Welcome to the Poetry Center reading series.
I'm Frances Sjoberg, the literary director of the Poetry
Center, and it is a great privilege tonight
to present Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole.
Thank you for coming, I know it was a very long journey.
I would also like to thank our co-sponsors, the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies, and also
the Inner Connection, which is co-sponsoring a high school
Matinee tomorrow morning here at the Poetry
Center with the poets.
I'd like to thank our standing series supporters, the College
of Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and the friends of the Poetry Center.
I have a couple of announcements as usual.
I just want to let people know that there
are a couple of spots still available in our Saturday
class, Robert Frost and his legacy,
which is this Saturday with poet John Wright.
On Monday, another class begins: binding
for writers with Drew Burk.
This is a six week class with the co-founder and bookmaker
for Spork Press and if you'd like
to learn how to hand bind your own work,
this is the class for you.
More information about both of those are available.
Where are the Flyers Annie?
Are they over here, outside of this door.
And our program assistant Megan tells me
that some of our regular audience members
are irritated with our surveys, I can't believe it.
Actually, I too dislike them.
But in filling them out, you're helping
us to meet the requirements of our grantors.
And to sweeten the deal, Megan this reading
has started a Haiku sweepstakes on the back of the surveys,
you'll notice that there is a Haiku challenge.
If you return them you will be eligible to win the Haiku
sweepstakes, which involves a Poetry Center gift
bag with a t-shirt, a tube of Poetry Center Lit balm,
and other goodies.
[LAUGHS]
Also many of you know that we are
trying to wrap up Stanza Bonanza, our one year long book
drive to seed K through 12 libraries
with great books of poetry.
Tonight, we need to receive 10 copies of the Country
Between us by Carolyn Forche on sale
from the U of A bookstore for $10.
And also 10 copies of The Dream Keeper
by Langston Hughes on sale from the U of A bookstores for $8.
And for each Forche that is purchased
tonight poet Brenda Hillman's folks, Jimmy and Helen Hillman
have agreed to contribute a copy of "So What?"
by Taha Muhammad Ali to our K through 12 libraries,
the high school libraries actually
is the appropriate age group for that one.
And Gail Browne has agreed to contribute a copy of Here,
Bullet by Brian Turner.
All books that teach us about the ravages of war
and conflict--
conflict and the benefits of coexistence.
For every Langston Hughes that is purchased tonight,
the undergraduate English and creative writing club
has agreed to buy and contribute one
copy of "I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You"
by Naomi Shihab Nye.
And Renee Angle family--
Renee Angle's family has agreed to buy a copy of "What Have You
Lost" also by Nye for each of those
that you purchase tonight.
To top it off, if you and the audience
contribute all 20 of the challenge books, 10 of Forche,
10 of Langston Hughes, Tony Luebbermann
will contribute in an entire kit of 25 middle school books
to a middle school library.
So I won't take you carefully through the numbers
but I will let you know that if you choose
to donate a $10 book by Carolyn Forche,
you are responsible for putting $39 worth of books
into local libraries.
If you purchase an $8 book by Langston Hughes,
you're responsible for putting $27 worth of books
in local libraries.
And if 20 of you donate books tonight, that's
85 books that will go into libraries worth $1000
to all four local schools.
And you also get a nifty little sticker for your lapel
that says "Bookworm conservationist."
Now, onto our poets, Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole.
Tonight, together, they will present Muhammad Ali's work
in both the original Arabic and an English translation.
Although, we will focus on Taha's poetry,
I want to tell you a little bit about each of them.
Peter Cole has crafted a life in service to poetry,
his own poems are lyric explorations
of history, ontology, of language itself.
They grapple with God, with soul, and the toll of ourselves
in the social world.
He writes poetry that yields a complex music
and unfolds substantively to scholarly readings.
Peter Cole is also a translator lending his precision and ear
to medieval poets of al-Andalus and contemporary poets,
including Taha Muhammad Ali, alike.
And he is a publisher with his partner Adina
Hoffman of IBIS Press.
While tribalism and fence building
are the order of the day, their mission states,
IBIS seeks to present readers of serious literature
with books that embody the cultural cross
fertilization that characterizes the best
writing from the Levant.
Each of our books derives from prolonged engagement
with the actual people, boulders, groves,
and city streets that make up the local landscape.
Peter Cole is a recipient of the Pen American
award for translation, a Guggenheim, and National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships
and most recently, the prestigious MacArthur
Fellowship.
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931
in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya.
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly,
which was destroyed by Al Nakba, "The Catastrophe,"
or the Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
He fled to Lebanon and later returned to Nazareth
where he is the proprietor of a souvenir shop.
Muhammad Ali is self-educated, he studied and mastered
both classical Arabic and contemporary Western poetry
and his poems are rich in influence from both traditions.
He is I believe, a natural storyteller: that rare person
who is able to hold, sustain, and develop entire histories
and humanities.
Taha Muhammad Ali is the author of a collection of stories
and four volumes of poetry in Arabic,
he is also the author of "Never Mind" published
by IBIS Editions in Jerusalem and "So
What" published by Copper Canyon Press
here in the United States.
We are very, very lucky to have both of these poets
here with us tonight.
Please help me to welcome, Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole.
[APPLAUSE]