An Enlivening Conversation with Kazim Ali

Photo credit: Jesse Sutton

KAZIM ALI was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary's College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

UZOMAH: When you co-founded Nightboat Books, what were some of the things you aspired to do differently from the traditional publishing world?

KAZIM: The press proceeded from my own interest in poems that used language and form experimentally and innovative but which still lay in the lyric and dare I even add autobiographical tradition in writing. In other words, I was not necessarily interested in dispensing with subjectivity or what might be called the “lyric I” even if I was interested in troubling what that “I” is or how it might be constructed and for what purposes. Sun and Moon Press was an early inspiration and in the first years of the press we were growing alongside Action Books, Ugly Duckling, and Omnidawn, presses with whom we shared much affinity.

U: Which one beacons your creativity the most and why from poet, novelist, essayist, and professor?

K: While I’m a poet first, last, and always, I could not necessarily choose between these because I see them as overlapping (not “intersecting”) states of being. Each lies inside and feeds the other. Judgment of what is successful at (Melville, Cather, and Hardy are three good examples of very successful novelists who took themselves as seriously as poets but were not so viewed by their readers or critics) comes from the outside. One is tempted to say “professor” is the least important of these since it’s a material condition and not an artistic one, but my life as an educator and researcher has dramatically and critically impacted my life as a creative artist.

U: How can the art of writing help one navigate a path with finding their purpose or a deeper sense of life? How did it help you?

K: Certainly being a poet helped me to experience more deeply—I think it was Anaïs Nin who said a writer experiences life twice, once as they live it and again in memory or in the writing of it. What she ought to have added (maybe did?) is that a writer also changes and reforms their own experiences and forges a new path forward. But writing is not only about the lived life in front of one. One also creates something new, something that had not existed before. People say about Nin that she made her life into art but it’s as true to say she made art her life.

U: What is the most challenging task when translating another author’s work?

K:There’s no one most challenging task. When I was translating Ananda Devi, I found no real way to imitate the sounds of French vowels and consonants in English. Languages have different prosodic rhythms as well. There’s also the question of translating across experience—in my case with Devi across gender and culture as well as generations. What you are really doing is rewriting the poem in the new language, not “translating” it.

U: What is the best advice or lesson you have learned about writing from a teacher or professor that you still use and apply today in your writing practice?

K: One of my early creative writing professors Judith Johnson always cautioned us against rejecting the unruly in revision. She reasoned if that something felt out of place in a draft, it was not something to be revised away but rather something that had not yet been done enough in the poem to have its purpose known. In other words rather than do less of something, do more of it. I learned to embrace excess in revision. Another teacher of mine Philip Levine was constantly trying to get me to do something different in my poems, both with language and form. The only poem of mine he ever liked was one that I wrote (in pure frustration and little bit of malice) as an intentional imitation of his style. What studying with him taught me is that you have to decide what your own aesthetic commitments are and what they are worth to you. You can, as a writer, have a vision the way Stein did or Cezanne or Celan. You can be a poet who knows what language means to you and work on your art without regard to reception or acceptance.

U: What are some of the many tools a writer would want to have to tell a good story?

K: It’s not a good story that’s important. I think a writer should study their own language as if it were not their own. I think also writers should study other languages, both those that are related or in the same language family and also those that are completely unrelated. To me, travel has always been essential, as has been physical bodily practice. Some writers swear by meditation. My own mind needs a focus, such as yogic trataka or nada meditation practices. I haven’t much luck in other kinds of meditation like vispassana or zazen.

U: Can you discuss the origins of your latest book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water?

K: Well, I grew up around the world. I was born in England, spent early childhood in India and then Canada. Between the ages of 4-8 lived in the far Canadian north, and then moved to the States where I lived in several more places before graduating from high school at which point I left home for college and continued my nomadic life. I never really felt like I belonged to a place but throughout my life often thought of those years in the Canadian north since that is where I first came into language, first learned to read, then write, and most of my earliest memories are from there, not India or England. My father had been there working as an engineer on a hydroelectric dam which ended up having a deleterious effect on the ecosystem. That dam, like most others in Canada, was built on treaty land, in other words sovereign indigenous land never ceded by the people to the Crown or Canada. I went back to Pimicikamak, the indigenous nation, after forty years to learn what had happened there.

U: How do you use personal stories in your writing to address topics like being Muslim, Indian, and part of the LGBTQIA community?

K: For the longest time I avoided using personal stories. I wrote about all these things but maybe elliptically. Or in fiction or by using myth or persona. There are some things a writer has to keep quiet about, keep private about. Otherwise you run the risk of not being true to the experience.

U: What are some of the most pressing issues you have faced being queer?

K: Being queer you must build your own chosen community because it is by definition alienating from established social, familial, and political structures. You do not fit into the scheme of society. You must be excluded by them for them to preserve their own sense of relationality. Queer people are dangerous in that way, it is true. We give lie to what might otherwise be accepted as fundamental truth—about family bonds, about marriage and gender and sex. About art and money and crime. So the hardest part has been accepting myself and finding my own way.

U: If you could select one poem that has had a lasting impact on you since you began writing, which one would it be and why?

K: This is a hard question to answer! There are so many. I read “Vive Noir” by Mari Evans in high school and it had a great impact on me in that it centered Blackness and a different kind of language and form. As a body of work, Lucille Clifton has been so important to me. Susan Howe’s “The Nonconformist’s Memorial” opened up for me a conception of sound and line in poetry that I have never let go of. I experienced an ecstatic moment hearing Olga Broumas recite poetry for the first time and her collaborative work (with T Begley) called Sappho’s Gymnasium is a touchstone for me. But if I were to recommend a single poem that resonated for me when I first read it and still moves me today and which I read and think about often, it’s “Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller, a poem rich in sound and meaning and which became, in a sense, the ars poetic of my life.

For more information about Kazim’s writing please visit his site and follow him on Instagram.