Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.
Andre Naffis-SahelyPoetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
Andre Naffis-SahelyEveryone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.
Andre Naffis-Sahely[Abdellatif Laรขbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."
Andre Naffis-SahelyAs Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.
Andre Naffis-SahelyIn a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.
Andre Naffis-Sahely