Abbey Frederick
“Flowing, and Flown”: Knowledge and the Sensorium in the Words of Four Poets
In the final lines of her poem “At the Fishhouses,” Elizabeth Bishop posits a definition of knowledge that is as mysterious as it is significant. In building this definition, Bishop’s foundation is a poet’s phenomenology rooted in lovingly-crafted visual imagery. It is a phenomenology that may be glimpsed beyond Bishop’s modernism and beyond her century, a transfiguring mode of thought that roots and re-roots knowledge in sensory experience and the body, such that knowledge has a fractal definition newly made over and over by the hands of many poets. This essay draws together several such poets writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Charles Olson, Aditi Machado, and Cindy Juyoung Ok—to explore the implications of Bishop’s words when she writes that “since knowledge is historical, [it is] flowing, and flown.”
In 1966, Elizabeth Bishop told an interviewer, “I think I’m more visual than most poets . . . All my life I’ve been interested in painting . . . as a child I was dragged round the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Mrs. Gardener’s museum and the Fogg.” The dominance in Bishop’s poems 1 of what Ryan calls “just description”—precise and restrained visual details to which abstractions and figuration are ancillary—reflects this preference.2 “At the Fishhouses” is a tapestry of color, luster, stenches, formal patterns, and textures, particularly in the first of its two stanzas. It is densely populated with material
things: the cleated gangplanks and storerooms, the nets, lobster pots, and benches, the rocks and
seawater, the moss and grass, wood and iron, the herring scales which form “iridescent coats of mail.”
In the collection of essays On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that the wastefulness and
restlessness characterizing American modernity correlates with an obsession with photographs.
2
In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone
engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the
traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place,
the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic
fragments.3
This work of cultural excavation, specifically as it is enacted through the taking of photographs,
Sontag says, “extends the eighteenth-century literati’s discovery of the beauty of ruins into a
genuinely popular taste.”4 The more ephemeral that things and landscapes become and the more
that the rate of change—specifically of destruction—accelerates, the more significant pictures
become. This ephemerality is one subject of “At the Fishhouses.” The poem is dense with references
to erosion and decline. The old man, “in the gloaming almost invisible,” is himself fading into the
gloom; the sea’s opacity is contrasted with the “apparent translucence” of the benches, lobster pots,
and masts; the herring population is declining. The world of Bishop’s poem—and especially those
elements in it that have been constructed or touched by human hands—seems to be wearing away
just like the blade of the fisherman’s “black old knife,” caught by the poet in the moment it
transforms from presence into memory. The mood of suspension—the fisherman waiting for the boat
to come in, the seawater hovering over the stones, the pines “waiting for Christmas”—heightens the
sense of a scene captured in amber. Yet Bishop’s engagement with a vanishing world in “At the
Fishhouses” is markedly different from how Sontag characterizes the collector’s engagement with
objects. When, in the poem’s final stanza, images subside and a more abstract meditation takes their
place, its subject is knowledge. Rather than cherry-picking fragments as aesthetic souvenirs, Bishop’s
speaker seeks to deposit her images of a waning world in an epistemological, enduring structure.
What allows Bishop to operate unlike the photographer? It may be that for the photographer,
the collecting of images is mediated by a mechanical process separate from the body. For the poet,
this collection is achieved using the body’s mechanisms—its senses—directly. The viewer of a
3 Susan Sontag, On Photography. 76.
4 ibid 79.
3
photograph, then, can only know what the camera knew; this is what Sontag calls “information.” But
the reader of a poem can know what the poet knew, and this is what Bishop calls “knowledge.”
✦
Aditi Machado, in a co-interview conducted in 2018 with Serena Chopra and published in Jacket2,
speaks about the word sensorium as she explains how she chose the title of her book Some Beheadings.
