BBC Spiritual Journeys: Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker

My wife hipped me to this poet a couple days ago. I've been mulling over the BBC program and her poetry, and feeling parochial. I've reached the point where what I like is what I like, and while I'm pretty open, especially when it comes to poetry, there's nothing like getting a blast of perspective from another culture entirely to make you feel small and wan against the big body that is world poetry.

The poet, artist and film-maker Imtiaz Dharker was born a Muslim in Lahore, Pakistan and educated at a school with a strict Protestant ethic in Glasgow where her family moved to when she was a child.

When growing up she began to question and challenge the restrictions of her religion, particularly on women, and poetry was a place where she could do this.

The titles of some of her poetry collections reflect the issues she grapples with: Postcards from God, I Speak for the Devil, and The Terrorist at my Table.

In her recent collection Leaving Fingerprints, Imtiaz Dharker has been inspired by the Sufi poets and attracted by their belief in the continuous recreation of the self.

However, Imtiaz Dharker is far too earthy and sensual to want to be labelled as merely a 'spiritual writer'.

Presenter: Bidisha

Producer: Kate Howells

Here's a poem from her site. I tried to find the poem 'Honour Killing' online, as it seems her most well-known but couldn't locate it. Which means another book purchase. Meh (not really).

The Right Word

Outside the door,

lurking in the shadows,

is a terrorist.

Is that the wrong description?

Outside that door,

taking shelter in the shadows,

is a freedom fighter.

I haven't got this right .

Outside, waiting in the shadows,

is a hostile militant.

Are words no more

than waving, wavering flags?

Outside your door,

watchful in the shadows,

is a guerrilla warrior.

God help me.

Outside, defying every shadow,

stands a martyr.

I saw his face.

  

No words can help me now.

Just outside the door,

lost in shadows,

is a child who looks like mine.

One word for you.

Outside my door,

his hand too steady,

his eyes too hard

is a boy who looks like your son, too.

I open the door.

Come in, I say.

Come in and eat with us.

The child steps in

and carefully, at my door,

takes off his shoes.

Frederick Seidel is Fun and Games for Everyone!

Copyright Mark Mahaney

If you don't know his work--and you should-- this article from Wyatt Mason is a good place to begin:

One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’ 

Seidel paused. The bright cries of a group of young women giving a baby shower in the adjoining booth rose and fell behind the bare crown of Seidel’s gray head. “So,” he continued, “the first thing I did was call a girlfriend. And the woman said, ‘I’m coming over.’ And did. And listened to this thing. And burst into tears. Because it really was horrific.” Another friend, a federal judge, also listened, insisting that Seidel call the police immediately and tell them he’d received a death threat. “They came by and they said: ‘It’s real. Have you published a book recently?’ I had. And that was it, really. Meaning nothing happened. But,” Seidel said, his large blue eyes brightening, “it was the most severe review I’ve ever received.” Read more.

 Or this one, by Michael Hofman:

Poems 1959–2009, by Frederick Seidel.

 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $40.00.

Frederick Seidel has always been interested in taboos. Only no-no’s need apply. Everything in him is sex, politics, religion, race, and class. A gentle giant of a black doorman remembered from childhood—

He wore a visored cap

With a high Gestapo peak

On his impenetrably black marble.

Waits out there in the sun to open the car door.

My noble Negro statue’s name was Heinz,

My calmly grand George Washington. 

—is to him a full house by any other name. 

