On: Chapter from the Poetry Bible

book by poet Munir Mezyed


Prof. Jean Harris, June 20, 2006
New York University

We’re here to discuss a volume of religious fervor.
The fever is messianic:

Have pity on me! (The poet writes in poem number 15)
I am not a Son of God to be crucified
To redeem sins…
Wait!
So let it be if my blood were
The oil of your lamps…!

How is the ground prepared for this writing? How does it fit in the Anglo-Saxon landscape?

It seems to me that Chapter from the Poetry Bible contains an impulse that has lain somehow dormant in English language poetry since the seventeenth century.
John Donne and George Herbert wrote mystic poetry that grew from within their own culture. In this sense, they were among the last of their kind, and at the dawn of the scientific revolution, struggle was the hallmark of their verse--intellectual and spiritual striving.
In Britain, Hopkins, Blake, and Yeats, fairly numbered among the post-enlightenment mystics, wrote in opposition to the dominant, post-enlightenment, laissez-faire, materialist culture.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the nineteenth century transcendental/mystic strain of American letters (which includes
Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau) existed as a sort of enshrined counter culture at odds with American materialism.
The transcendentalists’ heirs-- Kerouac, Ferlengetti, and Ginsburg
--belonged to a counterculture of renunciation and revolt that reached its social/political height in the 1960’s and its peak commercialization in the Beatle’s Ravi Shankar period.
In the Western arena, then, mystic poetry has lately become the province of the outlaw or the anti-establishment guy, and this
Anti-establishment quality can pop up on the right as well as on the left. The religious right, for example, has its own pop music and troubadours, and that music and those troubadours are somehow pro-Bush and anti-Carey, John Carey being for them the epitome of the enlightened liberal guy.
Generally speaking, politics makes its way inside the mystic arcane (Zen to the left? Rosicrucians to the right?), as part of a consideration of the problem of evil in the world. One thinks immediately of Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper, “Yeats’ “Easter1916,” or Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with us.” Serious invective and serious pity, however, falls outside the mystic province and belongs to heavy hitters like Swift and Dickens.
Munir Mezyed shares their abomination of poverty. In the twenty-third poem he writes, in part: alive/Dead in their world/Scourged by the whip of poverty/They appeal for death. Feeling pity for their souls/I desire death more than they do. Only, his pity is martyrdom and reaches miles beyond what are known as “Anglo-Saxon attitudes.”
.We can’t look for precursors of “The Poetry Bible” in
Anglo-Oriental literature either. The most widely read Arabic poetry written in English is The Rubayat of Omar Kayam by Edward Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald didn’t get Arabic poetry wrong even “accidentally on purpose.” He deliberately “got it wrong.” For him, the sensuous tropes and “exotic” setting of Arabic poetry provided a cover for sensual poems whose burden is: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die. The Rubayat is a case of tempus fugit all over again.
So, when we are discussing Chapter from the Poetry Bible” The best point of comparison for English language readers is not with the various departments of profane literature but with sacred writing, particularly the King James rendition of the New Testament.
In poem 29, for example, we read a version of the annunciation:

I am a breath from the Holy Ghost
Conceived in the womb of virgin star.
Behold,
When the angel of the Lord appears unto her
In dream saying,
“Arise! Take the young child
And cast him down to the earth.
Fear not,
Nor be afflicted…
Rejoice!
For we appoint him a poet
To begin reciting the new divine verses.”

In the poet’s eyes, our world is darkened and false:

By The Word and what they inscribe! (He writes in number 13)
They are impostors;
Their myths and tales
Are fraught with blood and smoke.

But the poet savior wants to bring light:


Poem 19 reads

Prepare ye the way for this light,
The light that emanates from the depths
Of the spirit


The darkness consists in part of social injustice:
In poem 22 the poet writes:

Woe unto you
The rich
Ye gained your comfort
Produce fruits befitting repentance:
Feed ye the poor
Lest ye turn them into thieves.

There is, however, the possibility of social correction:

I desire thee (the poet writes in poem 7)
Like a rose desiring the dew
So blame me not,
If I saddle the horses of war…!

In general, however, the poet experiences his existence as a via dolorosa.
(p.21)

Through this gloomy murk
I stroll
Carrying my cross
Whilst my reed,
And harp,
My house key in Jerusalem,
And mother’s sad face
Accompany me…
I sing,
In spite of the bleed…

Or again (poem 31)

How hard is my sorrow!
An afflicted pain inherited my heart,
Stinging the soul.
I feel pity for my soul,
And my soul feels pity for me.

In general, relief from social/political darkness of the world comes from poetry and religious emulation

Christ reincarnates me in love chants,
I build temples for love,
Temples where my verses are chanted.
Build,
Build ye the temples of love.
Let love be a belief,
Unite water and fire.

Read! (The poet commands in poem 70)
Read ye my books.
Ye will come to know
I am not a son of one of yours
And I have lived amongst you
A rose of blood…


“Chapter from the Poetry Bible” then, is a book of personal revelation in which the poet’s persona travels a life’s hardships with a message more of love than despair. His access to both to the divine and to ourselves is swift and direct. It cuts through the luxury of surface struggle and aims at the pathos within.