Two Fady Joudah Interviews to Read

This is just a quick post to drop a few interesting links out to readers. I’ve been away from blogging due to busy-ness with family activities, but I didn’t want to lose track of some interesting interviews I came across.

I ran into an in-depth interview with Fady Joudah on Lunchticket.com a while back — in which he discusses labels, translation as an act of close reading, and the 160 character textu form he created.

It covers some similar territory to his even-more-in-depth interview by The Rumpus in 2013. Which goes to show that many times, our personal themes, concerns or issues follow us through the longitude of many years, subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) transforming as we age but still accompanying us on the journey.

Of interest is that point Joudah gets across in both interviews that labels define and deplete a poem. They water-down it’s applicability, limit its resonance in broader engagement (my summary — he says it better and you should read the interviews for that alone). Or, at least, they make it possible for the experience of the poem to be hand-waved away as not important beyond a certain group of people, however that group is defined.

I previously discussed Joudah’s book, Textu, here.

…and a forthcoming book

In the Lunchticket interview, Joudah mentions a new book forthcoming in 2018–something I’m definitely looking forward to!