Do you write poetry in Arabic?
No, I've been translating to Arabic.
But lately, I've switched.
I've turned coat.
I don't translate so much to English.
I translate more to Arabic.
But I don't write in Arabic.
Maybe in the next 30 years, I don't know.
No, I don't write in Arabic.
I've never really written in Arabic, as such.
But since I've been traveling to Libya
and spending time in the--
I've begun to write more prose and commentary and so on,
but not poetry.
Poetry is still in English.
Yeah?
Was there another question?
Hi.
Thank you so much for that reading.
Thank you.
I'm exhilarated and devastated by the endings of your poems.
They do everything that I love in poetry,
where it feels like you're dragging me along
on the edge of a cliff.
And we're going very fast, and you
bring it right to the edge of the cliff, and then we stop.
I don't push you?
No, no, you're-- no, you're carrying me.
You're carrying me.
Ah, failure.
You're carrying me.
No, no because it feels like it's ended,
the poem has ended, but like a door has opened.
So, that's a very weird way.
So, can you tell me about your endings?
Can you just talk about the endings of your work?
You know, I learned--
not everything I know about endings,
but I used to have very Wagnerian endings.
And who taught me to sort of circumcise the poems?
It was Yusef Komunyakaa.
He knows what to say.
Because if you're repeating, if you feel like you're--
I think I'm embellishing in some.
I need to circumcise poem.
But if you feel like you will just agree,
if you're reiterating or reinforcing anything,
then OK, maybe you didn't do it well enough to begin with.
So go back and fix that, and then take the excess.
So then, at least I have that feeling.
When you're a reader of poetry, or at least a beginning reader
of poetry, you're waiting for that conclusive paragraph,
as in an essay, that brings it all together.
And some poems do that and some poems don't.
But it took me a while but at least
I've learned to trust that the poem, in order
for it to be on a loop, it needs to not conclude.
It needs to just sort of give what it has.
And it's the reader's effort to create that conclusion,
but it's through the revisitation.
So I don't-- I mean, I thank you.
I'm glad that I'm doing this because my thought is
that I'm probably saying too much at the end.
But no, I think the idea is, when is enough?
When have you said enough?
When are you reinforcing an idea,
and you don't need to reinforce because your images
and your word use, the good work you've done before,
should have all of that in it.
Thank you.
I think I'm going to let it end there.
Do you still have questions?
Did I read through too much?
Did I rob my audience of their questions?
No, I want all of these burning questions,
for them to come back next week.
OK.
And, in case you haven't noticed,
there are books for sale, so please buy them.
Khaled will be up here signing.
Yeah, I'd like to.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I'm really honored to be here.