The Nomad Poetry Project
Since I returned in February 08 from Yemen I had been focusing a lot of my energy on a large-scale calligraphy project revolving around a singular theme, that of nomadism, on many different levels, physical and intellectual, spiritual and emotional. I set my sights on 50 pieces, and this is the halfway mark, and September is the deadline. I have 25 until now, and many of them I haven’t posted until tonight.
I merge digital and analog in the creation of these works; I use GiMP, a free-ware photoshop program, to edit scanned-in hand written words or letters. I dont clean them up, but they scan in as a jumbled up soup of words:
So I re-arrange them back to coherent sentences.
I drew on many sources for this project, among them:
A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev by Clinton Bailey
Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture by Clinton Bailey
Dusting the Color From Roses: A Billigual Collection of Arabic Poetry by Ghazi A. Algosaibi
Love, Death, and Exile: Poems Translated from Arabic, Bilingual Edition by Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati
Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts by Nizar Qabbani
A Time Between Ashes And Roses by Adonis
The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
The Son of a Duck Is a Floater by Primrose Arnander
Victims of a Map by Mahmud Darwish, Adonis, Samih al-Qasim
Lovely 🙂