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  Art by Katherine

  Psychoanalysis is a dialectic, what Montaigne, in book III, chapter VIII, calls an art of conversation. The art of conversation of Socrates in the Meno is to teach the slave to give his own speech its true meaning. And it is the same in Hegel. In other words, the position of the analyst must be that of an ignorantia docta [learned ignorance, scientific ignorance], which does not mean knowing [savante], but… what is capable of being formative for the subject…. If the psychoanalyst thinks he knows something, in psychology for example, then that is already the beginning of his loss, for the simple reason that in psychology nobody knows much, except that psychology is itself an error of perspective on the human being” (Seminar I, p.278).

I was sitting at the bus stop feeling bold
My body hot in down plus thermal vest
Eating an egg sandwich with  green mould

My head was reconstructed in the jail
A hat can be a demon, scarves are best
I was  waiting in the graveyard in the cold

I really would have liked a bacon roll
The shop was Jewish so I  said, Shalom with zest
Eying that egg sandwich with green smiles

My grandad spent his whole life digging coal
And now he suffers from eternal rest
I was sitting at the bus stop, my, it’s cold

I read that we are human, not  emails
I write two and  send them unaddressed
How that friedried sandwich with green mould?

Would you ever get a bit depressed
When you got cancer from the love you lost?
I was sitting at the bus stop with my soul.
Eating nutty sandwiches  cats mauled

“People become the poem” – Interview with Syrian-American Poet Amal Kassir

 

“A lot of women will not respect what I am saying because I am covered, and that must mean I am a subjugated woman (a girl wrote a counter-poem in response to “For the Ladies”, and that is what she said).

Would you allow the label “feminist” apply to you?

Some Muslim women did not respect my poem because they felt like my performance was not modest.

Sounds like you’re caught in the middle.

Caught in the middle? I wouldn’t say so. My poem is a response to how many of the women in my society treat Muslim women as an inferior specimen of woman because they cover their bodies. I am not making a religious statement so much as I’m making a social statement. I am advocate of women’s rights. I do not support the patriarchal dictatorship of many Middle Eastern, Islamic countries that impose restrictions on women because of their gender, such as education and going out (important to recognize the difference between culture and religion), but I also don’t respect a patriarchal society that tells women being naked is being liberated while the male dominance in political offices goes on. Women’s rights don’t depend on what a woman is wearing — I do believe modestly is important, especially in such a sexualized society, but I am not going to discredit a woman who doesn’t wear hijab. The key is education. If women can learn their rights and how patriarchy is playing a role around them, they can mobilize as one unit and crack the foundation of the male-dominated society we live in.

In Saudi, though, the laws are not in favour of women. There are more women in the Saudi government than there are in the American government. The largest percentage of University students is women.

Now imagine if the curriculum was crafted to culturally accommodate Islam as well as feminist theories into one single productive system that could potentially teach women all over how to empower themselves through their minds.

I do not perform my “For The Ladies” poem very often anymore because it attacked women they way women attack the hijab, and it’s not entirely productive to communicate through that means.

Could you channel the same passion that you had in “This Is For The Ladies” into a poem on a similar theme, and which doesn’t attack women?

Of course. That doesn’t mean I will step away from my beliefs that the hijab is a tool of female empowerment, and I will continue to argue against any feminist theory that attacks a Muslim women and those who chose to cover. I will publically point out patriarchy’s role in a lot of feminist approaches, but I also won’t slut shame a woman.

I will keep an open mind, because if women work together, we can fight oppression. Unfortunately right now, we are fighting one another’s version of feminism and we aren’t getting to the source that is

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/erikcampano/2013/09/people-become-the-poem-interview-with-syrian-poet-amal-kassir/#5WoDHjHB50r6l9lM.99

When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head
When life runs like a river to the sea
Then shall I take new lovers to my bed?
And with their carnal touch consoled be?

When my lover raves so breaks my tender heart.
When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path.
Then, shall I my life of evil start,
And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?

