Christal
Cooper
All excerpts given copyright privilege by Yahia
Lababidi and Press 53
Yahia
Lababidi’s Balancing Acts
“Writing Poetic
Conversations In The Head”
“I read, and carry on conversations in my
head, which sometimes spill onto the page in the form of aphorisms, poems, and
essays. I write, primarily, in my head
and transcribe it on the scraps of paper, napkins, even my iphone or whatever
else is handy wherever the muse strikes – in bed, on the road, or at my
desk.”
Yahia
Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi’s sixth book, the poetry
collection Balancing Acts: New &
Selected Poems 1993-2015, published by Press 53, is already available
for pre-order on amazon.
Lababidi’s other five books are Barely There (Wipf
and Stock, 2013), The Artist as
Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2012), Fever Dreams (Crisis Chronicles
Press, 2011), Trial by Ink: From
Nietzsche to Belly Dancing (Common
Ground Publishing, 2010), and Signposts
to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press, 2008)
Balancing Acts:
New and Selected Poems 1993-2015
is now #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in Middle Eastern Poetry which is rare since the book has yet to be reviewed and only has been mentioned via word of mouth.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/13788371/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr
is now #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in Middle Eastern Poetry which is rare since the book has yet to be reviewed and only has been mentioned via word of mouth.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases/books/13788371/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsnr
Press 53 is owned and operated by Kevin Morgan
Watson and its editors, the legendary poets Pamela Uschuck and William Pitt
Root, selected Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1993-2015 for the
Press 53’s Silver Concho poetry series.
“It is a remarkable thing to bind and put out into the world
20 plus year of confessing in verse, or being and becoming – which is how I see
my New & Selected poems (1993-2015). I hope the many selves and styles in this
poetry collection, Balancing Acts,
will be engaging to readers of literature and, ideally, even draw in some
nonreaders, as well!”
Lababidi, 42, was born in Cairo, Egypt where
he had his first experience of writing poetry as a young child. He wrote rhyming couplets for his grandmother
whom he described as having the “smile as
long as the Nile.” He was named
after his grandfather who was a poet and a musician.
It wasn’t until his mid-teens, while
attending the International American School in Cairo, aka Cairo American
College, that he finally recognized himself as a poet while reading Oscar
Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Hesse’s lyrical novels.
“I thought ‘I want
to do that’. This further confirmed to me that I was implicated in the literary
project.”
Lababidi also fell in love with poetry written
by Gibran, T.S. Eliot, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Rumi.
"To quote the Persian Master Rumi who spoke of the limitations of poetry when he had become a celebrated poet: "What, after all, is my concern with Poetry? In comparison with the true reality, I have no time for poetry. It is the only nutrition that my visitors can accept, so like a good host I provide it."
He attended George Washington University in
Washington, DC where he majored in English and Humanities.
He spent a decade in Cairo, Egypt working with
the United Nations as a speechwriter and editor.
He spent another decade in the United States as
a freelance writer for magazines, a theater company, and a conflict resolution
NGO.
During these two decades he also discovered a
spirituality that helped him mature as a poet and make sense out of life.
“Philosophy
I left behind, after a ruinous decade or two, at the feet of Existentialist
Nihilists. My entry into spirituality
was the Tao te Ching, a tremendous little book which I still return to.
I read the lives of Christian saints for inspiration, but more and more find myself drawn to Sufism, the mystical strain in Islam.”
I read the lives of Christian saints for inspiration, but more and more find myself drawn to Sufism, the mystical strain in Islam.”
During the past few years he kept up a
correspondence with Pam Uschuck, when, in 2014 Uschuck contacted him about his
book of collected poems.
“I told her I was still
massaging it and tweaking it and she looked at it (again) and then a year ago I
got an official statement from Pam and Bill that said they would like to take
that on. I was ecstatic of course that is
my whole life.
We moved along and Kevin
suggested it would be a better idea to make it a new and selected instead of
collected edition.”
Balancing Act is 204 pages of 157
poems with a forward by H.L. Hix.
The most popular poem in the collection
is “What Do Animals Dream?”
“It seems to get the
most play, being included in a best-selling US college textbook, Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing (10th edition) and soon to be published as a stand alone, illustrated book by Onslaught Press."
What Do Animals Dream?
Do
they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably
humor or unimaginably bestial?
Do
they struggle to catch in their slumber
what
is too slippery for the fingers of day?
Are
there subtle nocturnal intimations
to
illuminate their undreaming hours?
Are
they haunted by specters of regret
do
they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?
Or
are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed
in tantalizing hieroglyphs?
Do
they retrace the outline of their wounds
or
dream of transformation, instead?
Do
they tug at obstinate knots
of
inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?
Are
there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies
against
their perceived selves or fate?
Are
they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to
horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?
Are
they ever neither animal nor human
but
creature and Being?
Do
they have holy moments of understanding
in
the very essence of their entity?
Do
they experience their existence more fully
relieved
of the burden of wakefulness?
Do
they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is
but a dream within a dream?
Or
is it merely a small dying
a
little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?
Lababidi’s inspiration for “What Do
Animals Dream?” happened fifteen years ago, when he watched a sleeping dog
display twitching and rapid eye movement.
“And
the idea was seeded: What could it be
dreaming? When I sat down to actually
write the poem, it expanded into a meditation on dreams and the human condition. When I sat down to write the form of the
poem, the imagery suggests itself. My
practice is to write on paper, and then type up on computer – out of a
superstitious fear that once I type a poem up, the dye will stick (so to speak)
and there will be no more room for it to breathe/grow/change.”
Visit Lababidi’s soundcloud page to hear him
reading poetry that matters the most to him. https://soundcloud.com/yahia-lababidi
and connect with him via twitter at Twitter: @YahiaLababidi
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