The poems in the book featured a recurring motif of “the body being dismembered and dislocated,”
not violently, but as a way of questioning how intelligence is defined. This headless thinking,
conducted primarily through touch and through the embodied and intuitive experience of language
as sound and structure, is an attempt to explore a complexly-constructed selfhood. Machado says,
The Oxford English Dictionary lists a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usages of
the word “sensorium” as the brain or the mind. So, the sensorium is intelligent, which means
maybe we have six minds, and maybe the brain isn’t always the most active of them, nor the
most present.5
In one untitled poem in Some Beheadings, Machado writes, “I think / I’m not human, I’m
grammarian.”6 She expands on this line in the interview, stating that she seeks a poetry concerned not
with a biographical or narrative subjectivity, but with grammatical subjectivity and relations.
Grammar, as Machado points out, “is social—the way it plays out relationships (pre-positions) of
people to people and objects.” Within these grammatical relations, Machado is particularly interested
in the pronoun “I” and what she refers to as its “tyranny.” She says that the fact that it is difficult to
express any idea or impression in English without the first-person pronoun, even if the pronoun is
elided or masked, amounts to a kind of grammatical fascism.7 This is the fascism referenced in the
opening poem of Some Beheadings, in the lines “a mirror / brightens the fascist / in me” and “when I
5 Jacket2 interview.
6 Some Beheadings, 89.
7 Interview.
4
speak / the fascist in me speaks.” In these lines, Machado seems to be referencing 8 the autocratic,
dictatorial nature of fascist leadership. And yet, “I,” the dictatorial pronoun itself, can be deceptively
difficult to pin down. In the interview, Machado elaborates.
Something I’m keen to know, but perhaps never will is where precisely this “I” is located,
outside of grammar. Or: where does it feel itself being located? Sometimes I feel it on my
skin, the point of contact with other skins. [ . . . ] This isn’t mystical. I believe it is accurately,
phenomenologically expressive of how thought works.9
Machado’s considerations of the tyranny of the “I” and of the sensorium are, therefore,
interwoven. In Some Beheadings, the insistent use of indefinite articles throws into relief the irresistible
definitiveness of the speaker’s “I”; the following lines all appear on the first page of the first poem: “I
see a sun”; “I make a kind / of debris”; “a great book I will write”; “a tornado”; “I / make a
breakfast”; “there is a house”; “A bracken, / a tongue meet.”10 So, since the poet-speaker cannot
orchestrate an escape from her first-person subjectivity through grammar, she seeks it instead through
the body. In the first poem in the sequence “In the Weeds,” the first three stanzas begin with the same
sentiment expressed in past perfect, simple past, and present continuous: “I had thought,” “I
thought,” and “I am thinking.” The final two stanzas move into the simple present, reading “I think.
A decapitation, a lovely guillotine wind lays my mind / in the weeds. That’s how // I touch a plant.
My water touches its.”11 When the transfigured anaphora of “I think” resolves into “I touch,” the
poet discovers a way to subvert her mind, ending the poem in the embodied present moment and
transferring awareness from the mind to the skin, where she discovers a unity with other forms of life,
the “little plants” at her feet.
“At the Fishhouses” meditates, albeit in a far more narrative mode, on similar questions. The
first-person pronoun does not appear at all in the poem until the 33rd line. When it does, it comes at
8 Some Beheadings, 3.
9 Interview.
10 Some Beheadings, 3.
11 Some Beheadings, 41.
5
first in the possessive form (“he was a friend of my grandfather”), then in the first-person plural form
(“We talk”), then at last in the first-person singular in line 50 (“One seal particularly / I have seen
here evening after evening”). For over half of the poem Bishop seems to 12 resist, as Machado does,
the word I—locating her subjectivity in impersonal description throughout the first stanza, then in a
familial lineage, and then in a collective—only to find the pronoun, finally, irresistible. It is here that
she speaks of being “a believer in total immersion,” stepping out of her detached position of remove
and placing her body and voice into the scene, singing to the seal and invoking physical contact with
the icy water. As she does so, a world constructed at first only of sensory detail—sights, smells, sounds
—gives way to one constructed by ideas as well. It is then that abstractions enter the poem, integrated
with concrete details, and knowledge can become something “drawn from the cold hard mouth / of
the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever[.]”
