On Syria's salon

Syria, like America, is not entirely comfortable with poetry. But its situation is a tad more dire than ours, according to NYU professor Sinan Antoon, who is quoted in this New York Times article about a Damascus poetry series.

“Many of the cafes which used to be literary and cultural nodes have closed down — especially in Beirut — or have been transformed because of gentrification"....Poets often have to pay publishers to carry their work and rarely receive royalties. “The culture ministries in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are a caricature of what they should be. Beyond the Internet, where hundreds of sites exist for publishing, young poets don’t have many outlets or forums.”

Enter Bayt al-Qasid, a cafe whose weekly poetry salons have attendees lining up hours before readings begin. Poets "take risks, reading works by exiled poets or flirting with risky political subjects," the article reports.

But the point of the evening is not insubordination, [host Lukman] Derky insists. “We don’t do things because they are forbidden,” he says. “The night is about freedom.” That may explain why it has survived for more than two years now, in full view of a government that has little stomach for dissent.

The night is also about hearing new voices -- rather than the popular writers who have been publishing for decades. And it's about inviting foreigners to read, too. Their work gets translated on the spot from Berber, Greek, or Spanish. (At one point a  Syrian poet, translating from English, "somehow managed to quickly interpret the line 'when you see that kestrel pinioned on its wing-bone.'")

Mr. Derky says that “to know others is to read their poetry....Bayt al-Qasid is a place for the others.”