me reflect long and hard on the way words come together. 

Just to digress a little, I am taking a poetry writing workshop online. They asked me to define poetry and here is what I wrote: 

• Poetry is the placing of words onto the page, or screen, some sort of space. The words placed onto this linguistic terrain forge forth sounds, which combined make meanings, which played with can make metaphors; all of which, in languish, are projected and emitted as emotion and/or experience.

I list the various aspects that make poetry whether it be space or sound or experience, poetry to me is a tugging of words and sounds to and fro till something honest is compiled.

This is what I mean by "reflect long and hard on the way words come together." Words don't appear, they are created, and sentences and phrases are also created. The possible transformations of language are limitless and this luridness is overwhelming, but also great. 

So how does one intrigue. That is ultimately a question of how playful one can be with language. 

On Death and Writing about One's Self

Sylvia Plath killed herself. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She placed wet towels on the cracks of the kitchen doors so that her children wouldn't be affected. She then opened the oven door and stuck her head into it with the hopes of relief from her clinically overwhelming depression.

Depression is no game. I listened to a recent TED TALK about depression and its debilitating impact. Plath is one of many that suffered from the type of sadness that can only ever mean death.

I experience sadness. When my uncle Chatah died, or my paternal uncle Tom died, or when my family was directly threatened by the Assad regime, I felt sad at each of these instances and it lingered a little (the impact of loss always sorta stays with you) but it passed for the most part. With the twist of the wind my thoughts gradually turned away from their fear and sorrow and opened up towards the prospect of a future. Depression takes away that prospect and leaves the sorrow to be reckoned with.

Sylvia Plath killed herself. But before she left us, she left a great amount of poetry to relish and experience.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distance.

God's Lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivotal of heels and knees!-- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to 
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark 
Hooks--

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air--
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel--
Dead hands, dead stringencies 

And now I 
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow

The dew that flies 
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the Red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The poem gracefully portrays suicide in parallel to early waking morning nature and its overwhelming weight. Sometimes the easiest things to write about is one's individual pain. More than often it's the hardest thing to portray. I have been through a lot last year and this year is still sluggish, but I find myself writing more and more about things distant from me: poverty, culture, society, food. Never do I write that in one year I lost more of my bearings than in any other year, that I grew strong but am weak with anticipation and waiting. There is so much to say and the words don't come. But here Sylvia Plath writes it all down and mesmerizes the public with her swift but ever so elegant "I want to die" poem. Simple but powerful and hurt. This poem makes me want to try writing about myself. 

New Year's Fever

Chatah Car Bombing 1

This new year I hoped and pleaded with the spirits that be that the new year will start and end with safety and sanity.

That the year wouldn't burn like a sickness.

On December 27, 2013 my uncle, a politician in Lebanon on the March 14 camp was killed by an explosive car bomb.

On January 2, 2014 a car bomb was detonated in the Haret Hreik, a predominantly Shiite area known to be home of Al Manar the March 8th camps leading news agency.

Haret Hreik Car Bombing 1

Lebanon's divisions have always been cause for conflict, but now it seems like the need to ignite these differences into full blown civil war is of far more interest than urging stability.

It's unclear who is behind the bloodshed. Some argue Syria planted the bomb that killed my uncle, Mohamad Chatah, and that the attacks in Haret Hreik were a reactionary response by radicalized Sunni Muslims in the country and in Syria. Others argue it was fundamentalists that did both attacks. Either side doesn't have enough evidence to place responsibility in the hands of those criminals who committed the crimes.

Haret Hreik Car Bombing 2

Receiving justice for the crimes committed against the Lebanese people whether they are March 8 or 14 is tough and the population has little control over the outcomes. Lebanon can't even form a collaborative government shared by all the sects in the country as the sects are adamantly divided on how to respond to the Syrian crisis.

This is what the new year brought us Lebanese. The gift of war which tastes bitter and salty like blood.

