(Jeffrey Yang, a poet and Dunya Mikhail’s editor at New Directions, has permitted The Constant Conversation to reprint his introduction given for Mikhail on her reading with Louis Glück at the 92nd St. Y, New York, April 8th, 2010.)

When the chemist James Bryant Conant gave the Franklin Medal lecture in 1943, he said fascism in Germany had spread “because bad poetry and wrong philosophy prevailed.” Today, as we sleep, dream, and wake, what prevails? “There are things we live among,” writes George Oppen, “and to see them / is to know ourselves.” “Just like sleepwalkers,” writes Dunya Mikhail, “we go off to war / and plunge into deep garbage.”

Since the current, ongoing war began in Mikhail’s homeland in 2003, according to a recent survey by the UN, of the 4.5 million people who have fled their homes in Iraq, over 2 million are refugees. The most common cause of civilian death there has been kidnapping-executions, which has escalated this year along with the suicide bombings. Mikhail’s refugee status began in 1996, under circumstances brought about largely from the publication of what was then the first book of her two-part book Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. It is a light-filled, absolutely heart-wrenching personal record of war’s ruin.

“All poetry,” says Octavio Paz, “is essentially a diary.”

The first part Mikhail wrote during and after the 1991 war, some fifty years after the two-hemistich monorhymed lines of traditional Arabic poetics was severed by the pioneering efforts of those such as al-Mala’ika and al-Sayyab. At one point in her Diary, the Minister of Culture says to a group of poets that “this new prose poetry doesn’t make sense to me . . . it is like marrying a foreign woman.” Mikhail’s verse continues this spirit of reinvention. In fact, the classical poetic meters in Arabic are called “seas,” and so here is another meaning of Mikhail’s “wave outside the sea.”

The powerfully imaginative, visionary quality of book one of her poem is akin to seventeenth century Mexican poet Sor Juana’s great, intellectual-mystical work, First Dream. Both are poems of geometry and science (Mikhail has had a deep interest in mathematics and chess since she was a child), both are poems of night and dream, of the soul’s voyage (says the “I” in the diary) “in a world with no end and no dimension. . . . The soul goes backward and forward / to see events before they take place.”

Both poems try to make sense of their respective universe, of point and wave, atoms and sea herbs, except in Mikhail’s poem the dream is created by the collision of war and poetry. The figure in her book even tries to rid herself of poetry and is then whisked away by a spaceship to another planet where she finds a river to lie down beside and nap . . . and like Prospero enters another dream. For Sor Juana the human essence is part angel, part animal, and part plant–these three resemblances are mirrored in Mikhail’s poem. A winged woman rises to a heavenly voice; tigers give lessons on the art of domestication; Utanapishtim, the survivor of the flood in Gilgamesh, appears and reveals the secret of the plant that grants eternal life; later Mikhail’s grandfather, whose beard she would reach into as a child, is swallowed by a strange plant; letters dance in the sea, shift and form different meanings, creating the world.

In such images and storytelling, Mikhail’s poem is also a celebration of childhood and children, her Diary opening in her own childhood in Baghdad, and ending in the childhood of her daughter Larsa, Larsa an ancient name of Mesopotamia, Larsa goddess of the sun. Through forests of symbols Mikhail names the elements of her childhood universe, recalling Senghor’s “Kingdom of Childhood” that is summoned thru poetry, “in order to prophecy of the new City of tomorrow, reborn out of the ashes of the old.”

The second part of Mikhail’s poem was written far away from a different war that raged and still rages in her homeland, and looks back at her past life in Iraq and Jordan, and traces her journey to the America. Vivid memories rise up, of her family, her friends, her poet-peers, her time working as a journalist, her mother who cooks feasts for the neighborhood, the death of her father–a warm, generous man who runs a restaurant and hotel–her love gained, then lost, then regained by chance; the bombings. “There never was a postwar literature in Iraq,” she writes. And of her wedding, after years of war-caused separation from her beloved: “I thought my wedding to Mazin / would be a magical event. / Instead, my dress was so long / I could hardly walk in it; the reception / was boring and the band was bad. / Everything was picked in a hurry / and criticized by our relatives. / The wedding was badly organized.” Like the pre-Islamic poet Shanfara, exiled from the tribe, Mikhail “joins the near end to the far.” Her ancestors are Catholic Chaldeans; she speaks Aramaic only with her mother; she is now a U.S. citizen and comes to us as the Recording Angel. I should also say she is an editor’s dream-poet to work with: whenever she visits the press, she brings us homemade klecha.

Pasternak equated exile with death, but as we know with every death there is rebirth, the possibility of a new home. In an interview on NPR Mikhail was asked if she saw her poetry as part of a healing process. She replied that she didn’t think poetry heals, but instead “keeps the wound open forever.” And with this opening of the wound, Mikhail has enriched our culture with her stories, her vast childlike imagination, her questionings, her lightness and humor; the spirit in her poetry deepening our understanding, enlarging our interior country–this is her reply to what prevails: “A wave breaking outside the sea,” she writes, “In this way I go on.”