Djelloul Marbrook

Dear and faithful readers,

Far From Algiers, my first book of poems, has just been published by Kent State University Press. Perhaps you will be interested in this press release announcing it. I am now 74. I started writing poems when I was 14, and I have never really wanted to do or achieve anything more than this—well, I would like to grow up before I die—even though my life has not been uneventful. It isn’t recognition, acclaim or even notice that I’ve wanted all these years; it’s rather to share my delight in seeing something a certain way and in so doing to shed a little light in the presence of a few people. That isn’t, of course, what a publisher wants. A publisher wants to find good work and sell it. But I have found that a handful of people have cast their own light in front of me in the dark, and I hope my poems are my homage to them.

I knew as a boy that I had a poem or two in me. I studied the poems of others (I still do), but I recognized at a certain moment in my 30s that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or, for that matter, meaning what I said. I was ashamed at that moment. I recognized that my poems had energy and some skill and even some prosodic daring, but my central recognition was that I would have nothing to say, and should say nothing, until I knew myself better, until I had some rudimentary knowledge of what had happened to me and where I was going. But, most important, I had a lot of growing up to do, and it seemed to me dishonest to write as if I knew anything worth saying. The better part of decency, it seemed to me, was to shut up. I wasn’t any kind of hero, but I could muster some courage to do that.

When the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, I realized, after all those years, that I was ready to say something. But did I have a voice? I thought my voice would paint itself over the page in the same experimental, surreal way it had when I was young. But instead I heard something of my adolescent voice in Manhattan, hawking newspapers on Eighth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, listening to Yiddish and Italian-American patois, listening in fact to mafiosi in my stepfather’s kitchen. I heard my years in the South, too, years of listening to soft cadence, irony and fabulist exaggeration. I heard Navy jargon and the casual machismo of sailors. I heard the irony and paradox of my newspapering years. I was scared. But I knew this was my authentic voice, the way I talk to myself in my head. Could I set it down? You be the judge.—DM

The following is a transcript of a press release announcing the publication of Far From Algiers:

Poems for just this moment in history

The uprooted, the mixed-race, the merely tolerated—these American stories are making headlines, but the news fails to convey the tragedy of being suspect in a land you would make your own. Now the poet Djelloul Marbrook has given the alienated and the alienating a powerful voice in a startling and prize-winning book of poems called Far From Algiers.

He wrote the book after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, walking the streets of Manhattan and writing poems that cast his Algerian-American background in the context of one of the most daunting challenges of our time, the migration of millions of people from south to north in search of better lives. He wanted to affirm his love of America in the face of the nihilism of the terrorist attacks and nativist sentiment.

Marbrook was born in Algiers to an American artist of German descent and a Bedouin father. He never knew his father. His mother fabricated a story about his father dying in a hunting accident before her son’s birth to conceal the fact that his father chose to remain with another woman.

Marbrook, 74, is a veteran newspaper reporter and editor. In this first book, winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Prize at Kent State University, he shows what it’s like to be half-accepted, to be a problem merely because of one’s place of birth. He shows, too, that skin color is only one of the ways we paint people as outsiders.

The poet brings an uncanny ear for street cadences and an unnerving eye to the predicament of people everywhere who are desperate to be accepted in a new land that doesn’t accept them. He understands the ambivalence of progressives and the hostility of nativists, and he sympathizes with both while walking in the shoes of  the disinherited.

Edward Hirsch, a highly respected poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, says of Far From Algiers:
“…a highly skilled outsider bursts into poetry with this splendid first book which brings together the energy of a young poet with the wisdom of long experience.”

“In a dizzying and divisive time, it’s beautiful to see how Djelloul Marbrook’s wise and flinty poems outfox the furies of exile, prejudice, and longing,” writes the poet Cyrus Cassells. “Succinct, aphoristic, rich with the poet’s resilient clarity in the face of a knockabout world, Far From Algiers is a remarkable and distinctive debut,” Cassells concludes.

Toi Derricotte, award-winning poet and Pittsburgh University professor, is the judge for the 2007 Wick Prize. In the book’s foreword she writes:

“How honored I am—how lucky—to have been able to choose this superb first book by Djelloul Marbrook that honors a lifetime of hidden achievement . . . Sometimes the poems seem utterly symbolic, surreal; they are philosophical, political, and spiritual. The genius is in the many ways these poems can be read. I kept being rewarded by new awarenesses of the poet’s intentions, by the breadth and scope of the manuscript.”

Far From Algiers is being released today by Kent State University Press. Bookstores may order from the KSU Press distributor at 419.281.1802, from all local bookstores, or at the university press web site: http://upress.kent.edu/poetry/index.html.
Interviews: Djelloul Marbrook, 518.537.3833, 845.380.9377, dmmarbrook@earthlink.net or visit the poet’s web site, www.djelloulmarbrook.com. He will take part in several panels at the Baltimore Book Festival Sept. 27.