Ammiel Alcalay

While reviewing Alcalay's latest book Islanders for Rain Taxi, this earlier book (2007) came to mind as relevant. So, I took it off the shelf for a quick re-read. How glad I am that I did, since Scrapmetal enriched my reading of Islanders while offering up its own independent pleasures. Pleasure is perhaps not the right word to describe what Alcalay affords readers, however. Engagement in history, memory, what one might call witness and responsibility in terms of poetry and literary prose would be more like it. In fact, Alcalay could serve as a model of the engaged writer/ activist. Since I am most often interested in learning and discovery when I read, rather than entertainment, I find Alcalay's books very satisfying. Scrapmetal is a collection of short documentary texts (How appropriate that it was published in a series aptly called Heretical Texts out from Factory School)both personal and historical. In this context, poems too are documents. The book opens with a posthumous letter to the poet Jack Spicer and ends with a poem ("my histories/ my vocabularies and my lexicons/ . . . maybe/ I'll find you somewhere in the dark:") In between are commentaries regarding the writing of Alcalay's own book, "from the warring factions," historical documents ("historical interludes") related to the Algerian Revolution and Viet Nam, appreciations and one depreciation (that of Albert Camus) of various writers, all interwoven with short segments entitled Work which note the many and various occupations that Alcalay engaged in on both coasts before he became a poet, translator, essayist, and official intellectual: house painter, auto mechanic and vintage car restorer, newspaper boy, snow-shoveler, roustabout, short-order cook, etc. A remark by one of the characters in Islanders that he never minded work could just as easily apply to the author himself.… (lisätietoja)