Invocations to Retire from the Sweetly Blown Trumpet of Lies by El Habib Louai

Invocations to Retire from the Sweetly Blown Trumpet of Lies by El Habib Louai

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The poems included in Invocations to Retire from the Sweetly Blown Trumpet of Lies, El Habib Louai’s third collection, span the tumultuous period extending from 2021 to 2026. Louai explains “Most of them were composed during the height of the COVID19 pandemic when I lived in a cluttered, but homely apartment— at least by my Moroccan bohemian standards— in a small village on the Atlantic coast. I was not self-isolating there as much as I was enjoying the freedom of movement that was not attainable by the residents of the metropole and its environs. In the village, I would still ride my bike up and down the surrounding hills. Late in the evening, after my scenic road trip to the Atlantic to catch the sunset, I would return to my place, put on some John Coltrane, Mile Davis, Sonny Rollins or Chet Baker, and let my mind gently untether. The poems would barrel down memory lane and come to me in recollections of things I have seen, felt and heard. I would write them spontaneously in the tradition of Jack Kerouac who embraced an improvisational approach to creative writing, accentuating raw, unfiltered subconscious flow over deliberate craft. As Kerouac recommended in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” I sought to capture the rhythm of everyday speech and immediate experience of the daily life.

Thematically speaking, the poems included in this collection continue to deal with the intricacies of the human condition with its universal, often paradoxical experiences that define our existence. They are in a constant quest for meaning, in a persistent struggle to maintain ideal individual morality and empathy while navigating a complex, often flawed world where humans are shaped by the institutions, political systems, and cultures they build. In doing so, the poems do not search for static origins but strive to navigate, in the words of the Martinican philosopher and writer Édouard Glissant, the restless, interdependent world (Tout-Monde), where the role of poetry is “to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash” (Allen Ginsberg). The poems in this collection denounce brutality, oppression and exploitation inflicted by supposedly democratic governments on individuals struggling under the yoke of capitalist imperialism and historical amnesia. They deal with socioeconomic disparities in a techno-globalized world where humans are mere laborers or consumers who wage wars (psychological and military) against each other, resulting in modern-day exodus, cultural displacement and new forms of discrimination. Additionally, the poems in this collection dwell on issues having to do with the current environmental catastrophes and call for a renewed awareness that puts the ecosystem and its various species in the center instead of extolling a blind infatuation with the Anthropocene.  Finally, while connecting with a previous tradition that exists in the Americas, the poems call for a return to the alternative ways of living as shown by drawing attention to the sane lifestyle of indigenous cultures, the Amazigh in North Africa as an example.”

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 108
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: August 11, 2026
  • ISBN  978-1-962847-59-9

Praise

“El Habib Louai’s poems sit with us in the present, and lead us through the collage-logic of dreams. We’re joined by spirits of animals, rocks, and trees; we smell the cigarettes and riverbanks, sip coffee, ask questions, hear birds and insects and neighbors, feel the sun. The dialogue between old and new is broad and psychedelic. Our ancestors are checking on us.” —Lori Goldston,  American cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer, & teacher  

“A Beat wanderer blowing lines of cool jazz across the Sahara sands, the Atlas Mountains, the streets  of Morocco, of Europe, coast to coast ghost to ghost across the USA, El Habib Louai, telling it like it is  in this cataclysmic age of change, is one of the best poets on this blue green planet, and his new  Invocations to Retire from The Sweetly Blown Trumpet of Lies, A Collection of Poems is a masterpiece.” —Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate, cross-cultural collaborator

“Here is a poet who has absorbed the free-wheeling insouciance of the Beat Generation and refitted it at a more sophisticated level suitable for the 21st century.  If you doubt that aesthetic values and political critique are compatible, this book will demonstrate how it can be done, with warmth and verbal dynamism.” —Alfred Corn, prize-winning American poet, essayist, novelist, educator, & translator

