The Seattle globalist, by Paul Constant

Paul Constant

February 21, 2017

There comes a time in every poet’s life when they must set aside their lofty goals and get on down to the pressing business of fucking. I’m not talking about flowery love poems — I mean the kind of horny writing that drops all metaphor and imagery and makes it clear that genital-to-genital contact is about to happen.

The poems in the beginning of Maged Zaher’s new collection, Opting Out: Early, New & Collected Poems 2000 – 2015, are about as thirsty as poems can get. The third poem concludes, “well, the truth is, i was too drunk to unhook her bra/but we fucked anyway.” Elsewhere, he says “i drove to work/thinking of undressing you/only with my mouth.” The bra doesn’t stand for eternity, the mouth is not a clever use of synecdoche for Zaher’s work. This is a man who wants to get it on — joyfully, unapologetically, repeatedly.

There’s a particular pleasure to be found in these sorts of massive volumes that collect a poet’s work chronologically through the years: you can watch trends and fascinations come and go, you can see the work evolve and take on new shapes. About fifty pages after those early horndog poems, Zaher starts to drift into a new realm:

once you overstep your limit
and learn to follow

the best practices document

invite your friends over

to decipher cryptographic codes

and alleviate your failings

The poems still reverberate with lust, but corporate language has been introduced into the mix. This is a young man learning that there’s more to the world than just screwing and truth and beauty. Zaher’s writing regularly incorporates the language of a software engineer — he seems fascinated by the beige-wallpaper banality of workplace vocabulary. The early capital-R Romantic language, with all its yearning and preening, interacts strangely with the best practices documents and the presentations. He writes, “our software is healthy/and the lovers we left behind are calling us back.” What more, in the end, could a poet possibly desire?

Once the language of work insinuates itself into his purview, the third essential component of Zaher’s poetry introduces itself in short order: he begins to identify as a global citizen, as a revolutionary in love with “the wonderful world/the total fucking brilliant world.” He chides Canada for its “lame socialism,” but admits that “we envy” it just the same in the free market of the United States. And then he launches himself around the world.

will anyone contact me if I am lost
in mistakes? if I slip off the grid

and belong elsewhere? if I have to pack up

all over again and head to a place

that I would call a sort of home

Sydney, Seattle, Melbourne, Cairo…

From this point in Opting Out, Zaher bounces back and forth between Seattle and Cairo, holding meetings in coffee shops and reporting on what he sees. It’s a time of Arab Spring and Obama, of 9/11 and Mubarak, and you can see the dawning of Donald Trump’s American carnage off on the horizon if you squint. This is a poem from Cairo in 2012 that could just as easily be about a Black Lives Matter protest in America this year:

During street battles
It is considered appropriate to cuss

At the officer who fired the last

Tear gas canister

From the safety of his tank.

Everywhere you go on planet Earth, you’ll find men wearing too much armor cracking the heads of poor people at the behest of a small but powerful upper class. Those animatronic sons of bitches in Orlando were right: it is a small world, after all.

Zaher’s poems are short, unadorned with titles and epigraphs. To a careless reader, they can seem like a jumble of disconnected lines, but that reflects the schisms in his life — from an awkward conversation about a TV show in a Seattle nightclub with a disinterested woman to an earnest discussion about socialism in a Cairo café, Zaher is comfortable everywhere, and nowhere. In Seattle’s fluorescent glow, he is a revolutionary, but in the less ironic light of Cairo he is a soft engineer.

For a time, Zaher felt rootless. But at a recent reading to celebrate the launch of Opting Out, he announced that he was moving to Atlanta to be with his son. He insisted that though he was leaving Seattle for a few years, he would be back. He was surprised as anyone to learn that he would miss the city. “Cairo is home,” he told the crowd at Arundel Books, “and Seattle is home.”

Books in this review:

Opting Out

by Maged Zaher

Chatwin Books
February 15, 2017
431 pages

Provided by publisher
Buy on IndieBound

The Seattle globalist

Paul Constant

About the writer

Other recent reviews

Talk about the weather

Paul Constant

The man show

Paul Constant

Accidentally honest

Paul Constant