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Poetic Profile

Kazim Ali

General Questions

1. Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I was born in London England, then moved quickly to Canada for several years, then after that to the States. I have always always always been a reader even from before I could read. I would open books (without pictures) and pretend to read them to my older sister’s dolls, and then later to my younger sister.

We would listen to Qura’an recitations, but in Arabic, and also to sung poems in Urdu—so the earliest poetry to me was rhythm and sound but without meaning. A beautiful way w think) to begin.

2. Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

Some of my favorite painters are Hans Hofmann, Agnes Martin, Farouk Hosny, Nicolas DeStael, George Braque—I think Agnes Martin is really amazing. Her work is so breath-taking, so personal, so intimate—when you stand in front of one you can’t even move. You just stand there and stare. It’s mesmerizing. She said somewhere that her paintings are like the beach you have to walk across to get to the ocean. And I am just humbled and shamed by the courage and patience it took for her to work those giant canvases so slowly, slow deliberately, so intently.

Some poets I find very important to me: Jean Valentine, Fanny Howe, Gilian Conoley, Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Lucille Clifton, Meena Alexander, Myung Mi Kim. It’s a long and eclectic list and I could fifty more names to that.

Gilian Conoley had a new book out this year called Profane Halo and I was waiting for it like you wait for a new record album. I finally got it and read the first three lines of the first poem and it was like: Wow—I could never even think that until she wrote it and I read it. That’s special to me.

Also I have to mention that Yoko Ono, as a writer, a visual artist, a performance artist, and also deeply and profoundly as a musician and social activist, has been a tremendous influence on me. She has a song called “Mulberry” on her latest full-length album Blueprint for a Sunrise which really sums it all up! I have every single album Yoko’s ever made and I completely do not get people’s manic dismissals of her music. People want Britney Spears I guess. Here’s a dream project: a double album: first disc is Bjork cover Yoko Ono tunes, second disc is Yoko covering Bjork tunes. If people could hear that, they would get it..

3. When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?

Well, when I started serious creative writing (as in I had a mission to publish books and devote my life to “being a writer”) it was fiction that I was writing. As I was nuts on Nin, Duras, and all this French theory at the time (Barthes mostly), I was writing these little fragmented, bits and pieces kinds of novels that were topping out at 60-80 pages. At some point along the way I started political organizing and began writing performance-oriented poetry. After years of reading and writing it just became an easy daily thing—my poems changed tremendously of course but I still find them strongly performative, strongly political.

I always tried to write fiction but it always came out in bits and pieces, very impressionistic. It wasn’t until after I read Carole Maso’s book of essays Break Every Rule (and then quickly everything else she’d ever written) that I realized the form of the “novel” is a form of infinite possibilities—I wrote several notebooks of material before finally writing the first draft of what eventually became my first novel Quinn’s Passage; a novel, in fact, that I had been trying to write since my earliest days in political organizing! It’s funny how you ‘get permission’ to write a certain way or do a certain thing. I owe that book to Carole Maso!

4. Where were you educated? Was this important?

I started the University at Albany as a political science major and then took a folklore class with Judith Johnson, an amazing poet who wrote The Ice Lizard and the Cities of Mathematics and Desire. She used to dress up in a gorilla suit and recite poetry, very performance oriented, but she also put us through our paces—I had to learn iambic pentameter and sonnets and sestinas, and not only those but harder forms too—by the time Judy Johnson was done with me I could write anapestic hexameters in my sleep.

So I switched and finished my English major there but then actually became an organizer with a statewide group fighting for increased funding for public higher education. I did political work for about four years and then I sort of dropped out, moved to Buffalo (where my folks still live) and hooked up with the very vibrant local literary scene there. Folks at the Just Buffalo Literary Center were just amazing—I started teaching workshops to the community but also started doing school residencies. I just felt, after being in that community, that I wanted to enter an MFA program, which I did, at New York University.

I always wanted to do something crazy and opposite of what everyone else was doing. Two teachers I just could not shock were Mark Doty and Marie Ponsot. Mark gave me a copy of Ronald Johnson’s big book-poem Ark. He was like: listen if you want to write poetry that privileges the music of language of specific syntactic meaning you really need to read this book. When I said that I was an experimental poet Marie Ponsot got upset with me. She said, “My dear, to say “experimental” is to imply that you are just screwing around. This isn’t an “experiment”—this is your work!.” That really stuck with me.

I worry about my penchant to be bad—if I had been at an MFA program like Bard or Brown maybe I would have written confessional narratives instead?

I’m making fun of myself when I say stuff like that. Form and my “form-al” education are so important to me. I write in meter—disjunctive manic meter perhaps, but meter nonetheless. And in terms of form, most of my most recent book is in couplets. It’s shocking really.

5. Mysticism is normally a problem in the poetry world since most poets are cynic hipsters how do you overcome this reality?