“They want you to pretend you hear the angels sing in heavens /To stop picking your despicable nose /To stop biting your delicious nails /& feel a blooming spring in a gloomy winter …/Kill your favorite sturdy roaches.” Channeling the rebellious fury of Allen Ginsberg’s expansive lines, the melancholy of John Coltrane’s rich mournful saxophone onto a north African landscape, where the Amazigh with African roots reside, El Habib Louai creates a poetry of great lyrical beauty – songs of the “insulted” which, in a stunning reversal of spiritual self-assertion, claims favorites among roaches and discovers the sweetness in dirty nails. Who says political poetry can only be intellectual and ironic in our time, and not directly slice to the heart? As an American poet with roots in Turkey and Turkish poetry, Invocations to Retire from the Sweetly Blown Trumpet of Lies by El Habib Louai also leads me to look at the entirety of the Beat Movement in an entirely new light, realizing its political relevance beyond its strictly American borders.” —Murat Nemet-Nejat, an acclaimed Turkish American poet, translator, essayist & editor

Excerpt

Stoned on Ritualistic Bullshit (Revisited)
(For Angela Davis)
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” ― Angela Y. Davis

They will all tell you, one by one, when you cross them,
collectively or individually, in court lobbies or hotel
lounges, in schools or inside mosques…
They will tell you only what they tell you, in their
Abyssinian rhetoric of generational apology
They will tell you the same old bullshit they vomited
before,
and after the great flood of the great bullshit out of the
great bowels into this great fucked up world of ours,
they will tell you only what they tell you:
You shall praise your dear Lord night and day
for having granted you the ease of breathing through
one nostril
You shall praise your dear Lord night and day
for having sent enough sugar and mint tea,
for bringing sour milk and wheat couscous to your table
You shall praise your dear Lord night and day
for the free birds that have not yet frozen
You shall praise your dear Lord night and day
for those who have not yet been gassed in their
chambers,
for the sky that still abundantly pisses on your patches,
for the army that still reluctantly protects you!

I do not blame you
Priests of the unconscious
have turned you all, one by one,
into widowed Mona Lisas with mustaches
& there you sit in penumbras
plunged into the noise of your flesh,
afraid of lawyers’ offices, psychiatrists’ couches,
and the neighborhood police
Did you decide to die the death
of a taintless mayor?
The one who promised to wash
the neighborhood of its despair?
Did you decide to befriend the treasurer who fattened
his stepchildren on Urban Household Finances?
Or did you surrender to the bachelor accountant who
clipped
our foliage with his economy of mystical needs?
I do not blame you
for having loosened your ties
when your representatives offer tailored intellect
How many of you became gay for pay
& sat in the corners of love waiting
for a bridge to the other side?
How many of you drank embryonic hopes in a café au
lait cup?
How many of you slept on post-strike discussions
to wake up with another historical hangover?

They will tell you, one by one, what
only they can tell you—
Do not bother with poems in late December
or roam the vagrant streets of life
Read torn newspapers in a strange town
& drink your spicy cinnamon coffee
They want you to pretend you are used to the explosions
& celebrate your exhaustion.
Who would recognize you after all?!

Author

El Habib Louai is a Moroccan Amazigh poet, translator, musician, and assistant professor of English Literature and Poetics at Ibn Zohr University in Agadir, Morocco. He is a contributing member of The European Beat Studies Network. Louai has been awarded the Aimee Grunberger scholarship by Naropa University to participate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics creative writing program. His articles, poems, and Arabic translations of Beat writers have appeared in several literary magazines, journals, and reviews such as World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Fifth Estate Magazine, ArabLit Quarterly, Beatdom, Brittle Paper, The Lowell Review, The Markaz Review, Souffles Monde, Big Bridge Magazine, Jadaliyya, Al Doha, Arrafid, Al Faisal and Nizwa. Louai has published two collections of poems: Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar. His Arabic translations include The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, edited by Norman Minnick, Michael Rothenberg’s Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story; America, America: An anthology of the Beat Poetry; Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain; Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Louai’s Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar was shortlisted for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry in 2020.

Additional information

Weight 7.8 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × .375 in