Walker Talks on Sufi poet Hafez

Walker Talks on Sufi poet Hafez

Hafez, the global poet, keeper of spinning planets in their places, dweller upon the threshold of taverns.  Hafez, the one of one mind with the one mind of all.  Hafez, who loses himself in the true self.  Hafez lived in Shiraz at the same time as Chaucer lived in England.  His command of the intricate poetic form known as "the ghazal", within which he compressed, like open secrets, the elusive signs and concepts of God's hands and God's eyes, is one-of-a-kind, in terms of world literature.  There is also Hafez the Sufi saint.  Well, not a saint exactly, though there are plenty of them.  More like a "rend" which means a mystic libertine, denouncing insincerity while gripped with all the perplexities that bedevil us, the common people, for whom he has made oracles.  Oracles and intricate simplicities. For us.