When such love lies and wrecks all loyalty.
When puzzlement makes all my world seem mad,
Then I shall upend causality
And let myself do deeds which make me glad.

For I have love’s sweet child inside my soul
And I shall tend her till at last she’s whole

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1955/5/20/poetry-of-moral-issues-pharvards-edwin/

 

“Harvard’s Edwin Honig is one of many contemporary poets who are also full-time teachers at universities and colleges. As such he is in danger of being labeled and passed off as just another member of a group in whose work readers of poetry have come to expect generally good craftsmanship, an unusual precision of language, and disappointingly little in the way of content. In the most important respect, however, Honig breaks this pattern; his poems are indeed characterized by the precision of the scholar, but they try to be serious comments on matters of unusually basic importance. The title of his recently published volume, The Moral Circus, is indicative of this intention.

In these poems, Honig most often adopts a position of removal from the subject he is treating, so that even his description of a very personal incident in “Do You Love Me?” combines dispassion with its emotional impact: “. . . Her dying sigh denies/The quiet settling idly on/His polished shoe. One blunt toe/Gleams back a flawless eye at him/As he dangles from the sigh.” The poet reports single acts or aspects of the circus: the morality or the moral are implicit in the way he sees them and transmits them to the reader. And it is at this point that Honig the poet becomes important.

Poetic Flexibility

It is fortunate, therefore, this his linguistic precision does not result in the sort of dryness or lifelessness which is often associated with the work of contemporary academic poets. This is no doubt partly because his facility with language and prosody allow him to fit the words and form of the individual poem to its subject in the light in which he sees it, where less gifted or skilled poets would find their expression cramped by a self-imposed strictness in form and diction. A comparison of two passages, one from “First Morning,” and the other from “Corrida,” shows this flexibility:

Nude and tall the morning sang

The clammy beach, the rustling foam;

Striped green and tan

The morning swam

The rustling air, the ravelling sand.

The silence of lover to lover, the world to be lost.

Government, race, and universe caught

On the lash of an eye, a flick of the wrist,

Before the tiny new opening rose of death.

There is an essential, stripped-down–quality to Honig’s poetry; it is clean of superfluities, nothing is overstated. Thus, without feeling any emotionalism in the author, the reader is aroused and given the mood in a few, terse lines. The poet does not often stop even to arrange a setting, but cuts immediately to the important question at hand, the particular act in the moral circus.

Unobtrusive Skill

The most important thing about Honig’s skill as a poet is that it is unobtrustive. He cannot afford to let flights of technical proficiency distract his readers from the spectacles of the moral circus that he is showing them, and so he keeps himself the lens through which they observe. When he distorts it is to clarify or magnify the hidden part in which he feels the meaning lies, never to call direct attention to his own feelings or flaunt stylistic achievement. In this record of the greatest show on earth the poet breaks his reserve only to let a little wryness creep into certain turns of phrase, sudden words that seem to betray a tiny, noncommital wrinkle at the corner of the mouth. But this is an individuality which does not mar the observational clarity of the poems.

Honig’s willingness to treat the carnival of humanity on a moral level and his remarkable wit and facility in doing so give his poems a strange quality that is at once disturbing, provocative, and entertaining. They are not more exercises with words and meanings, nor are they pedogogical recitals of moral truth. They are experience, and like all things true their connotations are deep, direct, and mysterious.

 

The gravity of loss brought me to earth
Beneath the rotting leaves, I lay with worms.
I wondered if I were of any worth

No more to be enchanted by love’s mirth,
I  with unnamed particles was turned.
The weight of loss bears down the heart to earth.

I could not rise alone but saw a path
While I slept a unity had formed
I learned I need not think of what I’m worth

My sorrow brought no guilt nor fear of wrath
I am both  eagle and  a twisted worm
In my little grave, I  loved the earth.

Like the adder, shocked into rebirth.
I from silent underworld had learned
Not to judge my soul or what I'm worth.

I shall not  fear the flames of hell that burn
When blackness is accepted, may one learn?
The weight of loss breaks down the soul to earth
With dusty shredded leaves, we then converse