Modern Poetry Around the World
Cross Cultural Poetics has podcasts featuring modern poets from different countries around the world.
The first podcast features Egyptian poets Mohamed Metwalli and Maged Zaher and Chinese poet Zhang Er. They compare Chinese and Arabic poetry to English poetry.
Zhang Er points out that Chinese poetry has no tense – so it has an eternal feeling to it. It has no plurals, no articles and no pronouns. Whereas English poetry is more static – it’s set in time.
Maged Zaher points out that the spoken Arabic language is different from the written language. He said the written Arabic language is more ornamental and rhetorical and that made his poetry more sentimental. To be free of this he writes his poetry in English.
Mohamed Metwalli said he writes in Arabic because that’s the language he dreams in. He speaks English and studied English literature growing up, so there is an influence of it on his poetry. He writes in a modern Arabic form that’s influenced by English.
You can listen to the 1st podcast here.
