Poetry for Students, Volume 29

Contributors Susan Andersen:Andersen holds a PhD in liter- ature and teaches literature and writing. Entry onOn Being Brought fr ...

America, America Published in 2002 inWithout an Alphabet, With- out a Face, Saadi Youssef’s poem ‘‘America, America’’ is a compl ...

Arabic poets of the modern age. He attended school in Basra and Baghdad, earning a degree in Arabic from Baghdad University, bef ...

La Li La La Li La La Li La La Li La 40 A stranger becomes afraid. Have no fear, dear horse. No fear of the wolves of the wild, N ...

America, we are the dead. Let your soldiers come. Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him. We are the drowned ones, dear lady ...

people are poor, indicating that even their gods are poor. He goes on to declare that his people are dead and drowned. THEMES Wa ...

collectively. In section three, the speaker lists many of the things he loves that Americans also love, punctuating his list wit ...

of free verse allows him to distinctly focus on memories, the blues, lists, and trades, endowing each section with its own uniqu ...

Violation of the rules would lead to the total disallowance of international trade. In reality, the sanctions hurt only the Iraq ...

from one country to another, a pattern emerged: a series of short, imagistic poems where the poet assumes a neutral voice are th ...

Given Youssef’s depiction of America, what do other poets say about it? Youssef’s work has been compared to that of Walt Whitman ...

American spirit of free expression and individu- alism. Ginsberg also wrote in free verse, with dependence on imagery and direct ...

as in-between. In the end, the speaker decides to move forward and live life even though it is often complicated and difficult. ...

poetry and poetics, but it also contains powerful and universally accessible poems. The Libyan translator, Khaled Mattawa, is hi ...

verse be borrowed for a slogan. In a sequence of poems written in besieged Beirut in 1982, Saadi describes life at the edge in h ...

recalls another and is linked to it, ‘‘We turn in the earth the way a shepherd wraps his cloak around him.’’ In another long poe ...

or Communist journalism, and serving political prison terms. Like the majority of Iraqi writers, educators, and intellectuals, Y ...

Nazik al-Mala’ika (1923-), Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996), and Abdul Wahab al-Bayaati (1926-), among others, were experimenting w ...

the farmer, tries to beg a ride from a boat owner, Salim al-Murzuq... For the traditional school of poetry the theme of this poe ...

sense in terms of the verbal pleasure it provides to the reader. The play with words becomes more intense in the next line, furt ...