Interview with the Lebanese-British poet, author, critic and academic Omar Sabbagh to mark the publication - by Wales-based publisher Cinnamon Press - of his fifth poetry collection But It was an Important Failure. Sabbagh lives in the United Arab Emirates where he is Associate Professor of English at the American University in Dubai (AUD).
How do you
see this fifth collection, compared with the preceding four collections, in the trajectory of your output?
It’s in the main a confessional and
lyrical artefact, like all my preceding collections – barring the one collection
which was an absolute failure down to my own loss of perspective at the
time. However, like my first, My Only
Ever Oedipal Complaint, and my fourth, To The Middle of Love, I do
think this collection is me, with the caveats below in mind, at closer to my
better (rather than best), on the whole anyway.
As per the highly ironic opening and closing prose entries of this 5th
collection, while in many ways parodic (which is not by any means to say,
comic, somehow) in some of this verse, I am in this collection as bare as I’ve
ever been. And I would say that I think
this collection hangs-together as a collection in the most effective way
among my poetry books. Nearly all the
verse was written very swiftly, and usually on impulse; however, that doesn’t
mean I invoke some romanticist notion of sudden, overwhelming
‘inspiration.’ It merely means that due
to certain psychological fears that remain with me, in some subliminal way I
don’t tend to invest as much time in writing verse as perhaps a poet should, or
a better poet would. This is primarily
because I see the stakes as particularly high in poetry, and would rather avert
losing in that artistic game; that said, when I do succeed, as I feel I may
have done in over half this collection, I think the time spent means very
little. In those places, as it were, the
brain was following the mind, or vice versa.
How did
you decide on the title, which plays with the line "But for him it was not an important failure" from W H Auden’s poem "Musée des Beaux Arts"?
Well, the collection being in the main
confessional and lyrical, and the life in the living for an individual in
today’s world, like me at least, meaning in the main suffering, it seemed like
a propitious play for the title. Also,
failure is important to me. It is more
than just the gauge of success; it is in some significant way success,
when that failure is the right kind of failure, an ‘important’ one so to
speak. I don’t need to invoke (very)
late Beckett, to indicate how artistic endeavours are above all else like the
soul itself, processual, more than to do with some final end-product. I suppose the process of trying, essaying
verse is itself the verse for me: as I suggest, too, in the closing ironies of
my 5th, ‘My Practice of Poetry, or, Not Bad’. All this means that poetry is indeed a part
of my behaviour, and not part of some tale I feel that really needs
telling. That said, there may come a day
in the near or farther future when I begin to write verse about things beyond
my-self!
Your
fourth collection To The Middle of Love was dedicated to your parents and to Faten, now your wife and
mother of little baby Alia. What impact have marriage and fatherhood had on
your poetry? Some of your particularly beautiful tender poems are for Faten or your
daughter.
Yes, true.
Even if I’m not quite, or don’t quite consider myself a truly
responsible poet, I am I think a responsive one. And relationships of tenderness are the
quickest spurs for my pen. Alia and
Faten are like my wings, a twinned and colourful surprise.
Is your foreword to this new collection, "A Pretentious Man", a witty rebuke or riposte to certain
critics? Yusuf pops up again - Yusuf
Ghaleez whom we remember from your first novella Via
Negativa? The foreword throws names around, eg “… what
Hegel would have dubbed, probably in Findlay’s
translation, ‘looking-on’…” And you observe: “However, though he was often seen as
a pretentious man, he knew himself to be merely pompous.”
Well, it’s a comic response to myself as a
critic of that same self. Findlay wrote
prefatory material, but didn’t as far as I’m aware (at least not in my Oxford
translated editions) translate Hegel.
That was a little red herring to amplify the comedy there. Throwing names around is kind of the
point. I do it often, but most often
when I really do know the name’s works well.
However, I can see how others might be sceptical; hence, I took this
prose piece as an occasion in a way, if not to answer actual critics,
necessarily, the ones who populate the air, potential critics or others perhaps
with lambasting concerns. Yusuf is a
name I often use. Father of Jesus in the
Christian mythos; and also a name I think Kafka uses.
The collection ends with your essay ‘My Practice of Poetry, Or, Not Bad’. Is your head for ever bubbling with poetry waiting to come out or do you have arid spells? Does what comes out as you write sometimes surprise or baffle you? Do you write by hand, or straight onto a screen? Do you feel sometimes the poetry comes almost too easily?
Yes, the poetry does come too easily,
which is why I don’t, as yet at least, consider myself a responsible poet. I write, normally at will, and always onto a
screen (this is my one thoroughgoing concession to modern technology, along
with a few other things, like email). Because
I write so much, and at will, no, I rarely surprise myself. What is often missing in my verse, because my
‘will’ is quite a logical one, is what Wallace Stevens called the element of
the ‘irrational.’ But sometimes I get
this, and when I do, logic and reflection (which in part may define my approach
to verse, in the main) meet and are surprised by successful lines on occasion. In other words, it’s not so much that
‘poetry’ comes too easily, but words (and thoughts) do. Poetry comes rarely to me, but when it does,
if not ‘easy’, it is swift.
