Djelloul Marbrook

Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. The banners were then carried onto fields, turning them into seas of calligraphy.

I’ve been dreaming about these banners. In my dreams the oceanic
Arabic script takes off and fills the sky with crystal ships and the carriers of the banners on the ground cheer and wave to the ships.

Why don’t we do something like that in Central Park— a vast poetry festival with banners from all the neighborhoods and their poets? Or in Prospect Park. Or both. Perhaps neighborhood associations could sponsor their poets. Or art galleries could participate. After all, New York’s art galleries have traditionally shown an interest in poetry. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, for example, was the first publisher of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and artists such as Donna Marxer regularly combine art and poetry in their work.

Let’s do this not only in the New York parks so familiar to me, but across the land and the world. Let’s remember that many of the people, including ourselves, who appear in today’s headlines of conflict have also marvelously contributed to the enlightenment and beauty of the planet. Let’s celebrate that in poetry. It will be an easy thing to do: poems in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Sanskrit—all the beautiful scripts of the earth.

Poetry is alive and well. And not just in academia. Readings and slams are popular, and many art forms, such as rap and rai, which are not usually associated with poetry, do in fact embody poetry. So let’s bring poetry to the beautiful fields of our parks, as the ancient and medieval Arabs did.
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Note: Speaking of poetry, Kent State University Press has posted a link where you can order my book, Far From Algiers. And yesterday my wife Marilyn sent out e-mails making friends and acquaintances aware of this link. The response has been lighting up our Inbox, renewing old friendships and encouraging new ones.         —DM