Kazim Ali: 04.03.2006-04.07.2006

Poetry and Silence

When one speaks, who answers back? What is a question in a poem? Sometimes I think there should be no answer—not that silence is the answer, but the gesture of the question is the point.

God’s silence ceases to be troubling—spiritually or politically—if one views wondering this way. It’s not reassuring. It’s a changing of the usual “Why is God silent?” to “There is a God who is silent—now what?”

Poetry and Community

I turn 35 today. May I ask you for a gift? My name is Kazim. Growing up, I always believed this name to mean “Patience,” which pleased me. And a complex “patience” at that—the name implied an ability to bear bad times without complaint, but also an ability to receive fortunes without being spoiled. Someone more recently told me the name more closely translates as “Restrainer.” A wild difference there.

When I visited Egypt I learned also that my Urdu speaking parents and family pronounce this name differently both in vowel and inner consonant than an Arabic speaker might. In Egypt my name is spelled as “Kadem.” How wonderful it feels to be lost and traveling with a secret identity. Kazim and Ali are my two middle names. My legal first name, imprinted on my paychecks, my driver’s license, my passport, is Mohammad. My family’s last name, which my father stopped using upon our immigration but which all my cousins and uncles and aunts still use, is Saeed.

Poetry and Painting

On a cloudy day, at the ocean, staring out at the horizon, one can see two things. That the earth does curve. And that the place at which the sky and the sea meet disappears.

In the fall of 1999 I moved to New York City with a backpack full of clothes, a blank journal, and a couple of books. In one of them, Ink Dark Moon, Jane Hirshfield’s translations of Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi, I had been writing little response poems underneath the text.

I felt like I had been emptying myself in preparation for this huge life change—a different city, going back to school after four years in the work force, leaving behind people that I loved, arriving somewhere new, frightened, listless, alone.

Poetry and Music

The instruments I love the most are the ones that resonate—a cello, a double bass, the English horn, the oboe. I like to hear the drummer’s fingers move across the drum, or the metallic noise of a callous dragging across a guitar string.

Similarly, the voices I love the most are the ones that fail—a singer like Björk trying to do a very low note, or Ani Difranco out of breath or laughing while she sings, or a singer’s voice breaking on a note from either intense emotion or mere strain. I suppose it is the human quality that I love.

Poetry and Dance

Saturday evening I sat on the train platform of the Marble Hill station, looking out at the river, Inwood Forest beyond it, the sun setting behind the rocks. A long time ago, on the eve of the war, Marco and his sangha from the Village Zendo buried an Earth Treasure somewhere in the forest as part of a prayer for peace.