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[Alcalay continues]... I published an anthology called Keys to the Garden, featuring writers born in Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, India, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Israel, and other places, with the hope that some of these writers might get "discovered" and get their books published in translation - out of 24 writers in the anthology, I think only three have managed to break out of this very constrained space they've been relegated to. One of them, Shimon Ballas, a superb novelist now in his 70s and originally from Baghdad, will have a novel coming out from City Lights next year that I am translating with the Israeli writer Oz Shelach. Oz is an interesting case in that he switched to writing in English; his first book, Picnic Grounds, is a brilliant demonstration of how a double alienation in language sometimes allows new things to be revealed; feeling, in some sense, that he had to "get out" of Hebrew in order to interrogate the constituent and inherited ideological elements of the language, Oz explores the sites of childhood picnics in parks built over the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages. Shimon Ballas, on the other hand, switched from Arabic to Hebrew, but his use of Hebrew is one that tries to shed the ideological baggage and apparatus within the language itself, bringing it syntactically closer to Arabic. Shimon was recently featured in a fascining documentary film by a Swiss Iraqi filmaker whose name is Samir - the film, Forget Baghdad, features other Iraqi Jewish writers who were involved in leftist politics in Iraq, most significantly Samir Naqqash, a genius who unfortunately died last summer. Samir Naqqash was the last significant Jewish writer to continue writing in Arabic and his work is featured in Keys to the Garden along with an interview that I did with him in the 1990s.

LRS: One difference between the writers that you mention and contemporary poets in the United States is, in my view at least, the question of what constitutes the political. Are Americans misguided in distinguishing between "political poetry" and other forms? Are they misreading poets like Darwish when they read him as a writer whose primary interests or themes are political ones? In other countries and for writers living under duress, it seems as though such distinctions might not exist.

Alcalay: Absolutely, I think you are absolutely right in how you phrase this. The difference, I think, is that here there is the illusion that "politics don't matter" to certain segments of the population, that some people have the luxury to pretend politics don't exist, the world is ordered simply as it is, generally to their advantage. This serves as an excellent class barrier, making it very clear who belongs where, what lines of legitimacy will be drawn and so on and so forth. I was somewhat flabbergasted to see in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine a story about a young novelist who got a $500,000 advance for his first novel and a $1 million advance for his second. I even know the literary agent in question. Now when phenomena like this exist, there must be a reason behind it, and there must be - whether conscious or not - a complex set of social, political and economic mechanisms at work. Being much more used to great writers who have generally been on the brink of poverty, something I would never romanticize, I have to see the current overpayment of a select group of writers as a kind of attempt to glut the market and create a kind of useless commodity out of writing - something apparently necessary but, like a VCR that programs 2 years in advance, actually useless.

The kind of writing I'm more used to is, first and foremost, a necessity for the writer - as such, it can become a necessity for its readers. The audience for this kind of writing tends to be smaller in number. Again, I would never promote an elitist view either. I have no problem with writers working for large audiences. I think someone like Stephen King is actually a terrific writer, and a necessary one, who I know has a more conscious and active politics towards writing than many of the more elitist types who might identify a Stephen King as the problem, something I once had a dispute with Susan Sontag about. In terms of writers from other places, obviously we read them reductively by only focusing on the political conditions out of which they write. For someone like Darwish, this has been a central problem that a lot of his writing from the past 20 years addresses directly.

LRS: I'd like to get back to some individuals and experiences you mentioned in your first response as indirect influences on your writing and your sense of place: Mr. Chase, the longshoremen at the laundromat, the head of the Mennonite Center in Jerusalem. What is the difference between locating inspiration in these people and the experiences that surround them, as opposed to, say, citing your first encounter with a W.C. Williams poem?

Alcalay: I don't really see a difference. My experience of encountering Spring & All is as real to me as anything, sometimes more so. The same goes for everything I remember reading in a formative sense, whether it was Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Patchen, Emily Dickinson, or Sappho. Like music you hear, places you see, or people you meet and become attached to or learn something from, these early reading experiences are crucial. While I have stressed the experiential, I think reading is an encounter that can be life changing, consciousness changing, absolutely necessary for sustenance. Robert Duncan at some point is speaking about a critic who relies on taste, and I'm going to paraphrase this from Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum, one of the truly essential literary histories we have of post World War II American poetry: "Since he has no other conceivable route to knowledge of that work, taste must suffice. But I can have no recourse to taste," Duncan says, adding that the work of Olson, Levertov and others "belongs not to my appreciations but to my immediate concerns in living." The key, I think, is not to make the separation - books are part of the world, while un-branded, unexpected, non-commodified experience is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Ironically, books and poems may still serve as some of the surest pathways back into experience, and back into the values of experience.