For a recent requirement to recite and discuss with me in my office a poem from a long list of choices, several poetry students chose Robert Graves’ “The Cool Web.” In that poem, the speaker traces how the filaments of “speech” and “spell” weave patterns of thought that both order the chaos of experience and diminish it.  Acknowledging that language offers both retreat from the world of human activity and fortification of one’s home in that land, Graves’ speaker accepts the double bind of language.  In intellectualizing retreat, recollecting in tranquility, one loses the extremes of felt experience, saturating the sea of memories with such preserving salts of language that the experience is not refined but parched, and though fluently comprehended, perhaps marked by inconstancy or fickleness of attention:

                                        Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
                                        We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
                                        In brininess and volubility.  (“The Cool Web”)

In the selection of poems by young Emirati poets writing in English, this double bind of language is perceived in theme and in structure.  In addition to facing feeling with language, as one faces the rose as beautiful and cruel, these writers variously recognize that to risk retreat from immediacy of perception is to risk all.  There is no hesitancy or metaphoric masking of felt experience--silence seems audibly, syllabically approachable—but rather an awareness that to toss off language is to risk not return to innocence but absolute oblivion. 

In some of these poems, there is another concern:  how does this double bind of language—as it orders it too removes us from experience—differently poignant when one is writing either in English as a second language or in English as learned first as a member of an Arab society.    Several of these poems are based on an imitation exercise.  After discussing the sound structures at work in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” the students wrote poems that tried to employ different levels of sound structure, generic musical (which might be local arabesque as well as Western classical) to imposed but accepted metrical.  The only other requirement was to try to work out a power relationship of any sort in the poem in a way that was both self and other instructive.  As you can read, language as power is a dominant theme.

Other poems in this selection are either ekphrastic or visual disruptions of narrative, such as “Apple Spine,” a variation on still life and “The Necklace,” an undoing of Guy de Maupassant’s short story and comment on contemporary consumer culture.  And finally, a sequence of poems including the technically brilliant “Disheartened” hones dialogically the intellectual apprehension of pure emotion and disguises its original medium of text message poems, which in that medium of SMS do not allow one to see the exactness of technique that scrolls the poem through mind. Imagine this sequence arriving in two or three yellow envelopes of SMS.

All of these poems were either originally published or forthcoming in the Zayed University student literature and arts journal, SAFE, or are written by former editors and contributors.  Students chose the title of their publication based on the double meaning of the word in English and in Arabic.

The silence increases its volume and the lawn is a mirage, it hides the sands I ride across and the chirping of the birds, they sit and watch me from the trees as I wander just beneath, they follow as I ride around to check that I too sing, but silence is all they hear, I’ve returned to here.

Lisa Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.  She has published poems most recently in New American Writing, Bateau, Denver Quarterly and American Letters & Commentary.