Q: In the past few years, poetry sales have reportedly been climbing, perhaps because a poem appeals to shortened attention spans.

A: That’s true. It doesn’t take so long to read a poem, and if you need a quick fix or consolation, you can get it.

For a while now I've been considering Assassin's Gate, George Packer's book about his time in occupied Iraq. Yesterday I noticed the following quote at the beginning of the prologue:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.
- Nizar Qabbani

I almost bought the book on that alone.

Andrew Bacevich also found this noteworthy:

As the epigraph for his new book on the politics of America's intervention in Iraq, George Packer has chosen a verse by the Arab nationalist poet Nizar Qabbani: "Dive into the sea, or stay away." The poet's charge aptly captures the thesis of The Assassins' Gate: a great enterprise requires unequivocal commitment; to act halfheartedly is worse than not acting at all.

I am reminded of Rita Katz:

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

Bacevich concludes his review on a dour note:

Sometimes the effect of diving into the sea is anything but cleansing.

Well Versed: Questions for John Ashbery