Introduction by Jim Moore

As soon as I began reading Abdellatif Laâbi in 2013, after a trip to Morocco, his work and life became an obsession and I quickly read everything in English by and about him that I could f ind. In addition to his poems I discovered his memoir, The Bottom of the Jar (Archipelago Books, 2013), which recounts what it was like to grow up in the medina of Fez, a book that is key to understanding Laâbi’s working life as a writer. It was in Fez that he began writing in French – the language that was forced upon him in school, but a language to which he gave himself willingly. This split between Arabic and French mirrored a split in his own soul. But like many such tears in the fabric of a life, it has also been a source of much that is most forceful in his writing.

Today when I look at the landscape of poetry being written in English, what I often miss is that sense of absolute necessity in the work, a feeling that ‘it is not a matter of choice’ for the poet to be writing his or her work. There are signif icant exceptions to this, of course; for example, many poets of colour publishing today in the United States are writing work that is alive with a need not to be ‘smothered by history’. This work is exhilarating, inspiring, and challenging. Nevertheless, the great majority of contemporary poetry feels almost lackadaisical compared to Laâbi’s. As if it is a kind of afterthought. It is frequently smart, cleverly self referential; but too often essentially empty. There are certainly exceptions. I think of Jack Gilbert, for example, whose work has that feeling of necessity about it. As does Adrienne Rich’s and Larry Levis’s, to mention two others.

I wish Abdellatif Laâbi had been with me, some forty years ago, when I was in prison! Laâbi and I were almost exactly the same age, and halfway across the world from each other the Moroccan poet and I were doing time. It was the early 1970s, a period when around the world men and women – even xi INTRODUCT ION