Bishop remains wary of the first-person pronoun, which reflects a characteristic hesitation to
reveal explicitly personal details or to strike a confessional tone.13 In the poem’s final lines, she
relinquishes it once again, moving quickly from a second-person “you” (“if you were to place your
hand in the water”) to land finally with the first-person plural (“It is like we imagine knowledge to
be.”)14 The grammatically-“dismembered” hand—which is not exactly, or only, the poet’s hand—is
the place where her understanding first happens. Physically, then mentally, she understands that
knowledge is something that moves through her, derived from and destined for the world around her.
It is something she cannot ultimately claim.
✦
12 At the Fishhouses.
13 where did I get this from…?
14 Fishhouses.
6
In “At the Fishhouses”, as in many of Bishop’s poems, the human figure is placed in a careful balance
in the surrounding world. Even when the poems move toward interiority, Bishop insistently regrounds
the lines in concrete, external detail. For example, in “Four Poems,” a short sequence that
follows “At the Fishhouses” in A Cold Spring, the poet’s relationship with her partner and ambiguous
feelings of wonder and of doubt are glimpsed obliquely, reflected and revealed through a meticulous
description of the partner’s sleeping form. The phone is ringing (the sequence’s third part is titled
“While Someone Telephones”), summoning the poet back to the world from her private meditations.
In the first part of the sequence, titled “Conversation,” Bishop writes that the dialogue of questions
and answers happening in the poet’s heart starts uninnocently, “and then engage[s] the senses, / only
half-meaning to.” The poet is skittish in the interior, alighting there only 15 ever briefly, but she is
comfortably at home in the visible, tangible world.
Charles Olson, in a letter sent to Robert Creeley from the Yucatan in the 1950s, writes
animatedly of the balance of objects in the poet’s contextual world (his “field of force”)—planets and
stars, animals, plants, and human bodies—stating that “the weights of same, each to the other, is,
immaculate.” Within this field of force, the poet himself, through his vision and language, is a force
that may support or disrupt this balance.
[. . .] what we have had, as “humanism,” with, man, out of all proportion of, relations, thus,
so mis-centered, becomes, dependent on, only, a whole series of “human” references which,
so made, make only anthropomorphism, and thus, make mush of, any reality, conspicuously,
his own, not to speak of, how all other forces (ticks, water lilies, or snails) become only
descriptive objects in what used to go with antimacassars, those, planetariums (ancestors of
gold-fish bowls) etc.16
Objects as Olson characterizes them in this passage recall the decorative “precious objects” amassed
by the collector in Sontag’s analysis, cited in the first section of this essay. It could be said that Olson’s
entire body of work was an attempt to explore the question of how—or even whether—the poet
could be faithful to a balance of forces, to maintain his own proportionality within these “relations.”
15 Four Poems. Bishop Collected.
16 Olson Selected, ed. Robert Creeley,
7
It was Olson’s obsession from the beginning; he opens his first book, a critical work about Herman
Melville titled Call Me Ishmael, by asserting that space—and more specifically what he calls geography
—is at the heart of all American stories. “Americans still fancy themselves such democrats,” he writes,
“but their triumph is of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows,
oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.” He continues, “To Melville it was not the will to
be free, but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us [as] a people.”17 Melville was
Olson’s obsession for the first two decades of his scholarly life, and he thought of Melville as his
literary father.18 As these first passages from Call Me Ishmael reveal, it was this insight of Melville’s—
about how Americans, meaning agents of the dominant American culture, relate to, appropriate, and
occupy space—that he carried forward and developed throughout his life as a poet.
The Mayan Letters derive from the same trip to South America, and the same line of
thinking, that produced Olson’s famous essay “Projective Verse,” in which he puts forward his ideas
about “open” verse and a “kinetic” conceptualization of the poem which emphasizes breath and the
voice over the stasis of words on the printed page. A poem is, he writes, “energy transferred from
where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way
over to, the reader.”19 But Olson insists that the kind of radical change in form for which he is
arguing does not only involve a technical or aesthetic change, but also requires a particular “stance
toward reality.” This stance hinges on how a person imagines their relational position in the world,
with the body being one “object” in a field of many objects.20
Combining Olson’s insights about the out-of-proportion speaking subject with Machado’s
thinking about how language itself, through grammar, establishes and upholds social and spatial