Dubai and
Lebanon (also Egypt & England) are very much presences in your poems, and
Dubai is the setting of your recent 2nd novella Minutes
from the Miracle City – could you sum up the importance of place to
you?
One of the first major influences on my
reading (and thus, writing) life was Lawrence Durrell, and for him the spirit
of place is key. This is not as powerful
a concern for me (I’m not Lawrence Durrell, as yet at least), but I do feel
like personae and places can and do interact in seamless, palpable and fruitful
ways. And apart from issues of prose
style and more attitudinal concerns like voice, character is for me the root of
my love for and my love in trying at least to build my own narratives. Teaching, in Beirut and Dubai, so far, has
been as it would be anywhere, at times a joy, at others a drain. However, I should say that my teaching has
influenced and informed some of my prose publications. In particular I have made use of insights
gained while teaching fiction or poetry in some of my papers, and the loci of
universities have figured centrally in some of my most successful fiction: not
only my Beirut novella, Via Negativa: a Parable of Exile (Liquorice
Fish, 2016), but also such prize-winning fictions of mine as ‘Dye’
(later in Cinnamon Press’s Ruins and Other Stories) or ‘Bad Faith’ (in
Cinnamon’s first The Cinnamon Review of Short Fiction); or, as another
instance, my piece of creative nonfiction, ‘From Bourbon to Scotch: Extracts
from a Dubai Diary’, which was published some years ago in the Routledge
journal, POEM.
A reviewer of your previous collection (RoulaMaria Dib, writing in the Oxford Culture Review) noted its various references to digging – in tribute to Seamus Heaney - this is continued in your new collection with “On Digging”, dedicated to your father. You pay tribute to various named figures in your poems and their dedications; are they kind of father figures and mentors?
Yes, father figures in craft and in life loom large for me. In fact, I was recently re-reading in and about Lacan’s Seminar XX, which deals with female sexuality and knowledge, among other things. And as ever, I used this recent bout of re-reading to garner a new batch of inferences. I think I like to lend myself authority in my writing – whether it’s by the use of capitalised initials at the starts of my lines in my poetry, or an authoritative voice, using at times well-nigh heroic syntax, or stagey punctuation in my prose. And all of these features of my mental life, reflected directly in my writerly, are ways of me searching for the law(s). I am both, I like to think anyway, highly gifted at abstract thinking or ratiocination, and to boot, my father, the best dad in the world, probably loved me, now as then, too much. In other words, coded, I am like Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’ and like most narcissistic types, both too much myself and too little. And so on. Theodor Adorno, one of my favourite twentieth century philosophical writers (in translation) cashes out in a serial manner this kind of psychological phenomenon in one of his aphorisms, ‘Hothouse Plant’, in what is my favourite of his works (in translation), Minima Moralia. In fact, to recoup, this last aphorism was used as an epigraph at the start of my first collection of poetry from 2010, My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint (Cinnamon Press).
You often use colour words in your poetry and fiction – “emerald eyes” being a recurring motif. I remember reading in one of your group emails how the poem "For Vincent" in But It was an Important Failure was triggered by seeing the Schnabel film on Van Gogh, Do you have painterly vivid imagination? Like some people have with colour and music, a kind of synaesthesia.
I’m not sure I suffer or prosper from
synaesthesia, but I do have a deeply-embedded relationship with words. And this reaches between and through their
representative content and their materiality; both the way they denote and
connote, but I think anyway, in ways that synergise. Colours are examples of this, where they seem
to be to me (and seam to be) both abstract and concrete. I would say or guess that as well as being
quite good at descriptive writing, and from the inception of my writerly
attempts, I also have (and without any detailed or deep knowledge of music) a
quite musical imagination, and that, in many dovetailing senses.
Do you
think a reader of your poems need to be well versed in English literature so as
to get all the allusions? Or is it enough that they may be carried away by the
language, images and rhythms?
Only the latter, yes. Especially in my verse, which is far less
sophisticated than my prose.
Your two
novellas were well received. You are now working on a novel entitled “The Cedar Never Dies” (which is also
the title of one of your earlier poems). Could you say something about this,
and about the current upheavals in Lebanon, which have inspired some of your most recent poetry?
The plot of this projected novel, as per
the already worked-up synopsis, embodies by the end the notion of ‘at-one-ment’. Both in its use of a Christian mythos,
married in signal ways to other presiding religious affiliations in Lebanon,
and in the way it hopes to enact a kind of Lebanese solidarity of sorts by its
close, in some respects very different to the current events in Lebanon, but in
some, strangely, uncannily, serendipitously relevant. Indeed, the novel was conceived and work was
begun this past spring, much before the onset of contemporary Lebanese events
in autumn of 2019.
Anything
else you’d like to say?
Plenty of things. But you’ll have to send me more questions at
another time!
Interview conducted via email by Susannah Tarbush, London
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