I want to say NO! to this sickness. But where does one person draw the line when the pencil is flat and needs sharpening? How do millions draw parallel lines when there aren't enough pencils for all? What happens when colors matter and gray is simply not enough?

Chatah Car Bombing 2

I pencil my way to trying to make sense of old and new wounds that scab and scar. So little can be said about writing when all it amounts to is another voice in a crowd of the unheard.

Its a bad start for the new year!

"It's Christmas. C'est Noel

This is one of the French-English Christmas songs sung during Christmas time in Lebanon.

Nothing about this country is singular. Even Christmas songs speak three languages. I know that singularity is a false precept, but Lebanon embellishes in its diversity.

The price is high: 

1. Christians in this country have a deep seeded fear Muslims will force them out of the region hence making the christian population in Lebanon null. This was one of the major causes of the Lebanese Civil-War. 
2. Sunni Muslims are feeling threatened by the Shiite population and its unnerving support of the Syrian regime which the Sunni's argue has stifled the economy and imperialised the Lebanese people for years. Not to forget that the hostilities between Hizballah's weapons and the Sunni's demand for a liberal economy creates clashes between the two sects. (Syria and Iran support Hizballah's anti-Israel efforts.) Christians are split between the two Muslim sects: Shiites and Sunnis. Both of which are from the same religion. 
3. Druze, Allawites, Armenians, Kurds, Leftists and Independents are all divided along the Sunni/Shiite divide. 

The country is in an utter stalemate. There is no government, because as the Syrians wage war on their people the Lebanese are divided between waging war and disavowing the Syrian government. 

Hizballah doesn't want to take part in a government that has members who are hostile to its Syrian efforts. This may result in a need for compromises they aren't willing to make. With a stalemate they can act as they please without the voice of the opposition claiming there demands. 

Sunni's and there supporters are not willing to form a government with a military force separate from that of the nations waging war in another country. 

Both realize that if a government were formed than the fighting in Syria might be spilled over into Lebanon with Hizballahs actions already creating tensions in the country.

Hizballah has already threatened the Future Movement (the Sunni bloc) with war as the Sunni leaders are not quiet about there disapproval. 

Hizballah has lost a lot of support in the region. 

All in all its a mess in Lebanon! 

In light of the Christmas Spirit, I thought now would be the right time for a little: 

falll all llalll alll la.. la.. la.. And maybe after that some peace.

LYRIC POETRY

LYRIC

                                                       NARRATIVE                                                                                    

POETRY

What is Lyric Poetry? 

Originally lyric poetry was poetry written for song. 

Time has transformed the lyric poem to be more about expressions of emotion. Rather than express a story they express the emotions behind stories and lives. Driven by rhyme and rhythm, and experimental syntax, the lyric poem becomes a vast medium for expression. But not all lyric poems rhyme, some don't have a specific rhythm and many don't necessarily experiment with syntax. Lyric poetry in its essence is about words used to feel rather than tell. 

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet, her lyric poetry introduced me to everything I love about reading and writing poetry. Rather than discuss the nitty gritty details about poetic analysis. I want to tell you what I feel about poetry. Sometimes there are words that cant describe, like: pain, war, love, friendship. They carry so much connotation and yet there is little in those sounds and those letters that tells you that pain is hard and sickening, that war comes with pain and hatred spews venom on all those who are already weak, but love and friendship are bonds, ties that matter as strongly as there counterparts. Naomi Shihab Nye knows how to tell these stories, to make you feel that sorrow, and she does it with the utmost skill and sly curiosity. Some of her works are taught in high schools around the world. It was when I read this poem, that I fell in love with poetry:

Making a Fist
For the first time, on a road north of Tampico
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with out unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Ironically enough this is one Shihab-Nye's narrative style poems. See how flexible the two terms are!

Intention versus Attention: Meet Narrative Poetry

"Intention matters. Intention is a kind of attention, and the underlying attention of a poem (not necessarily singular, not necessarily preordained) is the agency which has discovered and calibrated its effects."