17 Call Me Ishmael.
18 Clark Biography.
19 Olson Selected, Projective Verse.
20 Ibid,
8
relationships and distinctions illuminates the poetry of each. As both Machado and Olson suggest,
each in their own way, poetry can be a means of moving away from the reasoning mind and placing
other “minds”—the multifaceted intelligences of the sensorium—at the forefront of awareness and
meaning-making. Bishop does this in “At the Fishhouses,” deriving her thinking, by the end of the
poem, directly from sensory experiences of the fading world at the edge of the Atlantic. In particular,
the kinship Bishop describes she feels with the seal, a fellow “believer in total immersion,” may be
read as an attempt to demote her own primacy in the scene, insofar as immersion and suspension,
states that are evoked in several places throughout the poem, suggest a kind of balance where a
body’s weight is held “immaculately” by the countervailing pressure of a surrounding fluid such as
water or air. Floating implies a relinquishing of control compared to the way we usually move,
confidently over the ground and through the architectures we construct.
In Olson’s epic poetic sequence The Maximus Poems, the poet-speaker Maximus says “I have
this sense, / that I am one / with my skin.” Immersion is a way to access this 21 feeling of being fully
coterminous with one’s body, as fluid envelops and articulates an awareness of the body’s bounds at
every point—including the points where the body is porous, the orifices where, if we let it, the water
would pour in. This feeling may be what Machado is reaching for when she asks where the “I” feels
itself being “located, outside of grammar.” Olson’s “sense” tells us that the grammatical or thinking
self can be unified with the embodied self, even if it is only ever fleeting. Awareness, just like Bishop’s
idea of knowledge, takes on the properties of a fluid, passing into and out of the poet, “flowing, and
flown.” This idea echoes in the lines in Some Beheadings that read simply, “A wind, a text. / A wind, a
text,” and which are in a later poem reformulated as “So wind is a textual experience.”22 The analogy
is bidirectional. The sensory experience of wind on the skin may be a textual experience because of
the poet’s compulsive effort to put it into words. Simultaneously, the taking-in of a text’s meaning
21 “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]” in The Maximus Poems, 184).
22 find the poems in some beheadings.
9
may convert its structure into something wind-like, passing over the body and moving through it like
breath.
Crucially, though, whatever else knowledge may be it is fundamentally, Bishop asserts,
“historical.” Read in the context of “Letter 27” and The Maximus Poems as a whole, Olson’s “sense” of
oneness is, too, ultimately completely historical. The epic sequence is a quest to place himself in an
American history-mythology that is vast and complex. “Letter 27” begins, “I come back to the
geography of it, / the land [. . .].” In stanzas 7 and 8, he writes of the “imposing” of many
“precessions / of me, the generation of those facts / which are my words.” 23 It is the integration of
personal and national histories; land, cities, and geography; language, body, and selfhood—such that
their structures may be superimposed and simultaneously explored—that makes Olson’s poetry so
rich and so useful.
[add something here to conclude this movement..?]
✦
“At the Fishhouses” is dominated by visual description, as Bishop acknowledges. Some Beheadings is
preoccupied with grammar and tactioception, as Machado acknowledges. In the work of a third
poet, Machado’s contemporary Cindy Juyoung Ok, sonics come to the fore, adding another facet to
the exploration of how the sensorium produces poetry’s phenomenological meaning of knowledge.
Ok’s poem “Table of Contexts,” published originally in the chapbook House Work and later
appearing in a revised form in Ward Toward, plays with mis-hearings and mis-transcriptions. The
poem is made up of simple words, very few of them Latinate, arranged in six tidy, complete sentences
that span seven open tercets. Yet Ok consistently destabilizes and doubles words’ meanings, such that
they feel strange. This is apparent in the lines “A machine I own mistook shootings // for students in a
transcript, ushering / me to tilt canals toward titles and curate / hedges into pages.” Here, the poet
23 Letter 27.
10
toes the line where traceable logics of association verge toward coincidence and where sonic and
conceptual connections interplay. Shootings and students share sounds in common, which is presumably
what leads to the computer’s mistake as it generated the transcript. But the two words are forced,
ironically, into another affiliation if a reader brings knowledge of mass gun violence and school
shootings from an American context to the poem. The swapping of canals with titles and hedges with
pages might also seem to be based purely on sonics, if it weren’t for the fact that, together, they build a
miniature arc in which physical, architectural space (canals, hedges) is converted to textual space
(titles, pages). In this way, the lines act like images of language, as opposed to words expressing
images.
