How Poetry Can Kill You

How Poetry Can Kill You

Ask a polyglot who knows Arabic who he considers the best poet—in any language—and odds are that he would answer Almutanabbi, who lived about a thousand years ago; his poetry in the original has a hypnotic effect on the reader (listener), rivaled only by the grip of Pushkin on Russian speakers. The problem is that Almutanabbi knew it; his name was literally “He who thinks of himself as a prophet,” on account of his perceived oversized ego. For a taste of his bombast, one of his poems informs us that his poetry is so potent “that blind people can read it” and “deaf people can listen to it.” Well, Almutanabbi was that rare case of a poet with skin in the game, dying for his poetry.

For in the same egotistical poem, Almutanabbi boasts, in a breathtaking display of linguistic magic, that he walks the walk, in addition to being the most imaginably potent poet—which I insist he was—he knew “the horse, the night, the desert, the pen, the book”—and thanks to his courage he got respect from the lion.

Well, the poem cost him his life. For Almutanabbi had—characteristically—vilified a desert tribe in one of his poems and they were out to get him. They reached him as he was traveling. As he was outnumbered, he started to do the rational thing and run away, nothing shameful, except that one of his companions started reciting “the horse, the night …” back at him. He turned around and confronted the tribe to his certain death. Thus Almutanabbi remains, a thousand years later, the poet who died simply to avoid the dishonor of running away, and when we recite his verses we know they are genuine.

My childhood role model was the French adventurer and writer André Malraux. He imbued his writings with his own risk taking: Malraux was a school dropout—while extremely well read—who became an adventurer in Asia in his twenties. He was an active pilot during the Spanish Civil War and later an active member of the French underground resistance during the Second World War. He turned out to be a bit of a mythomaniac, unnecessarily glorifying his meetings with great men and statesmen. He just could not bear the idea of a writer being an intellectual. But unlike Hemingway, who was mostly into image building, he was the real thing. And he never engaged in small talk—his biographer reports that while other writers were discussing copyrights and royalties, he would steer the conversation to theology (he supposedly said the twenty-first century will be religious or will not be). One of my saddest days was when he died.