--Tony Hoagland

Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness

Poetry Foundation

To break the above mentioned statement into its parts:

1)

• Intention: the purpose of an agent 

versus

• Attention: a form of concentration 

"Intention is a kind of attention": means that the poet engages in a purposeful act of observation. 

2) 

"The underlying attention of a poem...is the agency which has discovered and calibrated its effects"

• Agency: is the capacity of an agent to act in the world

The poet is an agent, his/her intention is reflected in the attention he/she gives into their poem.

3)

Thus the translation of the above quoted Hoagland phrase is: The purposeful effort put into a poem is based on a form of observation of the world and is reflected in the artist art. This holds profound significance because the art is not arbitrary.   

Why am I talking about this:

Tony Hoagland writes narrative poetry which is in contrast to my lyric poetry. Narrative poetry tells a story in the shape of a poem. His work is extremely interesting and he has some powerful things to say about America, Living, Age, Sickness, and more. 

Narrative poetry by default tends towards a coherent meaning more than Lyric poetry. This is not always the case there are exceptions, which Hoagland points out in his essay. 

Meaning is questionable in a poem, and my family tend to advise me that my meaning is far to obscure. This is where I falter. Because while my family may appreciate the poetry of narrative writers more than the poetry of a lyric writers I cannot but help finding myself drawn to writing in lyric style...

Lyric gives me room to explore the page, to fiddle with language to the edges of nonsense and back. Narrative feels more confined. Though I love reading narrative poetry, I find my attempts at it come off sounding pedantic and flimsy. 

Here is a sample of Hoagland's narrative poem "Cement Truck"

I wanted to get the cement truck into the poem

because I loved the bulk of the big rotating barrel

        as it went calmly down the street

churning to keep the wet cement inside

                                                slushily in motion

.............................................

I knew that I might have to make the center of the poem wider

when the cement truck had to turn a corner

         scraping the bark of an overhanging tree, 

giving a nudge to the power lines--
...............................................

I liked the idea of my poem having room inside

for something as real as that truck

and having to get there by two o'clock or else

to pour the floor of the high school gymnasium.

--And I think at this point it would have been a terrible mistake

to turn the truck 

into a metaphor or a symbol for something else.

It had taken me so long to get the world into my poem,

and so long to get my poem into the world

.............................................

It's powerful! And has as much force as the previous poems I've studied which are lyric.

The full poem is here: Cement Truck by Tony Hoagland

Notice the effort at attention and intention in this poem. The wanting to make something out of one's attention (the cement truck) with an intention of making meaning (the reality of the human condition.)

Great! 

Jennifer Chang and Silence

Recently, I was browsing YouTube and stumbled upon an interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Jennifer Chang (Khaled Muttawa was suppose to join, but was in Libya at the time as it had just been liberated). I have already read and written about Muttawa and Nezhukumatathil, but Chang was a new world.

Upon reading Chang's book the similarities between the three poets became distinguishable.

1. Nezhukumatathil focuses on family in the second half of her book Lucky Fish, Chang focuses on family and poverty in the second half of her book The History of Anonymity. 
2. Muttawa struggles with identity issues and migration in his first novel Zodiac of Echoes, Nezhukumatathil also struggles with her concept of home and womanhood in Lucky Fish.
3. Muttawa and Chang both exploit similar syntax and line breaks.
4. All three explore themes of belonging, rootedness, and language.  

The comparisons can go on and on.

What interests me about them and about poetry in general is ... silence.

In the interview I watched on YouTube Nezhukumatathil elaborates upon the idea of silence in poetry as a reflection of meaning similar to that of the written word. Line breaks, words spliced in a poem, or isolated in one line, or simply the fadding off of an image are some examples of how silence can be exploited to reflect meaning.

Below I delve further into Chang's poetry and silence.