An Interview with Nick Courtright

Justin Bigos: Let’s begin with the title of your first book of poems, Punchline.   A punchline, in its abrupt pith, kills the joke; but your lines, even your last lines, never make me feel like the gig is over – rather, I still feel the poem moving, singing.  Can you talk a bit more about the title of the book, as well as the title poem, whose “punchline . . . is all our being and all our seeking”?

Nick Courtright: Well, what book of severe philosophical and spiritual questioning wouldn’t be hilarious?  All the great religious poetries are full of jokes: look no further than all the crap that happened to Job.  As for this book, I kind of see the whole thing as a happy commentary on the punchline that is our own lives, i.e.: we are the punchline of our own joke.  Knock knock.  Who’s there?  Human beings.  Human beings who?  HUMAN BEINGS. 

But more seriously, you mention how the poems themselves don’t feel cut off at the end, but seem to sing along, perhaps to the next poem.  This likely has to do with my approach to constructing the book: this isn’t a collection of a bunch of lyrics I had lying around.  Rather, it was all written in order as one compressed evolution of a thought process, but then with a lot of harsh editing decisions thrown in.  I wrote 30,000 words, then whittled it down to these 6,000 or so.  But I didn’t muck about too much with the order—I wanted to record the songs live, not with a lot of superficial studio magic. 

I also like the idea of a book of poetry that moves more like a narrative should, even if there are no characters—the idea that something should be developing, that an idea should be moving forward.  That’s what I went for, and via that, I wanted, by asking the most deadly serious questions possible, to see if I could come to any conclusions regarding the existence of the universe.

JB: Your poems often play with physical scale, whether contemplating the “miniature terror of ants” (“The Despot”), or our own proximity to the moon “if we were eighty trillion times the size we are, just like Florida/ is far from Cuba for the man who swims there” (“Consolation Prize”).  The poem “He Does Not Throw Dice” begins, “Imagine the lawlessness of the subatomic world, but larger.”  This kind of imagination seems, in the best sense, childlike – it reminds me a bit of the “I’m Crushing Your Head” Kids in the Hall skit.  Can you talk a bit abut this recurring theme of flexible proportion?

NC: I love that skit, and there is a childlike nature to those sorts of manipulations of scale.  But I do love considering that idea—have you seen the website scaleoftheuniverse.com?  You can interactively scroll through magnitudes of ten both larger and smaller than human beings, from the theoretical strings of string theory all the way up to the theoretical size of our theoretical universe.  And there, just a bit to the larger side of the middle of this frightfully large spectrum, are we people.  So I’m always fascinated by the idea that we have a “scalar bias,” in that we see the universe through the eyes of someone who just so happens to be this size.  We think ants are small, but they are fucking huge.  We think the sun is big, but it’s actually pretty tiny. 

But it’s this bias that gets me: we have the hubris to say we can understand the universe, why we are here, what happens after we die, what the truth is of evolution or religion or, jeez, even nutrition or the weather or why we like sports, but we’re coming to these conclusions from a very limited perspective.  So yeah, I’d say it’s a thing to think about.  And it’s not nearly as head-spinning as the notion of our “time bias” (the rock lives a lot longer than us, does it not?).

JB: No, I hadn’t seen the web site Scale of the Universe.  It is frightening.  But alternately soothing.  It’s also nice to see that America is bigger than the moon.  Suck it, moon!  Go USA!  Seriously, though, thanks for sharing that site.  I wish there was the option to change the music from Radiohead-lite to maybe Neil Diamond or Brian Eno.  What would your music preference(s) be?

NC: I was also struck that it shows the largest particle that could squeeze through a surgical mask, and then shows that the world’s largest virus is actually smaller.  Good to know.

But music!  You know I have a background in music journalism, so I’m going to have to fight my love for obscurity here.  But, having been inspired by what I’m listening to at this exact moment, I’m going to have to say the new Animal Collective album.  It’s completely insane, full of unexpected turns that somehow, in their unexpectedness, tend to follow a certain logic.  And I think that’s much how this fine sick mad beautiful universe of ours is, a bunch of things that have no business being together—(hydrogen and oxygen, together?!?!  Who would’ve thunk??!)—being together.

JB: Your poem “What Is” begins, “Apocrypha is no less than actual, if it is believed.”  Your poems themselves sometimes have an apocryphal feel.  Quick confession: your book survived a car wreck I was in a month ago, and it is still damp and distended from the water jug that exploded in the back of the car.  And the pages are dirty with who knows what.  Even so, even so – holding your book in my hands and reading one poem to the next, well, has felt like I found something secret, something excavated.  Have you ever felt that you discovered a similar book of poems?

NC: I love that my book has been traumatized by what was surely your reckless vehicular acrobatics!  As surface-level unpleasant as it may be to imagine my book being abused and crushed up, there is no truer sign on my bookshelf of a loved book than one that has been dog-eared, marked up, and battered.  If it is too crisp and clean, it must have done something wrong, or is a sign of my laziness.  As for whether I have ever discovered a similar book of poems, an excavated piece, I can actually plumb into a recent event to find an instance. 

When I was visiting my family in Ohio recently, I was rifling through a box of books that had survived flooding and atrophy and all those other pleasures, and I found a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a famous book I had never spent much time with previously.  I had had no idea that it was at my parents’ house, or how it got there—the copy was old, the cover torn off.  I was an archaeologist dusting away at the sarcophagus.  And so many great lines!: “And shall my desires flow like a fountain that I may fill their cups?” and “If this is my day of harvest, in what fields have I sowed the seed, and in what unremembered seasons?”  And those are just from the first poem of prose.  Like Poggio must have felt when in 1417 he rediscovered Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things after a thousand years disregarded or unknown, I felt as if I had stumbled onto a secret.

JB: I’m interested in your use of chapter in Punchline.  Some books of poems forgo sections altogether; some simply number sections; and some, such as yours, are even more purposeful in their divisions.  Can you describe your choice to open each of your four chapter with an epigraph that is the latter half of a quotation, such as “ . . . Invent the universe” – which finishes Carl Sagan’s statement “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first . . .”?

NC: It was quite the happy accident, really—I needed an organizing principle, and the “punchlines” of those quotes (get it?) I’d had hanging around for a while, wanting to do something cool with them.  I had a whole pile of quotes, and I narrowed it down to those four, which I think really do encapsulate well the idea of movement through the book: part one is “He does not play dice,” after Einstein, and it deals with (at least in my mind) the issue of fate and order and chance; part two, after the Sagan quote, deals with the universe and uncertainty; part three, led by Lorca’s quote about not worrying about death, said about a year before he was killed, deals with mortality and impermanence; and part four, after Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s quote that enlightenment is nothing special, is about acceptance, even in the face of the unanswerable.  And I’m glad I did it that way, because to me each of the sections has its own personality, though they also seem to make perfect sense with one following the next—I can’t really imagine them being in any other order.

JB: Another organizing principle I noticed is that the book opens with a drawing of the sun, and ends with a drawing of the moon.  Does lyric poetry come from the sun or the moon?  Mary Ruefle says the moon; Apollo says – well, we know what Apollo says.

NC: Ahh, I got you: you have it all mixed up!  It opens with the moon, and ends with the sun—to do otherwise would be depressing, right?  I did debate heartily which would come first and which would come last, but I decided I liked the almost-counterintuitive approach of ending with the sun; not “the sun and the moon,” but “the moon and the sun.”  It also gives the feeling that the whole book is taking place during the night (I’m just making this up now, but I like it), kind of like an analog to St. John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul,” in that after surviving this bay of unknowing we can find ourselves alive with a new day.  But, like I said, I’m just making this up now.

BUT, to answer your question: I’ll disagree with Ruefle just for the sake of discussion, although she’s very likely the righter of us two.  I’d say the epic poem is the moon, because all “story” must have sorrow.  The lyric, though, comes to us from the sun, a glimmer of light on what otherwise would be darkness.  Like within every epic is a lyric, the moon cannot shine without the sun.  As for Apollo, it was a shame when he got killed by Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

JB: Your short poem “No Children” stands out for both its starkness and its poignancy.  The poem seems to release any desire for a heaven without children, even while a children-less life is “blissfully lonely.”  I remember a friend told me years ago that I should have kids because it would make me a better poet.  I have no kids, and I sometimes find myself thinking of my friend’s odd statement.  What do you make of it?  As a father, do you feel your writing has somehow gotten better, or changed in any way?

NC: I definitely feel like having a child improved my work.  Because now my work is no longer so much just about me and my stupid existential problems or ideas of prettiness—now it’s about that, but filtered through the fact that all of my ontological inquiry is enriched by the presence of the very real life that exists and that my wife and I are responsible for.  In Hinduism there’s that big karmic idea that you should do things for the sake of the thing itself, and not for the outcome—that you shouldn’t be concerned with the fruit of the action, but just the action—and I feel like before I became a parent I like many was very ravaged with the importance of my desires and selfishnesses, and this manifested itself in my work; now I do the things I do less for myself and more as a means of figuring out what he my son “means” and how I can serve that meaning. 

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, but I can say for certain that having a kid made me less “anxious” about my writing and how it would be received, and more confident that I just had to do the writing I needed to do, for better or for worse, and that somewhere out there maybe some similarly afflicted human of too many questions would enjoy it.

JB: Thanks for the conversation, Nick.

NC: Thank you for the awesome questions!

Nick Courtright is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist published in 2012 by Gold Wake Press. His work has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Iowa Review, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He’s Interviews Editor of the Austinist, an arts and culture website based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy, and lives with his wife, Michelle, and son, William. 

Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com.

American Literary Review Presents: Back to School Reading for Incoming Graduate Students

Please join us on Saturday, August 25th from 7-8:30 pm for the American Literary Review's Third Annual Back-To-School Reading, featuring original fiction and poetry by incoming PhD candidates Tina Cabrera, Matt Haines, Karl Zuehlke, and Trista Edwards. All faculty and students are welcome to attend.

An Interview with J. Nicholas Geist

April Murphy: I was blown away by your essay “A Murderer’s Work” in the Spring 2012 issue of Creative Nonfiction. The essay explores the tumultuous relationship between virtual violence for entertainment (as in video games like Far Cry 2 and Bioshock), and real-life violence based entertainment (like bull fighting). The narrator's strong, vibrant first-person voice relates these two experiences.

Writing from the point of view of the character in a video game - so much as to say "I" - raises interesting questions about perspective and narration. If you're playing a character that  someone else created, whom does the "I" represent?

JNG: For me, I think it’s like any other game. I was playing Settlers of Catan last night with some people who aren’t nonfiction writers, and I don’t think either of them thought, “Who am I when I am playing?” It’s certainly true that I’m playing a character that someone else has created–and, generally speaking, that a second person (or team) has written and a third person has voice acted–but it’s still me who’s playing. The choices I make are mine. Videogame characters are a sort of collaborative identity, but it’s the player’s contribution that actually individuates the character. 

Recently, there’s been a bit of a mad hullabaloo about the ending to Mass Effect 3, and a lot of the frustration has run along the lines of “My Shepard wouldn’t do X.” I think that’s telling. When first I read Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, I was struck by a story he told about the first Mass Effect. (I’ve written a bit about this on my blog.) In short, he describes how, no matter what else is going on in the game, “his” Shepard always has a specific reaction to a certain character in the game. “My” Shepard always has the opposite reaction. We’re playing the same game, but in a very real way, we’re not playing the same character.

To say it more simply, even if the scenario is constructed for me by a team of designers, writers, and developers, the experience of playing the game is still mine, and the things that happen to my character are happening to me. They become a part of my experience, and a part of how I make sense of the world–which is ultimately why I think videogames are worth writing about. 

AJM: As someone who is a thinker about several different types of pop culture narrative, including comic books, I'm curious about your take on the emerging genre of graphic nonfiction. I'm a scholar of graphic narrative myself, so I'm keen to notice a structural relationship between graphic novels, popular comic books, and memoir - but not many academics agree. 

JNG: I'd hardly call myself a "scholar of graphic narrative," but I certainly read a lot of comics. I think more than anything using a graphic medium to tell stories is much like using text to tell stories--there are lots and lots and lots of ways to do it, and we do ourselves a bit of a disservice when we lump them all together. (We hear people dismiss "comics" and "videogames" all the time; we don't ever hear anybody say, "Pfft. Words.")

I think one of the most useful things about graphic media for a memoirist is the fact that comics already have a cultural acceptance of an interstitial authorial or narrative voice.

