What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
From time to time, sadness fills my throat and pain reaches its limit. Then, I wish to smash my life like a wine glass against a stone. But suddenly the gleam of the thread of a new idea, imagination’s hide and seek, the revival of a blade of grass, the burst of an infant’s laughter, the figure of beauty, the rebellious breasts of an ample woman compel me to take wings from happiness, to beg the heavens to stretch the bridge of my life so long I won’t be able to cross it, even in a thousand years.
"This element of Kurdish delights me: to crack a word open and peer inside it, to find a world within a word, a world where the abstract is embodied. The Kurdish language calls the body into every conversation, fashioning idea from body. There is no hiding the body, not even to protect it."
"Among other things, Worldly Things is about a Black man enduring in an anti-Black country. I hope readers will see it as a prayer for humanity, a work in praise of resilience and, in that way, lovely. I want a conspicuously Black book; I want people to pick it up and know it was written by a Black poet and concerns the Black experience."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
