It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilisations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters - Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor was it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Instead, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.
THE IMAGE OF THE POET, and the writer, and the artist, is firmly fixed in the public imagination. They represent all the values to which we most loyally adhere; they are deemed to embody the imperatives of sincerity and spontaneity, of integrity and dedication. Above all, they must be original. We hope and expect that the writers of our time will have something original to impart. We do not want them to repeat the maxims and precepts of the past. We do not want them to rehearse or follow the writings of their predecessors. There is a terrible fate in store for any writer accused of plagiarism. It is the cardinal sin of all contemporary writing
What is the Egyptian literary establishment coming to? The controversy surrounding the publication of the nonagenarian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's novel Awlad Haritna has opened up a can of worms with intellectuals, writers, critics and politicians using the altercation for their own ends. The text was first serialised in Al-Ahram in 1959, but its publication was discontinued when it was deemed objectionable, and it was never published in book form in Egypt. Now an "Egyptian" edition is paradoxically to be printed in Beirut.
“Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.” Jorge Luis Borges. The caller ID shows it’s my uncle. I ignore it– having my hands full with Stephen Dunn, his soul-grit roughing me up.I wonder if God is displeased with me for not answering,