History as Multiplicity: A Conversation with Kazim Ali
The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James, 2020) is Kazim Ali’s seventh book of poems. In it, Ali explores the overlapping narratives of the past to consider what “history” really means. His poems move from the grand tales of Greek antiquity and the Quran, to specific moments in living memory. Among the latter: the killing of the American-Israeli athlete David Berger by members of the Black September during the 1972 Munich Olympics; dining hall worker Corey Menafee’s shattering of a stained-glass windowpane depicting slaves at Calhoun College, in 2016, which cost him his job but prompted Yale University to rename the institution; and the Taliban killing, that same year, in Karachi, Pakistan, of qawwali singer Amjad Sabri, for the “blasphemy” of singing Sufi verses. To understand how he seamlessly weaves eco-socialist politics and transcendental philosophy into an evocative soundscape comprising “a chorus of voices sedimented,” I spoke with Ali a week before Nov 3, by which time he had voted, and hoped aloud that President Trump would prove to be a historical accident. Below is a condensed version of our Zoom call:
“Can history be unwoven the tightness released to make it possible to breathe to write anew,” you ask in one of the first long poem’s hundred floating vignettes. I read this as the thesis question of a narrative that wants to end narrative. What’s your vision for the future of history, or at least, of thinking about history?
When I say tightness of history, I think of history that is deterministic, whereas in Islam, the concept of kismet involves a more multi-directional series of causes and effects that move in infinite combinations. I’m not sure I believe in narrative as a certain arrangement of facts in a framework of time. Some storylines run throughout the poem and some just flicker in and out—for example, the meditation on “compost,” where “composer” and “imposter” combine to describe me more accurately than either word does. The poem’s structure may imitate paintings by Imran Qureshi, which are made on the surface of the lived-in world. I hoped in the poem to construct a way of looking to the future. When the lunar mission succeeded, Anais Nin said, so what, man has landed on the moon; he has so much farther to go within himself. The individual’s capacity for creativity and the powers of art—these are the real ways that society’s problems, whether social, political or economic, solve themselves.
While The Voice Of Sheila Chandra is primarily three long poems with custom-fit forms, there are these little poems between them in which you’re scatting, setting the vibe for the long ones. The book begins with one, with the line—“Small animal recite”—which I saw as a call to harness the power of sound. Can you give some insight into how you shaped this soundscape?
Well, the interstitial poems were very heightened little pieces of language. Although the three long poems also use some form of nonlinearity, fracture, or drift away from expected meaning, I would say these qualities are multiplied in the small interstitial poems. Several people read an earlier draft that only had the three long poems and they felt there had to be some punctuation or breathing space between them. At the time, I was thinking of tectonic plates, which came into a poem that was in my 2018 book Inquisition, called “The Earthquake Days,” so something clicked when my friend said, Shouldn't there be these tiny little poems in between, which have this incredible seismic shift and language structure in them to set you up for the charge of the longer poems. I really liked that idea.
Your call to end history and replace it with beauty is radical, and is central to the poem “Hesperine for David Berger.” As far as I know, “Hesperine” is not an existing poetic form. What is the “Hesperine”?
“Hesperine for David Berger” was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets, which was doing a project with the parks department for the 50th anniversary of the national parks. Each poet wrote about a national park in the state, and I was living in Ohio, where the David Berger memorial is. Olga Broumas gave me the word “Hesperine,” and I made up a concept and form. In Greek times, Hesperus, the evening star, and Phosphorus, the morning star, were brothers. It wasn’t until they began exchanging knowledge with Babylonian astronomers that the Greeks found out Hesperus and Phosphorus were the same heavenly body. This urges us to see history as multiplicity rather than as a dominant narrative that must be accepted. “Hesperine” comes from the impulse to understand history through all of these layers. It includes formal elements such as long lines with no punctuation, non-linear arguments, lack of narrative hierarchy, rejection of the question and the answer, and actual mysterious verses from the Quran that have no accepted meaning. Knowledge comes in weird ways.
Let’s get to the title poem, “The Voice of Sheila Chandra.” A song never begins or ends, you say; a singer just picks it up along the way. The form of the poem reflects this sense of perpetuity—the poem has no beginning or end, its sentences blend into each other. It’s stream of consciousness on acid. How did this poem happen?
