Published: October 01, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
You Can Find Me Under Washington's Horse Reading
By Djelloul (Del) Marbrook
We read in Baltimore today in a dripping-wet tent under George Washington's horse, or, more exactly, under the horse's ass, and we followed a strategy which the audience seemed to like. Kim Jensen, a Baltimore poet, read some of my work, and I read some of hers, and we talked about each other's work.
It was a celebration because Bread Alone, Kim's book of poems, had just arrived from Syracuse University Press, and I was able to say that its production values almost rival its content. When it comes to poetry books, that's saying a lot. Bread Alone is a classic example of what a volume of poetry should look like.
As always, The Baltimore Book Festival was well attended, and the crowd was attentive and enthusiastic.
Kim had worked up a strategy that focused on the affinities between my book, Far From Algiers, and Bread Alone. For example, we both wrote of aspen leaves and of how it feels to be an outsider. Stylistically, we're both spare of line, sometimes even Spartan, and we prefer understatement and restraint to exuberance and demonstrativeness.
At the end of the day, we both felt it was a strategy we might like to repeat, because we could see that the audience liked this interplay in which one poet spoke of the other's work, and the poets introduced each other.
I had met Kim, who is an associate professor at the Community College of Baltimore County, in the studio of radio station WEAA at Morgan State University, where we both appeared on The Marc Steiner Show on Thursday. I hadn't read Bread Alone and thought that I might have time to read a few poems before our reading at the Creative Cafe on Mount Vernon Square today. But once I began reading her work I couldn't stop, and by the time I read four of her poems to our audience I knew her entire book quite well.
Bread Alone speaks of the sorrow and agony of the Palestinian people. The poet has lived in France and the Middle East and she is married to the Palestinian artist Zahi Khamis. Her poems are elegant and biting. They sometimes sting and always sing, and that is a rare feat.
The audience was extraordinarily receptive and asked telling questions and even engaged in open dialogue with each other, which Kim and I took as a sign that we had touched the audience somehow. We had feared we might not have an audience, because the famous poet and activist Amiri Baraka was reading at the same time elsewhere on the square.
I believe Bread Alone will find a significant audience. It should, it deserves to. And I will write about it in this space soon.
Djelloul (jeh-lool) Marbrook was born in 1934 in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American painter. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, New York, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. He then served in the U.S. Navy.
Djelloul Marbrook
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The pioneering Online Originals (U.K.), the only online publisher to receive a Booker nomination, published his novella, Alice Miller's Room, in 1999. Recent fiction appeared in Prima Materia (Woodstock, NY), vols. I and IV, and Breakfast All Day (London, U.K.).In his younger days his poetry was published in literary journals including Solstice (England) and Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California). Recent poems appear in Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (www.arabesquespress.org), Perpetua Mobile (Baltimore), and Attic (Baltimore). He is the English language editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal (www.arabesquespress.org).
He worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and as an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. Later he worked as executive editor of four small dailies in northeast Ohio and two medium-size dailies in northern New Jersey.
Source: The Student Operated Press
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