Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi Poems

"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."(William Blake) A cooly impassioned, and "pathward" adventurous series of poems joining two modes of enlightenment, Buddhist and Sufi, that may in many ways be parallel-from my sitting with saintly Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 60s, and my blessed time with Qutb Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez in Meknes, Morocco, in the 1970s, may Allah be pleased with both of them. Are the two protagonists of these poems the main characters in Waiting for Godot, now no longer waiting, but there? Exalted humor lightens our spiritual endeavors.

SALT PRAYERS / POEMS, a tangy and rich chronological collection of poems ranging from molecular flakes to imaginal scalings of rare and lofty mountains, written between May 29 -- October 24, 1998 by the poet of Dawn Visions (City Lights, 1964), Burnt Heart (City Lights, 1972), The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company (1967-69), The Desert is the Only Way Out, The Chronicles of Akhira (Zilzal Press), The Ramadan Sonnets (Jusoor/City Lights, 1996), The Blind Beekeeper (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2002) and The Ecstatic Exchange Series, beginning with Mars & Beyond, and Laughing Buddha Weeping Sufi (2005).

Medina Tenour Whiteman stands at the margins of whiteness and Islam. An Anglo-American born to Sufi converts, she feels perennially out of place--not fully at home in Western or Muslim cultures. In this searingly honest memoir, Whiteman contemplates what it means to be an invisible Muslim, examining the pernicious effects of white Muslim privilege and exploring what Muslim identity can mean the world over--in lands of religious diversity and cultural insularity, from Andalusia, Bosnia and Turkey to Zanzibar, India and Iran. Through her travels, she unearths experiences familiar to both Western Muslims and anyone of mixed heritage: a life-long search for belonging and the joys and crises of inhabiting more than one identity.

This high adventure, in loosely metered heroic couplets, follows Abdallah Jones on his quest to capture the ball of disappearing-dust from the mad Sorcerer and stop the destruction of the world. He has been given the task by his Sufi shaykh, which takes him to the SorcererâÂÂs castle, where he meets Marbug the elf, Neptune, the King of the Jinn, and a collection of sweet and evilly dangerous characters along the way with more cliff-hangers and near-deaths than anyone but Abdallah should have to endure â and finally to Madina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him, his shaykh and people from the âÂÂUmma of Islam from all over the world, and a marvelous solution to the whole caper. Black and white illustrations throughout by the author illuminate the text.

Poetic inspiration continues to be a mystery to me, but I am its deep advocate, and hold to its irrational and shady acreage like a greedy real estate developer gazing out over the possibilities (a ramshackle hut here, a barn there, a castle with a lake yonder...). Is it angels, djinn, my black cat curled at the bottom of my bed while I'm hot in composition mode? My "unconscious," "God Consciousness?" (my fervent prayer).

THE MUSIC SPACE, written in 2001, is a series of poems most acutely attuned to the sounds of our universe, composed for the most part while traveling back and forth to New York, unexpectedly ending with the world-transforming events of 9/11, completing in an apocalyptic way an unforeseen circle. This is the music space where music is most difficult this place of joy and horror. I think the music of the spheres can be heard in this space. And the original sound is the sound of God alone audible to Himself and we are the humming elements of that sound.

COATTAILS OF THE SAINT - is a collection of poems which chase after the coattails of sanctity, in this world with its "meanings set up as images" (a Sufi definition of what we take around us as reality), and those souls living among us right now and forever who have had bestowed upon them that dimension of sanctity which sets them apart while making them at the same time true human beings. Imagination has given these poems a "saintly" thread, with no particular saint in any traditional pantheon meant, but rather that essence of simple sainthood of which we are all (God willing) capable.

I IMAGINE A LION - Poems in the devotional visionary tradition of Blake, Rumi, Christopher Smart, McClure. Ecstatic recognitions from both within and without our heartfelt common cosmic consciousness. "In the forest of matter so tightly meshed you/can't see the weave/I imagine a lion./Sometimes it's a table, sometmes it's chairs./Lion eyes out of the dark./Lion purrs when silence descends."