Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo. I’m drawn to her work for how it mingles Arabic language, painting and poetry.
Quoting from the interview:
Perhaps most interesting, in terms of her parallel practices of art and writing, is the display’s focus on what she refers to as ‘leporellos’ – a term for a sort of pleat-folded, concertina-style book, typically many pages long. It’s a format she began experimenting with while living in California, after coming across leporellos in a Japanese store there… “The guy in the shop told me it was for putting photographs in! But when I saw it, I knew that what I wanted to do was write Arab poetry.”
She doesn’t mean, though, that she used the leporellos to write her own poetry – not initially, at least. She tells me how she was part of the generation in Lebanon who was taught only in French at school, and punished for speaking Arabic, while at home she spoke Turkish and Greek. So she never became fluent enough in Arabic to compose in it (her own poems tend to be composed in English). It was other contemporary Arabic writers, then, whose poetry she turned to for her leporello pieces – and what attracted her, besides each poems’ [sic] meaning, was the process of transcription itself. “The flexibility of the Arabic script excited me. In Arabic, you have greater freedom to manipulate writing, visually. You can stretch letters out, you can put one letter on top of another.” She also added watercolours, coiling delicate, washy patterns around the words or through them – turning the texts into visual art, essentially. “In this way I discovered that the act of writing is also an act of drawing.”
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Ann Lauterbach’s ‘Door’: Trouble Me, Poet
A noun or pronoun, with a participle in agreement, may be put in the ablative to define the time or circumstances of an action. This construction is called the Ablative Absolute… The Ablative Absolute is an adverbial modifier of the predicate. It is, however, not grammatically dependent on any word in the sentence: hence its name absolute (absolūtus, i.e. free or unconnected). A substantive in the Ablative Absolute very seldom denotes a person or thing elsewhere mentioned in the same clause.
DOOR
World fills up
imperious pace
vagrant matter
into the humming
pooled at the feet
what soul went down
what inventory
mud slippage tracks
marked shells
anointed there
the ravenous real
flowering
above torsion of waves
unexpected
threshold
thrown open crossed.
(Ann Lauterbach, from Poetry March 2023)
Here’s how I read it:
World fills up. Imperious pace. Vagrant matter into the humming. Pooled at the feet, what soul went down! What inventory mud slippage tracks, marked shells anointed there! The ravenous real flowering above torsion of waves. Unexpected threshold thrown open: crossed.
Other phrasings can be inferred. For example: Vagrant matter into the humming, pooled at the feet. What soul went down! Etc.
I have an affection for the verb “cohere” — the state of being joined up, of hanging together. I also like “construe,” which is a feat of elucidation resulting from analysis. Whether it’s a painting or a verse that one reads, does it overstate the case to say reading is construal in pursuit of coherence? We’re meaning seekers; we want to claw message from noise. Figuring out what relationship words have to one another conduces to signal reception. One way to confirm we’ve been signaled is to restate message in our own terms, albeit paraphrase is a widely deprecated expedient. I like to think of it as translation.
“Door” is a sustained interjection built with declamatory ecce language: Behold! I speculate that a confluence of intensely perceived marine stimuli triggered a private ecstasy, a flash of insight into plenitude and convergence, a breakthrough to transcendent understanding, a “door of perception” moment which the writer sought to freeze-frame in haiku-esque shorthand. Terse headline language cascades through elusive dependencies, disputable enjambments, and a succession of power words — imperious, vagrant, soul, anointed, ravenous, torsion. Where I glimpse poem at last is in the ravenous real. I’m smitten with substantivized “real” and how it flows participially into a flowering above torsion of waves. Ecce coherence!
Whatever they say about “connecting” with an audience, writers who identify as poets fulfill themselves first. Perhaps “Door” scores artistic achievement by forcing me to come to terms with it to this extent, at this cost in spent treasure of life-moments. The question a reader must ask always is, “How does verse-speech fulfill me?”
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved