An Apology to a Poet

William Carlos Williams wrote a poem called The Wheelbarrow. This poem is about a wheelbarrow. He also wrote a poem titled This Is Just to Say. This poem is about Williams eating someone’s plums that he had found in their icebox. That’s it. That’s all that there is to them. They’re poems about wheelbarrows and plums. They do not serve a further purpose. There is no theme. Both poems don’t have much to do with ‘The Modern Man’ which was a pretty popular theme in the modern-ish period, no? No. Not to William Carlos Williams. 

“Williams poems are just a statement of fact,” I thought. I’ve come to realize that they are, and they’re not. His poems served a purpose, and that purpose was to celebrate the ordinary, the concrete, and the simple. Imagine using ornate language to celebrate how nice a wheelbarrow happened to look. It defeats the purpose. 

But what did I know about poetry? How many people in the past century defined and redefined poetry? How many people defined it in a way that serves their own agenda (aka Horace)? Who said that poetry should be made up of flowery/ ornate VS crisp/ concrete language? How much of anyone’s ideas actually stuck?

The only thing I do know about poetry is that it’s for everyone and for everything, and that it suits every occasion. Poetry could be for the heartbroken and the in love; the go-getters and the lazy. Poetry could celebrate the ordinary and the cosmic order of things. It could show us ugly social and political institutions. Or it could make us see ourselves for what we truly are —and a lot of the time that scares us. 

So poetry is everything you want it to be, and everything you don’t. It’s high snobeity (this is not a word), ornate lingo, and normal, everyday stuff. It’s William Blake telling us about the children with robbed childhoods, it’s Elizabeth Browning telling us about how much she loved her husband in 40-something Petrarchan-style sonnets—and it’s William Carlos Williams telling us about the plums and the wheelbarrow.

So, I’m sorry I ever thought I could put chains on the freest form of art I know. I’m sorry I thought there was such a thing as right poetry, which is ridiculous.

Arabiyah #7

To feel this way is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

There’s a gnawing, crippling, agonizing yearning inside me.  

I assumed it was the jinn or the devil at one point:  A muse whispering terrible truths.

Silly.

The yearning turned out to be a human need: A yearning for freedom.

A newfound human discovery.

My mind is not cruel to me anymore. My mind is kind.

My mind tells me that I am just as human as him. We’re Flesh, blood, and bone.

And so we’re equals.

My mind tells me that I am not the lesser, the inferior, or the smaller.

This frightens him. It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing.

Al Arabiyah #6

I am contained. They say that my voice shouldn’t be heard, that my name shouldn’t be uttered, and that my face shouldn’t be seen. 

I laugh at them now.

Why am I contained? I cant be contained. I am intelligence and complexity combined: I'm human.  

 So, why should be my dreams be in his hands?  Why should I give them to him?

--I’m the ill mannered and immodest women of the past and the present; the women who died in vain and in glory; the women who dreamt and couldn’t and the women who dreamt and could.

Here is my name, my voice, and my face. Here are my dreams and here are are my hands. Here, here is where they belong.

Arabiyah #5

I wish I could say to them:

You’re not smarter than us. I know it scares you when young women, like us, tell you that. It threatens your too-inflated ego, and your false sense of authority. You refuse to accept that the woman of today, are not like the woman of yesterday.

You need to understand that the dominance that you’ve enjoyed for so many years, while the other half of the population suffered, no longer exists.

Or:

I’m not sure you’ve heard of the revolutionary women of today. You see, they will not clean up after your mess. They will not live up to your expectations. Because they are educated, they will laugh at you when you say: “We know what’s best for you.” They will have ideas and opinions and they will discuss them with you. They are not soft. They cannot be tricked with false pretty words. 

And just out of spite, I’d say:

These women are so revolutionary; in fact that they laugh at poor men like you: The ones still think that we’re after their attention and approval.

These women learned of a truth: They are just as human, just as complex, and just as intelligent as you are.

Arabiyah #4

Here are my dreams. I rested them in the palm of his hands. And I pray he honors them.

I learned to speak softly, and to tread lightly around him.

To rest my dreams in his hands is a fact of nature, a component that cannot be questioned, or omitted from the cosmic order of things.

My ancestors, they have all done it. They stooped their shoulders, lowered their heads, and they put their dreams in the palm of their hands.

 So who am I to challenge this natural order? Who am I to put my dreams in my own hands?

Here lie the dreams of a woman.

Arabiyah #3

            I dream of killing him… Every night, I dream of wrapping my feminine hands around his throat and watching him as he takes his last breath. This time, he’ll be under my control—

But they’ve forgiven him, and they allowed him to live. I, on the other hand, died a long time ago. People no longer say my name. I have become an insult, a tragedy, a taboo.

Sometimes I wish I were like the terrible Gods of civilizations past. I would choose to be Zeus, and put this thunderbolt to some good use…or maybe I could be like the Sphynx, and I could yell:

“I am the Great Sphynx!

Half lion, half human,

Half Bird—

I am power personified

I am the King of Kings

I am the Great Sphynx!

If man to ashes fall,

I from ashes rise.”