Word: rumi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More than 50 poems were submitted by House residents, from sonnets to haikus, by poets such as Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Sappho and Rumi...
...That's why, Lewis and others argue, in the New Age bookstores and yoga centers from Berlin to Los Angeles where Barks' and other modernized versions of Rumi have found such an enthusiastic following these days, a certain tension is often missing. Barks' versions, Lewis claims, "teleport the poems of Rumi out of their cultural and Islamic context into the inspirational discourse of non-parochial spirituality." Cut free from the ground of orthodox Islamic belief from which they grew, the Persian poet's lyrical reports from the outer fringes of mystical experience risk becoming mere souvenirs...
...Whether true or not in Rumi's case, it is a fate that has certainly befallen the words of many another Asian mystic imported to American shores. Having outgrown its old orthodoxies while remaining profoundly hungry for the spiritual nutrition they once provided, the Western world has for decades been culling through the most alluring and exotic blooms of Eastern poetry and philosophy in search of a "spirituality" completely unencumbered by the spiky thorns of "religion." From the Zen masters embraced by the Beats of the '50s, to the Hindu holy men momentarily adopted by the Beatles...
...Barks freely admits that his versions of Rumi aren't always accurate from an orthodox or scholarly angle any more than a linguistic one. But that, he insists, isn't really the issue. "How do you take a poem written long ago and far away and get it into a person's life today?" he asks. "The scholarly versions of these poems aren't the original either?they're just words pointing to an original we can't reach." It's a point that even Barks' harsher critics acknowledge. An Americanized Rumi who speaks to the hearts of hundreds...
...little embarrassed by the New Age," Barks says. "I want people just to stay with what they love, what they really know. I don't know why my own versions are so popular, but maybe?hopefully?it's because something is coming through and recognized as truthful." If Rumi himself were somehow zapped, robes and all, into the present day and given a look at the vast spiritual Starbucks where he is the most popular flavor of the moment, what would he make of it all? Very likely he would echo what Kabir Helminski, a practicing Sufi and another popular...