Palestinian-American poet and doctor Fady Joudah is the winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Young Poets competition.

There's that crack about poetry that, unless you work for Hallmark, you can't make a living at it. Which is why poets have day jobs, mostly teaching in colleges and universities.

The classroom can certainly be a site of pain, but poet Fady Joudah's day job involves contact with suffering of a more elemental sort. He's an emergency-room physician at Houston's Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.

He's also done two stints as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, in refugee camps in Africa. As a Palestinian-American, the son of refugees himself, there's a certain irony in that, not lost on the author. Joudah, in his poetry, writes about those who are stateless and those who suffer, and tries desperately to do it without condescension or false simplification.

He seems to be doing something right. He's the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Started in 1919 and open to poets younger than 40 who haven't published a book, it's the oldest annual literary award in the United States, and in the rarefied world of poetry it's a big deal — previous winners include such iconic figures as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander and W.S. Merwin.

A historic win

Joudah is the first physician and the first Arab-American to receive the honor. Yale University Press publishes the winning manuscript, which typically gets far more review attention than most first books of poetry. Joudah's The Earth in the Attic lands in bookstores this week.

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"It puts me in a happy state," Joudah said, when asked why, after a long day patching up vets or ministering to refugees, he distills experience into verse. "Even though my poems don't seem to be happy, I think I like to sing."

He and I are talking in the small living room of his apart-ment in Montrose. It's a fairly spare place, with simple furn-iture and a dining-room table that does double duty as his in-house office. In a back bedroom sleep his physician-wife, Hana el-Sahly, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, and the couple's newborn son. They also have a 10-year-old daughter.

It's Monday, Joudah's day off, and he's opted for lounging-around attire — khaki shorts, no shoes, loose-fitting shirt. At 37 he appears fit, skin taut over a handsomely shaped face. He's polite, accommodating and gentle-seeming in that way you want a doctor to be, especially when you're lying on an emergency-room gurney.

But as soon as he starts talking about his poetry you glimpse his intensity, a mix of pride and anxiety about his literary work. This, you sense, is a guy who wrestles with things in his head.

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