Consider:

The medium affords three different voices presented side by side--the voice of a character speaking in a previous panel ("His name is Jason"), the voice of Robin in the present action of the scene ("YEEEEEEEHAAAA!!", etc.), and the voice of the narrator (probably Alfred--"He liked having him out there"). Each voice serves a different purpose, and so the writers are able to contextualize the scene in a way that a written text can't easily emulate.

One of the things I love most about nonfiction writing is the way in which the different voices intertwine to help make meaning in complicated ways. In any given scene in an essay, "I" may be speaking with three different voices, all of which are in direct conflict--that is, what "I" as a character in the essay am thinking may conflict with what "I" as a character in the essay am saying, which may conflict with what "I" as the author of the piece am suggesting. I think this is something that graphic media let us do really well, and in really interesting ways. (I just wish I could draw.)

AJM: While memoirs like Fun Home, Persepolis, and Maus have been 'accepted' as literature, it's been difficult for other graphic novels to break into the canon. Do you think this has something to do with the need of a first-person narrator? Any other theories?

JNG: One of my favorite quotations on the subject comes from Marshall McLuhan, who writes, "The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be." Which is to say, any new medium seems both inferior and simplistic to those whose literacy is built on older media. Today, people wish their kids would spend more time reading novels; when the novel was young, people looked it as a fanciful waste of time for flighty layabouts. Having grown up a late-20th-century geek, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that comics or video games can be art, but I have a lot of trouble accepting the idea that a tweet can be literature.

I think for the ensconced literati, Fun Home, Blankets, American Born Chinese et. al. are the exceptions that prove the rule, the shining examples that show how clearly all the rest of it is junk. Our kids, though, will grow up with the understanding that comics can be art, and so they will look for art in comics, and make art in comics, and then it'll just be normal. And things will be that much more awesome.

AJM: The structure of “A Murderer’s Work” weaves together several different locations - Madrid, California, virtual Central Africa, and even a city under the sea - can you talk a bit about how you connected these disparate places and characters so that they fed into a larger narrative?

JNG: I think of the essay–and possibly all literary writing–as the art of making connections, and I feel like Montaigne’s essays really exemplify this. For Montaigne, the movement of the narrative almost never comes from a discrete, sequential set of events–what we think of as a “traditional” narrative–but from the way his thinking about his subject takes shape as he considers his feelings and experiences.

In “A Murderer’s Work,” because the places and settings are so distinct and disparate, it made sense to me to separate them out as discrete chunks, rather than try to weave everything together. This was especially true because in a sense each of the settings has a completely different set of rules governing it–Bioshock’s plasmids, Far Cry 2’s weird political situation, the ritual of the bullfight–and so using the setting of each as an organizing principle seemed to make it easier to keep track of what to expect of the world at any given moment.

AJM: Nonfiction writer Abigail Thomas has said that the structure of a nonfiction essay arises from thinking deeply about the content - essentially that if you write, the form will start to take shape without you consciously thinking about it. It seems that this may be true in the structure of "A Murderer's Work" - but I'm curious about whether you think about structure while writing, or in revision, or, if structure seems to take care of itself? 

JNG: I love that idea--that form comes from thinking deeply about content--but I don't think that's quite the same as saying that essays take shape without intentional direction. I think really what an essay is for me is a sort of crystallized thinking--a record of the process by which I have come to make and understand a connection between things.

(Forgive me. Things are about to get a bit ridiculous.)

So: content. Let's say I've got some ideas I want to write about.

My writing process involves lots of junk writing--stuff I do just to get the ideas out, to figure out what I think, to help me understand myself--which I think is pretty common. Most of what I write doesn't end up in the essay, but it's necessary for me to get to the point where I can get a sense of how these ideas connect, for me. A lot of my prewriting takes me places I don't need to go; I spend a lot of time retreading the same ground, wandering down dead ends, branching off needlessly, but eventually, I get where I'm trying to go.

And so I think my way into these things making sense. Once I have a sense of how everything fits together, then I can start thinking about structure--but that structure comes from the thinking. I try to figure out which connections, which strands, which digressions and convergences are really necessary to the understanding I've built, and which were the necessary superfluities which were artifacts of my process, but not really a part of the essay proper. There's a lot of whittling here, and it is for me a very conscious process, but it's really a process of finding the the structure in my thinking and solidifying it.