The verbs in these lines stand out: when a human mind conflates, it is not an incidental error
or quirk of the algorithm, but an act of “tilting” and “curating”; a mind is at work moving the world
around, laboriously stacking up pieces and closing gaps. The poet’s conflations, unlike the computer’s,
are not automatic and effortless. In her mind, words have substantial form and weight.
This idea of weight recalls another part from Olson’s Mayan Letters where he tells Creeley, in a
passage about Mayan hieroglyphs, of “the tremendous levy on all objects, as they present themselves
to human sense, in this glyph-world.” This levy (from the Anglo-French lever, to raise, from the Latin
levare and levis, meaning light in weight ) recalls the blurred sceneries in a 24 few lines from Barbara
Guest’s “An Emphasis Falls on Reality,” which read, “Cloud fields change into furniture / furniture
metamorphoses into fields / an emphasis falls on reality.”25 Guest’s lines transpose realms of chaos
and dissolution with the intimate, arranged, and static—but her “emphasis” is the existential
confirmation that comes through these metamorphoses, and it lies at the heart of “Table of
Contexts,” too. The poem bears its concepts, is laden with them, striking uneasy balances in the
distribution of weights. This is the poetic image as sonic phenomenon. Abstractions are materialized
24 need to cite
25 Guest Collected
11
when they are expressed sonically, even if they are not expressed in concrete terms. Words are
movable and mutable, but not without heft. It is arguably the phenomenological 26 substance—the
levy—of words in the poet’s mind that lend them, throughout the poem, rich potentialities for
instability, multiplicity, play, and rot.
Meanwhile, the poem’s “I” careens between states of abstraction, embodiment, and
objecthood in the lines “I once thought // I was a shape but it is a form / of furniture, not a prop but
not yet / a structure, the way I eat with pairs // of sticks.” I becomes it; momentarily, selfhood is
purely grammatical before that state is complicated by a bodily need (to eat). The speaker then
“repeat[s] the attic antics / outside [her] house.” The private world is suddenly opened up; the
concealed is exposed and the private is restaged in public. Perhaps this stanza even refers to the
experience of reading or teaching poetry before an audience, with the artist’s process being the “attic
antics” now on view. The outlines of the “I”—carefully drawn elsewhere in the poem when Ok
writes, “I stay outstretched in a November / coat, not abundant and not wanting / to be,” defining
her speaker in time, space, and affect—and the implied closed-off interiority they contain are now
porous and vulnerable.27
A first-person pronoun appears in each of the six sentences that make up “Table of
Contexts,” increasingly embedded in and subordinated by clauses which contextualize and tether it in
affective webs. Ok deftly places poetry’s capacities for sublimation and deposition in tension, such that
edges may be blurred out toward the general or underscored to reinforce distinctions—sometimes
simultaneously. In the poem’s final two stanzas, a second-person pronoun appears—parenthetically at
first in “(you can eat the paper),” then more prominently. Meanwhile, causality is repeatedly
thwarted. “It is always wartime here” leads to a string of confused conflations: of body and house,
making and memory, document and aliment. This series of clauses might constitute a collection of
26 Add a note here about what Alice Oswald says about figurative addition and subtraction, and how Ok’s poem
challenges this framework?
27 From House Work.
12
responses, all imperfect, to ongoing violence—ranging from seeking (or providing) shelter and
nourishment to attempts at documentation and restoration.
