Fady Joudah

Gently, patiently, I followed it on my knees with shattered heart and plastic bag, coaxed it, caught it, released it into the yard, and started to cry.

So I just remembered that, you know, when I was reading the Tea and Sage poem, that I do have a Tea and Sage poem in footnotes in The Order of Disappearance.

And then in Tethered to Stars, I have a poem, I think it's Aquarius, that is in conversation, but that's my secret.

Now it's not a secret with the two T and Sage poems.

And so there is a movement in my mind where I was really interested in...

the incomplete, the art of the incomplete poem and what that is.

And I think it's a private conversation we, you know, poets have.

And you end up, you know, returning to something for various reasons.

But then you realize that it's actually, it can be a tool, that it can actually further an aesthetic signature, if you will.

And I think that anyone who's in love with any particular poet and you read their work, you will find out that they're repeating sometimes sentences verbatim.

And sometimes if you get a chance to ask them questions,

you know, they might be coy or not.

They might tell you, oh, I don't remember.

Are you going to be coy?

No.

I mean, you know, the frog is out of the bag.

But so that's one thing where I guess at a younger, I mean, I think even we were talking earlier in Textu, there was a poem about,

about revenge, and the last line of it, I'll lick your ears against revenge, repeats in the latest book, in a poem whose first line is, why don't you denounce what you ask me to denounce?

And it ends, so it's like I didn't, I really liked the line, but I'm not so sure, like I wanted to say it again.

The critic, the Moroccan critic, Abdel Fattah Kleto, if you haven't read his literary criticism, it's stunning.