And maybe it's at this point that I figure out that that thing I thought was a digression is actually what ties it all together, or that something I thought was crucial really doesn't matter. In the initial drafts of "A Murderer's Work," there are two big scenes--one in a Spanish dorm room, the other in a (real, non-digital) car on my commute--that were actually the first things I wrote. They were the starting point of my thinking about the issue, and they were definitely connected to the conclusions I come to. But eventually I realized that they weren't a part of the connection I was trying to understand in the essay.

The structure of the essay--bulls, Bioshock, Bowa-Seko, and all that--came out of my thinking about the interface between videogames and violence, but it was a product of a concerted effort to make sense of the question of what, amid all of that wild thought, was actually meaningful

I like the way Philip Lopate said it: "I am more interested in the display of consciousness on the page. The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.…I’m arguing more for reflective nonfiction where thinking and the play of consciousness is the main actor."

AJM: Many people think of nonfiction as existing on a tenuous border between fact and fiction, blending together reality and the imagination. Your work expertly makes takes this border and stretches it to its limit - but can you tell me where you think the steadfast boundaries of nonfiction lie?

JGN: The tagline of Creative Nonfiction is “True Stories, Well Told.” And I think what we mean we say “true” with regards to a story is that the events presented are consonant with reality.

And so, at the risk of sounding like an enormous dink, I think “nonfiction,” as a designation, will always be hampered by the fact that reality is always filtered through subjectivity. This isn’t necessarily to say that there’s no such thing as objective reality, but I do think we can’t access that reality except through our sensorium, such that everything we encounter gets filtered through our biases, our assumptions, our prejudices, our peccadilloes, our passions. If there is such a thing as objective nonfiction, then I think probably nobody can write it.

If our access to reality is filtered through subjectivity, then I think the only useful way to call a story “true” is to say that this story is consonant with my perception of reality–i.e., that it is honest. If I tell the truth as I see it, then I’m not lying, fabricating, misrepresenting, or fictionalizing. The worst I can be is wrong. (Which I am both comfortable with and accustomed to.)

Where I think the people who run afoul of the creative nonfiction police do so is when the write something that doesn’t align with what they know to be true. James Frey knew he wasn’t in jail for three months. If it was the “emotional truth”–if it really did feel like three months–then that’s fine; that’s real, and legitimate, and I think Frey had every right to say, “It felt like three months.” But he didn’t. He said it was three months, even though he knew that wasn’t true.

Thankfully, I never killed my father in order to secure access to escape from his undersea empire. (I’ve never killed my father at all; he’s quite alive and happily occupying the surface world, with no empire to speak of.) But I have had the experience of occupying the mental space of a videogame character that did do those things, and so those experiences are a part of my subjective reality. I can be honest about the way that they affected me, the role they have in their life, and the significance I’ve found in them without having to treat them as “real.”

Truth, I think, is probably too big a job for me. Honesty, though, I can do.

AJM: And this, honestly, has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us at American Literary Review. We look forward to following your writing! 

J. Nicholas Geist is an essayist, gamer, programmer, teacher, feminist, and all-around geek about town. He earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing from California State University, Fresno in 2008. His work has been published in Creative Nonfiction and Ninth Letter, and he frequently publishes weird stuff with Kill Screen. You can find him on Twitter as @jnicholasgeist or on his blog at geekabouttown.com

American Literary Review Spring 2012 Issue Now Available

Contributors

Fiction:

Marc Dickinson, Smoked

Kyle Mellen, Just Like A Man

André Mangeot, One Day of Life

Austin Gilmour, On Huron

Nonfiction:

Barbara Cameron, Hawk Blood

D. W. Martin, Bloodlines

Kaitlyn Palacios, The Waiver

Poetry:

Joseph Duemer, Lake Surface Full of Clouds (contest winner)

Lisa Fay Coutley, Shooting Geese

Derek Mong, Midnight at the School of Cosmetology; Heliotrope, or Man’s Mind Angles Inevitably Toward God

