Safaa fathy biography of michael

Translator’s Note. These last weeks, while trying to work on other things, I keep getting interrupted by messages coming in via WhatsApp — it is old friend Habib Tengour, sending photos and videos live from Constantine, Algeria — and by my own compulsion for checking Al Jazeera TV or French radio as the news of a “ras-le-bol,” a loud ’nuff-already of the Algerian people starts to boil over into the streets as next month’s “elections” — the government’s attempt to make Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a sick old man right now hospitalized in Switzerland — puppet-president for the fifth time, closes in. I can’t help checking Facebook and Twitter threads and posting myself, and thus early on the 9th, I post this to FB:

‘makach al khamssa ya Bouteflika’ Wow! The demonstrations in Algeria are a breath of fresh air in the Maghreb. Women & children in the front rows. So far, so good. But the gangsters who have hijacked the country will not simply hand over the keys to the government (or to their bank-accounts into which the wealth of the country has been drained).

And it makes me go back to a book that came out last year, the Egyptian poet and filmmaker Safaa Fathy’s Revolution Goes Through Walls, a collection of poems and texts I helped her translate into English (and that was published by Splitlevel and celebrates the Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo during that country’s “Arab Spring”).

Here an extract from that book:

SNAPSHOTS (excerpts)

-      Tell your feet that don’t want to go where you want to go that the journey is toward absence.

-      When the gas entered my lungs I decided to start smoking again.

-      The taxi driver took me as far as Al Abbassya and held his hand out to greet me. He and I are incidentals encount

Anselm Berrigan‘s latest book of poetry, Don’t Forget to Love Me, is forthcoming in September 2024 from Wave Books. Other books include Pregrets, (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm. A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber.  From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program. Berrigan was granted an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2017, and was also awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation