Eight days after September 11, 2001, Semezdin Mehmedinović, a Bosnian national who first came to the United States five years earlier as a political refugee, took a train ride from the East Coast to the West & back again, traversing the United States twice in a period of just ten days. “Nine Alexandrias,” the title sequence of the book by the same name, is the result.

At one level, “Nine Alexandrias” is a sonnet sequence, a form normally accorded to love poetry. But there are so many other layers here – the classic American genre of the road trip, a nation in emotional disarray, Mehmedinović’s status not just as an immigrant (itself a major trope of American writing) but also as a European Muslim during a period in which that spiritual category was itself taking on an entire range of new, terrible, largely simplistic & stereotypical connotations for many Americans – that to call this a sonnet sequence misses the mark entirely. Rather, Mehmedinović has chosen a form precisely because, as in the work of Jack Spicer, that which appears “simple” & “lyric” can in the same moment also be “limitless” & “infinite,” not in the Montana Big Sky sense, but rather something closer to Dante, infinite darkness, infinite depth. Here, for example, is “Open Dialogue,” unique in this series only in its large number of stanzas:

“What are you reading”

“Poems by Jallaludin Rumi, a
Poet born in Afghanistan.”

“Where are you from?”

“Bosnia.”

“Serbs and Croats, right? Is anyone else there?”

“There are others.”

“What color are your eyes?”

“Green till Colorado
But since we passed Apache Canyon
They’re blue in the
New Mexico light.”

“So then what kind of Muslim are you?”

“White.”

To call this a sonnet mostly is to call that genre into question. At least formally, “Pound” would seem to be closer to the historic form:

I don’t know the name of the place
With the local radio station on the cliff
The neon sign with its frequency numbers rising
High in the night, almost to the sky.

It must mean the American interior still harbors the
Early notion of building the ruler’s temple as high as
Possible – a vertical optical illusion playing
On human and divine perspective.

In Washington this kind of attitude’s been allotted the
Nicest plateau in front of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
There, as an old man
(Since he’d committed to the asylum for reading on Italian radio)

Ezra Pound surveyed the city in the ravine,
His lion’s mane waving in the wind.

There are several things going on here worth noting. Most notable at first is the use of enjambment, especially at the end of the first lines of the second and third stanzas, but also the second line of the second stanza as well. How much of this is Mehmedinović & how much is his English translator Ammiel Alcalay, I can’t tell, but someone here is deliberately rushing us through these strophes to get us to the last stanza, the moment at which the referential stream of notions comes finally into focus. More interesting is the way the two major instances of metaphor – ruler’s temple, lion’s mane – play out in the poem. The first occurs in the one line in the text that is bounded on both sides by enjambment – which is to say that the reader’s ability to pause on ruler’s temple is made as difficult as possible. The term is then contextualized as an illusion, an explanation that deliberately drains the life of the image. But the second metaphor works in just the opposite way, as the poem literally ends on the image of Pound’s red hair wild & flowing in his St. Elizabeth’s period (where, as best I can tell from photographs, it had more or less already gone white). Is Pound literally being lionized? It’s hard to imagine, especially given the cues that come up ahead of it – Hospital, old man, committed, asylum – even if Pound’s anti-Semitic harangues themselves are oddly neutralized into “reading on Italian radio.”

The question of the Second World War & American poetry comes up again even more ambiguously in “After Spicer / (LA 9/22),” which reads:

I’ve already been sitting in the garden at the café
For hours before I spread the book out in front of me
Jack Spicer’s Language
So I can transmit what I’ve just read like it was
News, not something that
Happened half-a-century back:

“The 50 penny German postage stamp
Depicts a small chapel and an oak:
If you look real closely
You can see Hitler’s face come together in the crown of the tree,
And at the Bundespost the Reichmeister says:

We know what it is we’ve designed and it doesn’t represent Hitler.
It doesn’t speak very well for the German people
If they see Hitler everywhere.”

This quoted passage is, more or less literally, a translation back into English of the ninth poem from the sequence “Graphemics” by Spicer. More or less literally because only the last two lines are Spicer’s text word for word (not, however, line break for line break). While one might read the first six lines of this quotation or appropriation – Spicer himself would have approved of this theft – as a condensation of the original as when, after the word stamp at the end of the first line of Spicer’s, the parenthetical phrase (a grapheme to / to be paid for and cancelled) is eliminated. However, after the word tree (this quotation already gives its details in a very different order than does Spicer), comes a lengthier passage that has also been cut:

Graphemes should not be looked at
              so minutely.     The
Forest for the trees.     The kisses for
              the love.     The
Oakman grows behind every chapel.
The fine
Print on the contract.
God gives us that.

Strangely enough, looking minutely at the graphemes here is exactly what I’m doing. Is this simply excess baggage of Spicer’s that Mehmedinović slashes from his text so that he can end up with the requisite 14 lines? Is this material he doesn’t want us to think about? Or is its absence, like the use of a translation of his translation, rather than a pure return to Spicer’s original words, an active element of the text? This is not the first time in Mehmedinović’s series that the question of translation arises. In the poem immediately prior to “Pound,” entitled “Sufism,” Mehmedinović writes of Coleman Bark’s rendering of Rumi:

Initiates go so far as to claim the translations
Matches the original and that, in line with this,
Sufism is available here in a southern drawl.

There are any number of other lines one could trace here – for instance between Mehmedinović’s poem about the death of JFK and Spicer’s famous “Smoke signals/Like in the Eskimo villages….” Or the use of the word tower coming so soon after the fall of the World Trade Center, as in

Beauty towers – Japanese –
Like snow over Denver

also from “Sufism,” or, from a later poem,

I’m going west but there’s an endless series of
Towers to the east, electric grid like Eiffel’s, facing Paris

Or the multiple poems that refer not to travel, trains, destinations, but to prison life? And what does it mean for somebody who writes of antifascism to focus on Pound & Spicer, two of the more anti-Semitic poets in recent American literature? Where is the point between reading and reading into, projecting one’s own subtext over this language?

There are also two other, shorter series in Nine Alexandrias, each very nearly as dense in their web of reference & implication. Unlike the earlier Sarajevo Blues, this book clearly is about Mehmedinović’s new country, but it’s a country with a difficult history, and comes at a difficult time. The confusions that might abound in a nation in which “there are at least nine cities … called Alexandria” are not to be passed over, nor muted. Mehmedinović is willing to look at everything and does so without blinking.