محمود درويش، وشاعرة نوبل البولندية فيسوافا شيمبورسكا، في عرض متعدد الفنون
Le poete palestinen M.Darwich et la polonaise Szymborska (Prix Nobel) à la projection "Inspiring cities"
Light projections by artist Jenny Holzer. An interesting fusion between light art, cityscape, and poems: the Polish Wislawa Szymborska and Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish.

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About the artist, Jenny Holzer:

Jenny Holzer (born 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio) is an American conceptual artist. She attended Ohio University (in Athens, OH), Rhode Island School of Design,
and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Holzer was originally an abstract artist, focusing on painting and printmaking,
but after moving to New York City in 1977, she began working with text as art.

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About the first author, Wislawa Szymborska:

“for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality"
Wis³awa Szymborska (born in 1923) is a Polish poet, essayist and translator. Honoured by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 and by numerous other
awards, she is generally considered the most important living Polish poet. In Poland, her books reach sales rivalling prominent prose authors — although
she once remarked in a poem entitled "Some like poetry" [Niektorzy lubi¹ poezje] that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art.
Szymborska frequently employs literary devices, such as irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement, to illuminate underlying philosophical themes and obsessions. Szymborska is a miniaturist, whose compact poems often conjure large existential puzzles. Although most of Szymborska's poems are barely a page in length, they often touch on issues of ethical import, reflecting on the condition of Man both as individual and member of human society.
Szymborska's style is marked by intellectual introspection, wit, and a succinct and stylish choice of words.
Szymborska's reputation rests on a relatively small body of work: she has not published more than 250 poems. As a person, she is often described as modest to the point of shyness. Long cherished by her Polish literary contemporaries (including Czes³aw Mi³osz), Szymborska became much better known
in international circles after her 1996 Nobel Prize. Szymborska's work has been translated into many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.

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About the second author, Mahmoud Darwish:

"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be
involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."
"We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions.

They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair."
Mahmoud Darwish (born 1941 in Al-Birwah, Palestine) is a contemporary Palestinian poet and writer ofprose. He has published over thirty volumes of poetry, eight books of prose and has served as the editor of several publications, including: Al-jadid, Al-fajr, Shu'un filistiniyya and Al-Karmel. He is
internationally recognized for his poetry, which focuses on his strong affection for his lost homeland. His work has won numerous awards, and has been published in at least twenty-two languages. The majority of his work has not been translated into English.
In the 1960s, Darwish joined the official Communist Party of Israel, the Rakah, but he is better known for his active work within the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation). Once a member of PLO Executive Committee, he resigned from the Committee and broke with the PLO in 1993 to protest the
continuation of the Oslo Accords.
Sarid, who was Israel's education minister, suggested in March 2000 that some of Darwish's poems should be included in the Israeli high school curriculum.
But Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared, "Israel is not ready."

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CityPoem 14 - London
London CityPoem: For the City

Light projections by artist Jenny Holzer. An interesting fusion between light art, cityscape, and poems: the Polish Wislawa Szymborska and Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish.

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The artist American artist Jenny Holzer was commissioned to present a series of poems to mark Samuel Beckett's centenary, as a part of of the Beckett Centenary Festival at the Barbican. Each night for 8 days she projected a number of poems against London landmarks, such as City Hall, Somerset House
on the Strand and the Barbican.
Writings from Beckett and a selection of works by celebrated poets, were cast as light projections onto well-known London landmarks, allowing light and text to flow over the cityscape, creating an extraordinary visual experience.
This series of light projections is part of a programme by Jenny Holzer called ‘For the City’, which took other cities too, such as New York (to be published on Inspiring Cities later).
In London, she projected poems by several poets. Presented today are the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
The Poem Projected in the above picture was written by the 1996 Nobel Prize winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Printed in bold is the text in the picture.

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The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From "No End of Fun", 1967

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The above poem from Fewer Roses (1986) is by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

He Embraced His Murderer

He embraces his murderer. May he win his heart: Do you feel angrier if I survive?
Brother...My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?
Two birds fly overhead. Why don't you shoot upwards? What do you say?
You grew tired of my embrace and my smell. Aren't you just as tired of the fear within me?
Then throw your gun in the river! What do you say?
The enemy on the riverbank aim his machine gun at an embrace? Shoot the enemy!
Thus we avoid the enemy's bullets and keep from falling into sin.
What do you say? You'll kill me so the enemy can go to our home
and descend again into the law of the jungle?
What did you do with my mother's coffee, with your mother's coffee?
What crime did I commit to make your destroy me?
I will never cease embracing you.
And I will never release you.
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http://www.inspiringcities.org/index.php?id=1&page_type=Article&id_article=18024
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Wislawa Szymborska photo by StadtwaldMahmoud Darwish محمود درويش: من ديوان-ورد أقل The above poem from Fewer Roses (1986) is by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. photo Phil Gyford