Amy Eisner, Guide for Monsters

Richard Jackson, No End to It; Prophecy

Josiah Bancroft, Burning the Ship Home

Roxane Beth Johnson, Geode; Honeymoon; Sermon to Self

Liz Waldner, Royauté

Nick McRae, Forgiveness

Leslie Adrienne Miller, Roget’s; Collette as Trope

Judith Skillman, High Strung

Keith Flynn, The Agnostic; Rembrandt’s Mirror

Ross Leckie, Still Life

Britton Shurley, Babel

Bobby C Rogers, Archival Quality; Interesting Case

Dave Nielsen, Awkward Sonnet for My Father

Meredith Stricker, “The Whole Battle of the Century Inside Him”

Luke Hankins, A Shape with Forty Wings

Philip Brady, To Banquet with Worthy Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet

Beth Marzoni, My Mother Tells Me About the Steel Pier

An Interview with Dilruba Ahmed

Justin Bigos: Your first book, Dhaka Dust, is an impressive debut in many respects. One quality of the book I particularly admire is the ranginess of its voice: sometimes narrative and shrewdly cosmopolitan, sometimes childlike yet aging quickly, sometimes historical, sometimes persona, and sometimes sounding like lyrics reaching us from ancient Greece or Spain or India. What is it, in your mind, that holds this book together?

Dilruba Ahmed: I can only hope that part of what holds the book together is as sense of multiplicity. The book brings together a host of voices, as you point out . . . voices of (mostly) women across generations and contexts—with some voices that lean toward story and some toward song. I hope that the voices and tones delivered by various poetic devices come together as facets of experience—at times harmonious, and other times, contradictory.

If I had to name one thing that holds this book together in my mind, it’s a kind of haunting—a haunting that I began to understand more clearly upon reading, as an undergraduate, Agha Shahid Ali’s lines about discovering an “exit to Calcutta” in Ohio and an “India [that] always exists / Off the turnpikes / of America.” John Keats wrote in his letters that poetry should “appear almost a Remembrance” to the reader – Ali’s lines had that sort of effect on me. In a way, many of the poems that I’ve written over the years have been in response to those lines, which startled me into a state of recognition. In my poems, I also hope that part of what emerges is a longing for the seemingly unattainable – for home and a homeland, for permanence, for language, for a family undivided by time and geography.

JB: You mention Agha Shahid Ali. I recently attended a one-week poetry workshop at UT-Austin and we read Ali's introduction to his anthology of formal ghazals written in English, Ravishing Disunities. The form is very seductive, at least in part due to its "formal disunity," as Ali calls it; the ghazal relies on music to hold together its "thematically independent couplets." I'm curious about your poem "Ghazal" in the collection. It's a beautiful ghazal, but it does not use a qafia, which is the rhyme preceding the refrain, called the radif. Why did you choose to write a more nontraditional ghazal in English?

DA: While I attended to the ghazal’s strict requirements when I began writing the poem, that particular aspect of the form fell away as I wrote. That’s part of what I love about tackling given forms—sometimes the conventions are strict requirements, and other times they serve as mere suggestion, depending on the direction a poem takes.

In Ravishing Disunities, Agha Shahid Ali emphasizes that a writer must depart "from somewhere . . .” Would he have recognized my poem as a ghazal? I hope so! While my poem, in the end, did not use a qafia, I did attempt to stay true to the spirit and shape of the form—its themes of longing for the beloved, the conflation of the earthly and divine, its non-linear movement, sense of repetition and variation, inclusion of a makhta, etc. (this is when I must reveal that my first name, Dilruba, roughly translates to "stealer of hearts,” which appears as “heart-thief” in the makhta).

I also began having fun with other sonic devices—the repetition of the “er” and “n” and “uh” sounds, the rhythms of stressed and unstressed syllables, variations in the caesuras, etc. Had I not strayed from the ghazal’s qafia requirements, some of the lines that emerged unexpectedly may not have surfaced. As a writer, I find that kind of surprise much more interesting than strict adherence to a particular form.

JB: “Stealer of hearts”! Wow, that is an amazing name. For the record, I photocopied your poem for my peers and teachers in the workshop at UT-Austin, and I think your ghazal stole at least a few hearts.