I couldn’t do without it—I overcome the cynicism of reality I guess by not being aware of it—my belief in a Creator and the interconnectedness of all things, and the inevitable eventual occurrence of my own joining with all of it seems so much at the heart of my living awareness I can’t quite fathom what it would be like to not have this belief.

6. How does your formation and ethnicity color your poetry? Would you say you are a Muslim? How is Muslim poetry for you different than other poetry?

I will always say I am a Muslim. The word “islam” is derived from the same word as “salaam”—it means peace. This is a religion that teaches you how to live peacefully with other people. The word “muslim” means someone who submits to the will of Allah. So of course since I believe there is Allah I would necessarily submit to the Will of That. Here’s always the catch: who decides the nature of Allah, what That want—what is the “will of Allah”? Everyone can say there own thing. Islam has always been a religion without priests. In the Qura’an it says, “Who is he that can intercede with [Allah] without His permission?” meaning there is no one between you and God; nothing to show you the way, nothing but you in the night in the silence. That’s powerful to me. Nothing contradicts this for me, no matter what disagreements I might have with other Muslims about religion, politics, lifestyle, I will always be a Muslim.

Certainly I think both my upbringing as a Muslim and my cultural background as an Indian and an American have influenced my writing. My recent book The Far Mosque sort of obliquely looks at some of the philosophical dramas that have played themselves out as a result of being a “nowhere man”—growing up East but in the West. My current unpublished manuscript The Fortieth Day probably deals with these issues slightly more directly, but I am not really a narrative poet so even when I say “directly” it sort of means some else—another hallmark of traditional Islamic art and writing, by the way—a sort of poetic misdirection…

7) What is your favorite food?

I really love seitan. Also hot lime coconut soup. Anything Indian and savory. Really all Asian cuisine—Korean, Thai, Vietnamese. Yum yum yum. I am a vegetarian. When I eat eggs I have to eat them from happy cage-free, steroid free chickens. It’s really important. K. Pattabhi Jois, the teacher of Astanga Yoga, said that the most important yogic practice was vegetarianism.

8) Sports team or Activity?

I’m not a sports watcher at all. I also don’t understand very much the culture of watching sports. I have practiced yoga for the last six years. I also run long distances. Once I ran in races and collected medals but I got a little manic about it. Now I just run. Also I used to dance with a modern dance company, studied various forms of dance, including ballet, for several years. The body as a moving object is a beautiful thing. Dance was very much a part of my writing process as was yoga.

9) Vacation spot.

I would go back to the rocky beaches of Cassis—linger there for a few days before taking the bus to Marseille. Catch the night boat to Corsica and then—I think that’s where I would stay: land in Ajaccio, on to Calvi, Corti, Bastia, the cape, then to the south. There’s a trail that goes from the southeast across the heart of Corsica and ends in Calvi. It’s long and arduous and I would have to recover there—languidly, writing poems on the beach—for weeks! Then of course back to Paris to meet my cousin Hyder and spend several more weeks. Well that’s one scenario. There are so many places in the world I would like to go, so many places I haven’t been.

10) Curse word.

I like it when the snarly villains wring there hands and say “Curses! Foiled again!”

Craft Questions

1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

I guess I would say organic—but you know it is strongly informed by all those years of education in the forms and meters—Judy Johnson and then later Agha Shahid Ali, demanding that I learn this stuff. For me a poem starts as notes. The notes accrete and accrete. Usually there is a long gestation period. The Far Mosque took me three years to write but in that was a period of nearly a year when I didn’t even look at it. That year was near the very end—a year of silence and then a series of dramatic revisions. I’m writing poems in groups now—adding pages to a folder that is labeled “My second book.” They hang out in there and then I can add a word or line—a long slow process of being written.

2. Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

I write both poetry and fiction in long hand, prose in spiral notebooks, poetry on loose leaf paper. In regular ball point pen. I like to sit outside, but I also love writing at the café with all the noises and people talking. The computer comes in at the very very end of it. With the novel I am working on right now it is a big drag because now I have five spiral notebooks I have to sit and transcribe! But I could never get it done if it wasn’t me with a pen actually writing it.

3. In the balance between found language and created language where does you work fall?

It’s found in my head. Usually in the beginning it is a word or phrase that echoes—but in my head not always what I hear or find. Very rarely a phrase will strike—I have a paper with John Donne’s “his first minute, after noon, is night” on it. I know I will get to this eventually but that’s not usual practice for me. Sometimes it is found language from my own poem. I have a poem from my new manuscript that ends with a line “should I draw the soul as a lantern or a cup” and then I wrote a poem with the title “Dear Lantern, Dear Cup.”

4. Is there a poet whose craft feeds you poetically?

Jane Cooper. She writes these quiet deliberate little poems, but crafted so carefully and beautifully. Like the Agnes Martin paintings. Also Olga Broumas whose work is so grounded in ecstatic utterance. I was delighted to find a perfect counterpoint between these two in a poet named Juliet Patterson, whose first book The Truant Lover, is going to be published soon by Nightboat Books, the non-profit press I am involved with.

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