Writing the David Berger poem blew apart the structure of a poem for me. I couldn’t just start writing again. I had these twenty notecards of Basquiat paintings from some art museum. Every morning, I would take out one blank card, free-write on it, put it in an envelope, seal it, date it, and put it back in the box. Then I went to Germany, where I wrote the last poem, “Phosphorus,” after which I went to Chicago to act as a caregiver to a relative undergoing a medical procedure. I was staying with them for three weeks, cooking and cleaning during the day, and in the night, I would go on long walks in the streets because it’s draining to do that kind of work, because you are completely sublimated as a person. Once, I had a day off when my relative was going to the hospital for some tests, so I took the box of cards to this coffee shop and began transcribing them into my notebook. I wasn’t copying the words, but I was shaping poems out of the material. They shaped themselves into these sonnet forms. Like how the harmonium drone in Indian music is a single note containing infinite harmonies, these sonnets were polyphonic, with many registers. Some sound like religious sacred texts, some were in a demotic quotidian language. I liked that mix of registers and I tried to heighten the effect as I was transcribing this raw material from across continents, and across seasons.
Music is central to TVOSC. Artists from Coltrane to qawwali singer Amjad Sabri, and of course, Chandra, work in a space that transcends history. Chandra’s music is personal to you, since you write that you found your voice when she lost hers. What’s the story?
The notion of finding one’s voice is metaphorical for writers. What do you sound like; what are your subjects; what are the forms of your poetry; do you have a recognizable tone? That was never true for me. My approach to poetry was always one of multiplicity. A lack of focus, if anything, has been the hallmark. I feel like I gave myself permission to fully embrace this non-linearity and wandering, in Bright Felon, which I wrote in late 2006 and early 2007. In 2009, Bright Felon came out, which was also when Chandra lost her voice to Burning Mouth Syndrome. So, in a way you could say that there was a crossing of paths of the loss of a voice and finding of a voice. I’ve been listening to her for 20 years. I heard her music for the first time in the Fall of 2001. It was right after I had moved out of New York City, and into a town called Rhinebeck, upstate. There’s a really well-curated bookstore and music stores, where you buy CDs. They had an EP of hers, of five songs. I took it home, was captivated, and have been listening to her since.
That the last long poem is named “Phosphorus” for the bringer of light, suggests that you’re ending on an optimistic note. In it, cities become “aural palimpsests.” New York and Paris, “write themselves into you,” while Berlin, “you write yourself against.” Can you elaborate, and also describe how cities have been interlocutors in your poetry?
Yes, I am absolutely ending on an optimistic note, even though the last poem primarily is concerned with understanding what Orpheus sang in the land of the dead. But even that is a kind of optimism because we want to understand how the poet defeated death. I am a poet of place, and the landscape, the urban backdrop, and the communities of the cities I’ve lived in are important influences on my poetry. I think if the first poem in the book is a deep dive into a particular moment and trying to see the infinity in that moment, then the second poem, the title poem, is raging across time and space almost to the end of both, in order to understand what is at stake in the act of creation. Maybe the final poem combines these modes? What I can say about that final part is that it is not epic in the way that the other two are. In fact, I think it is very ordinary and that it describes daily and quotidian events, going for a run, trying to find an old friend, listening to music on the street. There are no grand mythic events like those that occur in the other two poems.
After a tour of Berlin, in the poem “Phosphorus,” you compare the story of Abraham as told across Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions. Ultimately, you say “I am not Isaac nor Ishmael nor any other son who was saved / In this story I am the ram.” Since it’s killed in all three traditions, the animal has no salvation. Is this fatalism, or ecocriticism?
I’m a vegan. I believe in ethical treatment of animals. As a boy in India, I have seen an animal beheaded in an aunt’s courtyard. It was for Bakri-Eid. I was thirteen. My cousin was older, maybe eighteen, but they wanted me to do it because he had done it before. They were trying to push the knife in my hands, but I couldn’t do it. Later, in a poetry workshop with Melora Wolff (who teaches at Skidmore College), twenty-two years ago, she wrote a poem in which the main character was the ram, and it made a break for it. Even then, I was moved by this forgotten victim, marginalized of the marginalized. Future generations a thousand years from now—God willing there’s a “thousand years from now”—will look back at the way we treat animals and the natural world and be like, what were they thinking?
At the core of “Phosphorus” is the desire to know “the actual syllables that Orpheus sang / To the dead to be allowed into hell allowed again to leave.” Curious that you’re after the “syllables” and not “words”—is there a difference? Also, as you said earlier, you offer your interpretation of Orpheus’s song in the poem, saying, “Whether death or doubt— devote / yourself / down / smell / the earth.” In a paradigm in which beauty erases history, is this your vision of emancipation, salvation or justice?
I suppose I said syllables instead of words because I believe in the power of sound. I believe in the way a poem sounds, it's rhythm and lines. Of course individual words do have meanings and we see the power of them amplified when a word is used with such intention. Yet there’s something ancient about certain syllables like Ma, which lead me to believe that there may be power in sound alone. I don’t know if beauty erases history, but I think that can make history bearable. I don’t believe in salvation. I do believe in the soul, but I believe the soul lives in the body. I believe we are each sacred beings. I believe we each deserve justice from the powerful political institutions that try to govern us. But that is different than a question of salvation. Saved? From whom?