Last year, I tried to write a few paragraphs on ghazal poetry and its relation to the craft of spinning, called in Arabic ghazl. Before long, I had 9,500 words on my hands, and now I'm stoked for them to appear in Studia Metrica et Poetica, the open-access poetics journal from University of Tartu Press. For a magnificent editorial experience, I am grateful to Maria-Kristiina Lotman, and to Kalle Paalits for the patient typesetting, and to my friends and colleagues thanked by name in footnote sixty to "The Riddle of the Thread: On Arabic ghazal."
Also last year, I entered my translation of "The Palm Tree Sings" (1981) by Tahar Hammami into competition for the Stephen Spender Trust's Poetry in Translation Prize, and received a Commendation for First-Time Entrants. Whatever I can do to draw attention to Hammami's work won't resolve my debt to his 2003 monograph al-Shi‘r ‘alā al-shi‘r (Poetry on Poetry: A Study of [Arabic] Poetics up to the 5th c. A.H./11th c. CE in View of Poets' Verses About It), without which the book I'm writing would be a vain dream. Profound thanks to the poet's brother Hamma Hammami (Secretary General of the Tunisian Workers' Party) for his permission to reprint the Arabic text, and to Youssef Ben Ismail and Amani Alzoubi for their critical assistance.