Another thing I love in your book is the sense of double vision. There is the sense of being in one place and being in another at the same time. There is the particular immigrant experience of visiting a parents’ native land, which is foreign but also a place where the daughter/son might have belonged—and maybe does, a little. There is also, in a poem like “Venice during an Election Year in the US,” a very subtle sense of distance/intimacy, with much political subtext (great use of title in this one!). This sense of double vision that I am trying to describe is, I think, very important for our times. Aside from reading poems, what do you think poets need to do to see the larger world in its parallels and contradictions? What if a poet lives her whole life in a town in southeastern Ohio? (Or, does the poet always have to leave?)

DA: At a recent poetry reading, an audience member described poets as people who have a sixth sense, a kind of super-sensory power that allows them to detect things that are not readily apparent to others. I think that’s probably accurate—that poets possess a kind of hyper-sensitivity to people and places, to relationships and history, to language and its capacity to capture/shape/disrupt experience, and to the collision of imagination and perception in making sense of the world. So maybe it’s just that sensitivity that lends poets the kind of double vision you describe—permitting them to fashion, for example, from two unlike things a powerful metaphor that transforms understanding and helps us see the world anew, or to somehow stand simultaneously here and there.

Must a poet always leave? I don’t think it’s necessarily a requirement. Small towns are full of their own mysteries and contradictions, rich with stories and rife with conflict. A poet who lives her entire life in a town in southeastern Ohio may reside, for example, with the history of decimated native peoples; with the destruction and potential of industry; with ever-shifting race relations that bring generations and neighbors into conflict; and, as anywhere, with the small gestures that make us human and the transgressions that break us down.

It may be difficult to see much of that, of course, or to understand it within a broader context without some distance to provide a sense of perspective. I suppose this is where the “leaving” comes in . . . but I don’t think that travel alone helps writers experience or develop the kind of double vision you describe. It’s possible to leave and return unchanged if one isn’t willing to spend some time with the feelings of discomfort and displacement that can accompany a departure from home. Elizabeth Bishop’s work possesses a keen awareness of this discomfort in poems such as “Questions of Travel,” “Filling Station,” and “Arrival at Santos,” to name a few. Poet Mona Van Duyn, in a poem called “Into Mexico,” writes of the exhilaration of first-time travel but not without contemplating experiences of alienation and discord as well. Jack Gilbert, too, tackles this uneasiness as he describes the “laughter / every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta” in his poem, “A Brief for the Defense.” And in “Blackbottom,” Toi Derricotte’s speaker ventures back to the inner-city neighborhood that her family has “freshly escaped,” both mocking the former community and acknowledging her family “had lost [its] voice in the suburbs.” So while it’s problematic to say that the poet must “always leave,” I think that many writers have shown us how travel has the power to be transformative: it jars us out of our complacency, making the familiar strange and the unfamiliar commonplace. Which, of course, is part of the poet’s task.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Translating Tagore,” which I read ultimately as an ode to Tagore, the “Mother bird” who feeds words to the speaker, who struggles to translate them. The poem ends with the speaker “in dream” trying to read Tagore’s “curlicued Braille.” The image is wonderful in how it gives textured form to the Bengali language, as a different way to “see” it. I don’t want to ask about your efforts to translate Tagore because the poem already speaks so beautifully of that struggle, but can you talk about Tagore’s influence on your poetry? When did you discover him? 

DA: Somewhere in my parents’ basement are a few reel-to-reel audio tape recordings of my mother reciting Bengali poetry along with handfuls of cassette tapes with the same. My mother was deeply involved in poetry recitations and competitions while in school back in Bangladesh, and in my very earliest encounters with poetry I heard her reciting the poems of Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and others. During my childhood in Ohio I would sometimes find her recording her recitations with a tape recorder, or, as an adolescent, I would stumble across an unlabeled cassette that, when played, surprised me with the familiar sound of her voice hypnotically delivering indecipherable verses.

The recordings were always deeply mournful and dramatic, full of great yearning and pathos. I understood very little of it, as most of the poems were written in a more difficult, “textbook” version of Bengali while I was only familiar with the everyday spoken Bengali of our household. My mother would sometimes translate the poems from the difficult Bengali to the understandable Bengali and/or English that I knew, all the while mourning the loss of the poem’s music, spirit, and beauty. In many ways these encounters with Bengali poetry were similar to my experience of hearing Arabic prayers: both contained verses in which something unspecified but significant resided. My lack of fluency transformed my experience of these languages to one of pure music.

