JOY
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Guest Poet
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April is National Poetry Month. This new web page, Guest Poet, is my way to honor poetry and the work of contemporary poets.
My first guest is Yahia Lababidi, an Egyptian poet who is the only  contemporary Arab writer included in James Geary's Encyclopedia of the World's Great Aphorists. He has recently been quoted (more than once) in The Week magazine, Sun Sentinel, and The New York Observer. A few of my personal favorites are listed here on this web page, below my interview with Yahia, such as: "The personal made universal is art's truth" ...and... "Different faiths are different dialects of the same Language." But the aphorism that first caught my attention was quoted in A Word A Day: "Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions." Yahia and I have had a remarkable collision online, as a result of this quote which I mentioned in my Yoga Blog. We have begun a friendly conversation and this interview is one of the results. Enjoy! And then read on, below the interview, to find more of his aphorisms and a wonderful poem called Clouds.
 
It seems unusual to be an aphorist…why did you choose to write in this form?
I wrote out of an inner compulsion, to talk back to the books that I was reading. I suppose it was Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that got me started trying to “sum up the world in a phrase.”It wasn’t that I had anything in particular to say to the world, but rather a head full of questions to pose to myself. Aphorisms presented themselves as a natural way of thinking outloud (and quoting the soul’s dialogue with itself).
Are there any particular writers or poets who have been an influence in your work? Wilde, Nietzsche, and Rilke are certainly up there. But there are many others in between: Gibran, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Rimbaud, too many to mention, really. Basically all thinkers, seekers, rebels and free spirits like Blake, who realized “[they] must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s”.
What poetic form do you use…is it free verse? How would you define free verse? Free verse, yes. I would define it as verse free of restrictions, or corsettes, that allows thoughts and feelings to come as they are and to breathe freely.
What is the meaning of your name? And how do you pronounce it?
It is pronounced Ya. Hia (sounds like, Yeah, Here!) And, it means Live, or Long Live in Arabic. It’s a fairly common name. Apparently I was named after John the Baptist. (Yahia is actually John in English, or Juan in Spanish).
Do you attend or lecture at writer’s conferences and if so, do you have a conference you’ll be at this year?
No, nothing of the sort … Frankly, I don’t trust myself to play the part of the writer, just yet. Perhaps later, I will feel that I’ve earned such a privilege or that it is necessary. But, for now, I think the work speaks for me better than myself.
Do you have any plans for other forms of writing, such as a short story or novel?
Short stories I wrote as a teenager, but no more. As for a novel, I don’t think I have the breath for that … yet. I would like sometime to try my hand at a play, or maybe even collaborate on one with another writer.[I think plays on words and ideas can be serious fun, and (Socratic) conversation, both witty and wise, is probably the origin of Philosophy, anyhow.]
Do you have another book in the works now? Two actually. A book of essays about everything from Nietzsche to belly dancing which is currently under consideration at a University Press –working title, Trial by Ink. Plus, a poetry book that I must glean from 100 poems or so that I’ve managed to secrete over the last several years…
Is there anything you’d like to say about anything at all, for all the world to know?
It’s there in every line I write... as well as in between the lines.
 Below are a few aphorisms which he so graciously agreed to let me use here, as well as a wonderful poem called Clouds, originally published in Leviathan. His book, Signposts to Elsewhere, is available from Jane Street Press at www.janestreet.com/press All of these aphorisms strike me as true, in the deepest sense of the word. And being brief, they are easy to memorize and enjoy. Like a good haiku, an aphorism is a wonderful companion to your day.
Ambiguity: the bastard child of Creativity and Cowardice.
Two good reasons to read: to better understand oneself or to forget oneself, altogether.
Spirituality occurs at the boiling point of religion, where dogma evaporates.
Miracles are proud creatures; they will not reveal themselves to those who do not Believe.
Intuition: generous deposits made to our account by an unknown benefactor.
For the inconsolable, there is Nature.
Clouds
to find the origin,trace back the manifestations.Tao
Between being and non-being
barely there
these sails of water, ice, air -
Indifferent drifters, wandering
high on freedom
of the homeless
Restlessly swithering
like ghosts, slithering through substance
in puffs and wisps
Lending an enchanting or ominous air
luminous or casting shadows,
ambivalent filters of reality
Bequeathing wreaths, or
modesty veils to great natural beauties
like mountain peaks
Sometimes simply hanging there
airborne abstract art
in open air
Suspended animation
continually contorting:
great sky whales, now, horse drawn carriages
unpinpointable thought forms,
punctuating the endless sentence of the sky.
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