One night I decided to disclose my sorrow to the sheikh but he knew nothing of modernist poetry, René Char, the broken sentence, Mallarmé, Joubert, the silence of an empty line. “This undermined my confidence in my sheikh. After all, he hadn’t been offering me anything new for some time, just Keep your heart clean, and God’s love will deliver you from oppression and eight or ten other lines like that. I don’t want to be unfair, he is not a simple man; it’s just that he had a simple education. It was at this point that some devil within—half utilitarian, half rationalist, a remnant of my
...more