So I came to Tagore through my parents, with the layers of translation and without direct access to a beautiful and deeply poetic language. As a result, my introduction to what Neruda refers to as poetry’s “small and mysterious exchange of gifts” was doubly mysterious – it was as though my parents wanted me to love (as they loved) something I couldn’t fully perceive or experience, as though the reading of poetry were a kind of mystical experience I would never fully behold but rather, simply experience secondhand through my parents, who served as conduits to the source. I think these early experiences probably shaped my tendency to write for sound or music rather than for meaning in many of my initial drafts.

JB: Your poem “Return” is a love poem to Pittsburgh, a city – I will concur here – that can be difficult to love, at least for the newcomer. And yet so much poetry comes out of this city; it really does seem to be a poetry-lover’s kind of place. Off the top of my head, there is Jack Gilbert, Jim Daniels, Gerald Stern, Lynn Emanuel. What is it about Pittsburgh that inspires people to not only write poetry, but poetry in praise of Pittsburgh?

DA: I’ll start by saying that Pittsburgh is a very significant place for me, personally: I went to school in Pittsburgh. I fell in love in Pittsburgh. I got married in Pittsburgh to a man who was raised in Pittsburgh. I still have family and dear friends in Pittsburgh and visit regularly. And while my earliest efforts with poetry preceded my studies in Pittsburgh, it is in that city that I began, tentatively, to think of myself as a writer. I owe a great debt to the writers and scholars there who mentored me formally and informally: Judith Vollmer, Shalini Puri, Toi Derricotte, Geeta Kothari, Lynn Emmanuel.

While I lived there, Pittsburgh’s often-dreary weather put me in a pensive mood that inevitably drove me to write. (Upon moving to the sunny West Coast after living in Pittsburgh, I remember thinking I would never write again!) More specifically, if I had to say why poets write in praise of Pittsburgh, perhaps it’s because its charms can go unrecognized. Pittsburgh’s a city that you come to appreciate over time, I think.

In “Return,” I was attempting to capture a mindset in which the speaker feels that if only he or she left her current location, change would be possible. While the stagnancy is embodied by the landscape, it also rests within the speaker.

JB: " . . .the speaker feels that if only he or she left her current location, change would be possible." This reminds me very much of a poem I was just introduced to: "The City" by Cavafy. Do you know it?

DA: No, but I just looked it up (thanks, Google . . .). Cavafy’s poem is very powerful—so brutal and emotionally “true.” The ruin of Cavafy’s speaker is not location-specific; the ruin—and the capacity to create ruin—resides within the speaker. I was tackling a similar idea in “Return,” I suppose—the speaker rejects a particular landscape as a home, but the feelings of disillusionment and restlessness stem from internal sources. There’s a kind of inner reconciliation that has yet to take place. In a sense, the speaker has not yet discovered that a sense of “home” is as much created and actively constructed as it is found.

In Cavafy’s poem, the speaker wants to believe his or her dilemma is context-specific, but the poem’s counterargument frames the problem as a psychological one. The experience of ruin, or of creating ruin, is something he or she can’t shake or escape—he or she carries it with him. The poem is pretty damning—a real kick in the pants. I love it.

Both speakers seem to desire something that doesn’t or can’t exist—call it longing, or melancholy, or suadade in Portuguese, or maya in Bengali. In my poem, the speaker remains in the state of melancholic searching, while Cavafy’s poem confronts and dispels it.

JB: Now that your first book has been published, are you hard at work on your second book? How is your work changing? Let’s end our discussion with some hints of what we might expect to see from Dilruba Ahmed in the future.

DA: The new poems are taking shape . . . I don’t think I have enough distance yet to speak about them articulately—it’s a bit like peering through a pane of glass smeared with Vaseline! I can say that, in my earlier poems, I was deeply interested in place, which resulted in a lot of descriptive language, while the language in the new work (which does not have a focus on place) feels much more pared down. 

Thanks so much, Justin, for taking the time to ask these thoughtful questions about my work!

JB: And thank you, Ruba. It’s been a pleasure.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. A writer with roots in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Bangladesh, Ahmed holds BPhil and MAT degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has taught in Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA program. Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com.

Photo credit: Mike Drzal