In the face of ugliness which stormed the world man needs the beauty to try
to deal with that ugliness and surpass it, in the face of the brutal killing
and deaths man needs to accept life and interact with vitality. In the face
of chaos man, also, needs to order and arrange his things to be able to overcome
the difficulties and enjoy his life. In short, to pass the world of non-poetry
which life transformed into a mechanism overwhelming man and the whole world
man needs poetry, that lingual thing which is difficult to be identified, but
it's easy to feel it and its pleasure that makes man having the ecstasy and
the strength to resist in this arid desert called everyday life.
As I said it is not easy to define poetry, no one can put a specific framework
or monopolize a definition for it and say this is poetry as there are countless
visions here and we do not have only to note that there are common features
that can be found at a certain age or a certain group. On this basis, I would
say that the important current in today's Iraqi poetry is the model of modern
prose poem assuming that this model is the best style in expressing the internality
of man in Iraq today. This doesn't mean that this tendency claims a monopoly
of poetry but, according to the today's Iraqi poets visions, as we read that
in their interviews and essays, it is the closest style of poetry to modern
man based on its spaciousness in form and thought. In fact, most of the Iraqi
poets believe that the prose poem involving more opportunities in charging beauty
in the poem and certainly the highest in the ability to generate ideas and visions.
Adopting this vision and understanding of poetry and its genuine necessity prominent
writers in Iraqi poetry longed, after the era of getting rid of the authoritarian
rule, to deliver this vision to the people through various means and innovative
communicative procedures. It is the right of poets of this period to claim that
they are the first who searched to deliver poetry to the receiver through the
channels of the social communications, the Facebook for instance, the universities
classrooms, the cafes and even the worshipping houses. They made brotherhood
with the river Tigris and chose a place on its shoulder to meet poetry lovers
on Fridays. This meeting became an intimate encounter in which poets managed
to connect the poetic revelation to the recipients as the recipients enjoyed
the uniqueness of experience. Also the poets went to the university to communicate
with students and teachers to break the isolation of the Iraqi university from
what the last Iraqi poets created today. They, moreover, held their cessions
in clubs and popular cafes for the first time, seeking to connect the new poetic
spirit to the non-elite recipients.
In the Iraqi Poetry House (IPH) they paid attention to the artistically advanced
poetic sounds who remained in the shade, and have for the first time to held
effective activities, for example, the symbolic activity they called "Appeals
to the Anonymous Reader" by having poets recite their poems first and then
put the poems in bottles and deliver these bottles in the Tigris River in a
signal to communicate with the other.
Place is not an obstacle any more. Poets held cessions under the hot sun in
al-Mutanabi street, where most of the Iraqi intellectuals meet, and the audience
unite with them, despite the heat of the sun in Summer and the coldest days
in Winter. Poets presented poetry to the people when they were sitting in the
outdoors, seeking to create a more coherent atmosphere between the poet and
his audience. Whenever we have provided an appropriate atmosphere for the poet
and recipients the gap narrowed between them and perhaps this atmosphere stimulates
an opportunity for the poet and his recipients to be closer to each other in
terms of the technique of poetry.
The identity of Iraqi poetry today is actually freedom as an exercise away from
partisanship and away from whatever rigid ideologies. Most of poets openly opposed
to be under any political mantle of fixed conviction because this will put them
in a bound box and surround them with incompatible dictates that contradict
with their creative orientation.
1- Ra’ad Abdulqadir
(Born1950, died in 2003.
Published books: Let the Nightingale Wonder, Baghdad, 1996, A Hawk, a Sun Over
His Head: Baghdad, 2002.)
Let the Nightingale Wonder
Let the nightingale
wonder
at the hand of disaster
that trains him as a falcon.
Let freedom
remember its form;
let the world
test its wit.
It is just a bird,
unimportant
entirely
whether it sings of the disaster
or swoops down on the prey
Let the nightingale
wonder.
(Translated by: Soheil Najm)
Windows
They can do everything,
look inside or outside,
they can notice any movement in the air.
In place, they don’t care about what happens.
They are silent, gazing, convinced,
happy with their love stories,
with light penetrating their bodies.
They enjoy their loneliness,
aloft…
windows.
(Translated by: Soheil Najm)
2- Safa Thiyab
(Born in Nasiria 1970.
Published books: Anxious, Baghdad 2001. No One But Me, Baghdad 2005.)
Who Knows?
No standing statues
no wind that knocks the door
no fingers…
no eyes…
no hair…
this is what he knows of always.
And who knows, some of his skies might make time heavy?
And he might rip the thunder…
but who knows who he is?
(Translated by: Dr. Sadek R. Mohammed)
The Iraqi
Every time he sees the blooming of a flower,
the sun blazes him, so he escapes indoors.
Every time the day is about to set,
darkness attacks him,
so he loses the garden.
(Translated by: Dr. Sadek R. Mohammed)
A God
The sky that split
was nothing but my lips.
The land that was enraged
was nothing but my eyes.
And the mountains that were leveled
were nothing but my fingers…
And I am a god
pushing you into the abyss.
(Translated by: Dr. Sadek R. Mohammed)
3-Mohammed al-Nassar
(Born in Nasiriah, 1961.
Published books: The Current of the Days, Baghdad, Competing Me on the Desert,
Baghdad, Third Life, Beirut, 1993)
Too Late
Behold this mixture
of thorns
and shiny cunning.
We young poets
once said
that when the language raged
like stormy waves,
it threw
our dreams
upon the edges of the river
… I mean,
upon the sluggish emptiness,
unchanged
in how many thousands of years.
Edmonton 2006
Restoration
Water can be a devil too
in this region
when labyrinth
becomes
the weapon of the Nazi God
to restore his millstone.
As for this jungle,
Caesar makes jokes
about its teary salt.
…………….
……………….
Answering the terrible boredom
of this desert,
the poet burns a puzzling book
in the name of the prince.
Conflict
This hand,
sweeping over the stormy river,
carelessly kicks up grains of sand
that fall upon
my words,
dispersing
their happy agility.
Life cannot deny
the despair
of this stranger.
...............
.............
...............
A clown
standing on the coast
alone,
fumbles to find the connection
between his heart
and the drum he is carrying.
Edmonton 2007
( Translated from Arabic by the poet himself. Edited by the Canadian editor Allan Shute.)