The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 13, 2007

Obies Journey to Poetryland

Last Thursday, Professor of Creative Writing Dan Chaon presented a full lecture hall with a new assistant professor of poetry who “can do nearly everything and does it all incredibly well.”

“He walks an interesting tightrope between the formal and experimental, the personal and mystical, Dickinson and Rumi, Virginia Woolf and Yoko Ono&hellip;Perhaps my most favorite quote on him is that ‘He has been kissed by the lips of eternity, and remained lucid enough to speak of the wonder,’” said Chaon.

“That was my yoga instructor,” said Associate Professor of Creative Writing Kazim Ali at the ebb of applause.

Launching into an early piece in his book, The Far Mosque, Ali marooned the audience on that dusty terrain from where he began.

“‘Gallery’ was from my first year after college graduation — I was friendless, jobless, poem-less,” said Ali. Likewise, the one addressed in the poem pines for poetry.

“You came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden, / intending to starve&hellip;You’re thinking: I am ready to be touched now, ready to be found / He’s thinking: How lost, how endless I feel this afternoon,” read Ali.

Ali continued with homage to Emily Dickinson, a letter to Rumi and an “essay to poem” on the “unaccountable dark matter” and demands of minimalist painter Agnes Martin, all inspirations during his Beacon, NY days.

His poem, “The Return of Music,” was intended as the journey from these fragmented pieces to narrative.

“[But] a lot of writing for me is coming to the edge of that unspeakable, ineffable experience and shouting into it&hellip;because of that, there’s often a point of breakdown. This is documentation of a breakdown. It’s like gag reel of a Mission Impossible stunt, but having it actually in the movie,” said Ali.

Ali read, his voice reined and cleaving, like treading water: “&hellip;here as the season / stitches itself into fog then frost, you will. / Here as you untold, unsummon, uncry, you will. / Unopened, you will. Unhappen, you will. / These moments against the years, you will. / Unmoment you will. / Unyear you will. Unyou you will. / Unwill you will—”

During a pause, Ali said quietly, “And that’s how it goes in Poetryland.”

Also included in the reading was a pair of “sea” pieces from his new collection, The Fortieth Day, which is slated to go to press next spring. He also performed excerpts from his most recent project, an autobiography couched in lyrical prose.

The book was birthed last October when Ali came out to an aunt and uncle, who insisted upon his admission to his parents. The plan had been to break the news over Thanksgiving, said Ali, and the book was first a rehearsal of sorts for the big event and then a meditation as November stole past in silence. The text is lit with the “conflagration of a boy who disappoints his parents,” and those volatile signal fires he comes upon in a trancelike quest for that man with the same name who has “done it better, without hurting anyone.”

Ali received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Albany and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. In addition to The Far Mosque and the upcoming The Fortieth Day, his publications include the novel Quinn’s Passage, named among the Best Books of 2005 by Chronogram, and the chapbooks “River Road” and “From the Book of Miriam the Prophetess.” He is cofounder of independent press Nightboat Books and his works have appeared in national journals including American Poetry Review and Barrow Street.


 
 
   

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