The poem’s final lines read, “Not a performer, I know // the figure of the student exceeds
— / includes — that of the teacher and I think / it is for you I wash and rotate the wish.” In contrast
to the coincidental substitution made earlier by the computer, the porous poet makes an active and
willing conflation by allowing teacher to incorporate into student. The labels of “student” and
“teacher” could be applied to the speaker and/or the “you” in a reciprocal interplay of insight and
aspiration. Similarly, because there is no possessive pronoun, the wish belongs to neither figure alone.
Regardless, the wish’s maintenance, like the poet’s figurative work, is arduous. Like a plant, the wish
of Ok’s poem might bend toward the light. It has material, organic substance with a contingent,
unresolved structure. It may be manipulated, weakened, or fortified as it responds to a contextual
world of forces, even if these are simply the forces of other words. A textual table of contents may as
well be laden with cutlery, fishbones, and candlesticks.
In a sense, Ok’s “Table of Contexts” has little in common with Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.”
Where, in Ok’s poem, the rhetorical surface is visible and dynamic, even troubled, in Bishop’s it is as
clear as the glass over a picture. It may be accurate, if reductive, to say that Bishop’s poem contains
images made of words whereas Ok’s contains images of words. While Bishop sets her poem
concretely in a quiet seaside town and conjures it through meticulous visual description, if Ok’s poem
has a setting it is in language itself, where one absorbs “house” and “attic” as sonic and semantic
phenomenon before, or at least at the same time as, one visualizes anything. Nevertheless, Ok’s poem
strikes a strange harmony with Bishop’s because of how Ok reveals, to put it in Olson’s terms, “the
generation of those facts / which are my words.” The poem is a way of placing words into balance,
inspecting their sonic structures, considering them as “facts” which, like the facts of objects,
constitute, obstruct, and facilitate the possibilities of the poet’s thought and come to bear on her
13
body. In other words, it is a deep sense of the physicality of language—which 28 can take on properties
of fluidity or solidity, transparence or opacity (it is natural that Bishop finds her metaphor for
knowledge in the ocean water, which has no fixed position and no fixed phase)—that thread through
the poems analyzed in this essay. Not only do these poets sense this, but they reveal poetry’s unique
capacity to enact and wonder about this physicality. They envision, furthermore, that language’s
substance, at some molecular level, underlies the entire structures of knowledge and history.
Machado’s statement that she sometimes feels her grammatical self located on her skin, an echo of
when Olson says “I am one / with my skin,” is therefore understandable. It is tempting to say that
language, knowledge, and grammar are mental phenomena. But the truth may be that they are as
much a part of the intelligence of the sensorium as they are of the intelligence of the brain.
✦
Having held up Bishop’s lines from “At the Fishhouses” as a lens over the words of Olson, Machado,
and Ok, it is worth returning to those lines themselves.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
28 to add something here about the rest of house work + ward toward, themes about belonging, medical institutions,
mental illness, etc.????
14
It is the strange combination of solidity and ephemerality that makes these lines so mysterious,
despite their apparent clarity. The sea is always the same sea, eternal even though the water is
endlessly moving and fragile even though it is expansive. Its intensity is such that it could be a form of
fire. Here, perhaps, Bishop invokes the Presocratics, who posited various basic materials—water,
aether, some invisible “boundlessness,” etc.—as making up all of the world’s substances and forms.
The Presocratics’ inquiries into the basic stuff of the universe constituted fundamental, original
explorations of the limits and potentialities of human knowledge without the presence of divine
authority. In the poem, knowledge is derived from the most concrete elements 29 of the natural world,
in one sense, and yet in its ceaseless motion, flowing and drawn and flown, it is never resolved and
never decided. The image of knowledge emerging from the “cold hard mouth / of the world”
depicts, ambiguously, both speech—the world speaking, the world producing words—and saliva, a
liquid, silent, translucent secretion issuing from deep inside the body of the world. In the end it is not,
in fact, clear at all what the true substance and constitution of knowledge are. All we can say for sure
is that it moves, and how it feels as it moves through us.
29 CITE presocratics reader
Hisham Bustani is a Jordanian writer of poetry, fiction, and hybrid works that focus on the dystopian experience of postcolonial modernity in the Arab region.
Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, lecturer and curator specialising in contemporary Arabic writing.