“Poetry for Adonis is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking,
something almost like mystical revelation.”
Charles McGrath
New York Times
October 18, 2010
McGrath is writing about the Syrian born poet Adonis (b. 1930) who has given a new voice to the world through Arabic language poetry. For three years I have read Adonis in English translated by Khaled Mattawa, searching for a way to name the effect Adonis’ work has on me. I am both troubled and delighted by the fact that McGrath has done my thinking for me, troubled because I prefer thinking for myself, delighted because McGrath has given me a way to name the work Adonis accomplishes with his poems. According to McGrath, poetry is not simply a literary genre but “a way of thinking.’
This approach does not focus on the poem as a product but as a process, as a particular way of engaging the world. Poets are seers. They are not seduced by the apparent and obvious. The poet sees well below the surface where things appear to be separate, into the depths where relationships and connections are revealed. The poet has the critical task of illuminating uniqueness and distinction while recognizing the complex web of relationships in which everything participates. The poet calls attention to the thread without destroying the tapestry.
Poems teach, but they are not didactic. They are evocative. They put us in a state of emotion/mind. They call for a full response from the reader. They suggest image, sensation, emotion, memory, ideas. Poets write not strictly to deliver data but to create experience.
We all think poetically, it is our primary way of languaging the world. Languaging – I know its not a word. But it’s what we humans do. Using words we excavate experience from its inarticulate background and give it voice in the foreground of awareness. Words are worth much more than simply carriers of information. They make emotion and meaning. We work language, not just for the transfer of information, but to articulate a world for ourselves and invite others into that world.
Poetic language, even in everyday speech, respects and uses the evocative power of words to project a hologram, a virtual reality, through which we can share experience. In Charles McGrath’s view, Adonis does this “almost as a mystical revelation,” giving the reader access to his multi-dimensional experience of the world.
Adonis: Selected Poems, trans. Khaled Mattawa, Yale University Press, 2010