Wednesday 15 January 2020

James Dunnigan : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Scope and vastness (not necessarily length) being two things I am inordinately fascinated by, I only got turned on to poetry when I got the sense that it could do things on as large and deep a scale as a great novel, great film or scripture (most of which is poetry, but I didn’t know this at the time). The closest I ever got to enjoying poetry in my adolescent years was when I found a copy of the Qur’an in Arabic and French at Dawson College’s library and began to, with the help of other translations and often transliterations (Arabless as I was and still am), piece the text together aurally as well as narratively. Surahs Ar-Rahman, Ash-Shams, An-Nur and Al-Balad contain tremendous poetry which I know I will never experience the way many Muslims or native Arabic speakers do. I still have a verse from Ar-Rahman pinned to my kitchen wall now which says something along the lines of “all that is on earth will [one day] disappear”: consolation at least in the instances where things on earth are bothering you, and a healthy reminder of where all of us must one day go: away. In English, it was my introduction to things like Paradise Lost and Othello, which caused my break into poetry, that and especially the poets of the early XXth century: Pound, Eliot, Williams—H.D. only much later, as is often tragically the case. It was all downhill (uphill?) from there.

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