Djelloul Marbrook

Editors notoriously complain about how much bad fiction and poetry
they’re forced to read, poor dears, but I think the case can be made that a large amount of surprisingly good stories and poems are submitted to publishers. Poor work is readily assignable to the round file, but good work raises the question of how good?

When I first encountered Daniel Pendergrass’s 23 Istanbul Karabitsi I fell into a strange reverie in which I was walking in the streets of Alexandria, not as myself, but as C.P. Cafavy, looking at the city’s street scenes in much the same way Pendergrass has observed the streets of Istanbul, the city Cavafy loved second only to Alexandria.Several times I snapped my head back and forth to get out of Cavafy’s head and into Pendergrass’s. I studied Karabitsi’s prosody, looking for a way out of this unjust reverie, unjust to Pendergrass. The prosody is suave and at times daring. The poet was obviously well read, although I was to learn he hadn’t read Cavafy.

As the poem—its separate poems in the end constitute a whole—drew me into Istanbul’s streets, making me at home in a city I had never seen, I realized that, while Karabitsi deserves comparison to Cavafy, its author is more an observer and less a conversationalist. Cavafy has a lot to say about history and his own pain. Pendergrass has something of the extraterrestrial in him. He’s a visitor, not a resident. He has reports to make, things to do, other than lounging in favorite cafes and taking his own and history’s pulse.

I recognized by the time I had read a third of the work that this poetry wasn’t just good, it was superior, and when the poet asked me to say something for the jacket of the published work I felt no hesitation bringing up Cavafy, a modernist whom I admire inordinately. I had commended the manuscript to Amari Hamadene, the founder and publisher of Arabesques Press, and I had no doubt it would find its way into the hands of the most sophisticated readers, as it deserves.

The karabitsi is a street drama which the Ottomans inherited from their Byzantine predecessors. It embraces the kind of scenes I’m fond of describing in my own poems about New York City and New York’s Hudson Valley. You have to have a sharper eye than if you were sitting in a theater, and you have to care, which is what poets do for us.

I commend 23 Istanbul Karabitsi to you as enthusiastically as I had the privilege of commending it to Arabesques. It’s not just another good book of poems, it’s an important book of poems.