How Long Have You Been With Us?: Essays on Poetry

by Khaled Mattawa

Overview

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
 
“Like the myriad companions and comrades that he summons from their exile, Khaled Mattawa is himself a ‘poet-stranger.’ In the essays, ‘written in a poet’s prose,’ collected in How Long Have You Been With Us, Mattawa evokes a powerful amalgam of the personal intimacy of the solitary and the political challenge of solidarity.”
—Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
 
“If you’ve read about exile, you’ve read about Brodsky and Milosz—just as, if you’ve read about translation, you’ve read about Walter Benjamin and George Steiner. While Khaled Mattawa has mastered these masters, his essays about world literature serve as a tour of the rest of the world. He introduces you to the writers you haven’t heard of but should from contemporary Libya and colonial South Asia to Latin America and China. When Mattawa invokes Saadi Youssef or Rabinidrath Tagore, Mohja Kahf or Toru Dutt, the effect is to deprovincialize American literature.”
—Ken Chen, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
 
Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan origin, explores various dynamic developments shaping American poetry as it is being practiced today. Arising from an incredibly diverse range personal backgrounds, lyric traditions, and even languages, American poetry is transforming into a truly international form. Mattawa, who also translates Arabic poetry into American English and American poetry into Arabic, explores the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchange and literary translation that fostered such transformation. The essays in this collection also shed light on Mattawa’s development as a poet and provide numerous portraits of the poets who helped shaped his poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472053292
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	11/08/2016
Series:	Poets On Poetry
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Khaled Mattawa is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Since 2014, he has served on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors. His many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the San Francisco Poetry Center prize, the Arab American Book Award in Poetry, and two Poetry in Translation Prizes from the PEN-American Center.

Table of Contents

Meet the Poet-Stranger: Three Stories and Their Aftermath 1

Identity, Power and a Prayer to Repatriation: On Writing and Translating Poetry 25

On the Poet's Presence: Thinking Back, Thinking Forth, Thinking Darwish and Tagore 41

Resisting the Lapse into Monologue: On the Poetics of Bihngualism in American Poetry 61

Ethnic American Writing and the Challenge of Tradition 74

Writing Islam in Contemporary American Poetry: On Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore and Agha Shahid Ali 87

Translation Impossible 97

Epic Temptations: On an Unwritten Poem 101

Four Uneasy Pieces 118

On the Road with Adonis 132

Skyping with. Saadi, Channeling Li Po 135

Poems and Days (A Reader's Memoir) 138