A Rebuttal

Description:	Shlah, Zaid (author)Callahan, Eileen (printer)Hansen, Sean (printer) Letterpress. Edition of 50.This broadside is from the collection of a historic suite of hand-printed literary broadsides which are a part of the Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here broadside project at the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries. Poetry tells the truth—but only if its heart is real. Anyone can work this field, but only in some parts of the geography does a poem determine to take its form from a language unyielding in its demands on the truth. A poem like that can shake the grit out of any idea—and make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Poetry from Iraq is a gift to the world: the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley’s poets have been bringing us the news of what is found there for thousands of years. From the literary traditions begun with Gilgamesh and Inanna through the poetry of the present written in Iraq or in exile, this hard work of the poem is always telling us something we need to hear. Without poetry, how else are we to know what’s happening, and what did happen, in this land and in this war? Governments have long known that the killing of hope and resistance is made easier if a people’s culture is first destroyed—thereby ensuring that there will be no arts left to articulate the insistencies of peace as a mark of their own culture, of their own lives. In this current Iraqi devastation, beauty and grief share equal part: and each of those languages is desperately needed now. Since Plato’s Republic the artist—and particularly the poet—has been the most feared of all the government’s citizens. The poet’s word—his voice, her voice—might topple empires. Williams Carlos Williams had it right: the news of the day cannot be taken from newspapers but can be found in truest form only in poetry. People die everyday, Williams wrote, “for lack of what is found there.” Poetry is a potent weapon and with its ally, printing, keeps us in touch with ourselves so that we can know something again of language, something again as “the real.” The broadside tradition began as a means of bringing the general to the local, to the people, to the streets. From the beginning of printing, the earliest broadsides posted around town brought the news of the day to the population in the streets. Printing this broadside for The Al-Mutanabbi Street project was a way of continuing this tradition—and continuing the tradition of honoring poetry to carry the news—the news that if not heard, “men die/from the lack of what is found there.” The broadside brings the news of the poem, the news of the day—to anyone who cares to listen.
Origin:	2007
Created By:	Shlah, Zaid; Callahan, Eileen; Hansen, Sean
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/1541
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	broadsides letterpress printing art

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