From the beginning, Seidel was always a bogeyman, a Bürgerschreck, anépateur—a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry. He is a purveyor of picong, a Trinidadian term, “from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.” (This, as good a description of Seidel as inadvertence or serendipity can come up with, is from The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s outstanding new biography of V.S. Naipaul, and what a lot the authors of Ooga-Booga and A Bend in the River have in common: both of them Insider Outsiders, traveling compulsively on all five continents; sharing an unspeakably deep attraction to a sort of eighteenth-century squirearchy that may or may not be England; a fascination with Africa, with Joseph Conrad, with Islam; both are students of the remorseless spread of global capital and culture, the Gulf Stream of development and the countervailing El Niño of terror; both are equally at ease in fiction and non-fiction, and in a blurring of both; and last and far from least, both exhibit, and are proud of, an insouciant erotomania. Surely Seidel, never a professional poet, never a reviewer, reciter, promoter, or teacher of poetry, could put his name to Naipaul’s boast: “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” Both are barbed, solitary, aloof, alarming figures, becoming, if anything, less mellow with age, and more like their intrinsic fossil selves, jagged and serviceable, “sharp / And meek,” Seidel says somewhere—he does love his noses—“like the eyesight of the deaf.” Thomas Mann’s term Greisen-Avantgardismus—meaning something like “the experimental progressivism occasionally found in the very old”—suggests itself. We as readers are uneasily privileged to witness their bold, inflammatory, defamatory gestures—gestures we know there will never be time or second thought or pusillanimousness to take back.) Typically, Seidel’s splendid ketchup, piccalilli, and black Poems—its featly five hundred pages covering fifty years of writing—runs backwards, to that beginning, to the slim volumeFinal Solutions, which shared its author’s initials and was published to no little controversy in 1963 when Seidel was twenty-eight, and reasonably fresh out of Harvard. Now Final Solutions stands at the end of Poems 1959–2009, as if it was always going to be there. Read more.

There's not much of his poetry available online, but it seems to me his collected poems is well worth the hefty price tag, and there are other smaller volumes like Ooga-Booga that will give you a taste, too.

Radio Silence

I'd like to say the last three weeks of non-posting have been in service to great new ideas and a rush of writing great big hairy poems and other good things. Sadly, not the case. I am reading a lot, and will likely post some reading-related material here in the next week or so. In the meantime, it's not too early to look forward to NaPoWriMo. Check out the new website Maureen Thorson put up for the annual event she began.

NaPoWriMo

For those of you who don't know, participants in NaPo agree to write a poem every day during April. That's it. Many of us post our drafts to our blogs or other writing communities, just for the heck of it, but many do not. Some of us--cough--often fall three to four days behind schedule and end up writing a frenzied 5-6 poems in a day or two to catch up. It's fun, is the bottom line, and it's collegial and it's humbling, to see what other poets can come up with in the wee hours. Try it. I'll be posting my drafts to this blog in April,and probably in a few other places as well.

Emergency Haying by Hayden Carruth

If you ever want to know how to properly end a poem, read this. And then admire his beard.

Emergency Haying

Coming home with the last load I ride standing

on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor

in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung

awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.

Almost 500 bales we've put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.

And of course I think of another who hung

like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced

by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat

is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended

on two points of pain in the rising

monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image

fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains

brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.

Now is our last chance to bring in

the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales

to the barn, these late, half-green,

improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine

across the field, tossed on the load, and then

at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help—

I, the desk-servant, word-worker—

and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands

are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.

I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.

Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,

her father in the camps of Moldavia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers

herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands

too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even

the touch of love. I have a friend

whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day

she snicked her hand off and took it

and threw it grandly at the sky. Now

in September our New England mountains

under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last

begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first color. I look

beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,

to the notch where the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,

where a full new-risen moon like a pale

medallion hangs in a lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes

sting with sweat and loveliness. And who

is the Christ now, who

if not I? It must be so. My strength

is legion. And I stand up high

on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out

you sons of bitches who would drive men and women

to the fields where they can only die.

Love Your (Poetry) Moves

Oh no, the gargoyle sez, not dis too?

Elisa Gabbert brought this to my attention first, with a list of tricks (many/some/all) poets use in writing their masterpieces. At first I thought it was funny, then I looked in my poems folder. Urgh. Most of these quoted gaffes are actually pretty usable, I think, if you know what you're doing, which is after all how it's done: if you can get away with it, it works. Full list at HTMLGiant. Be sure to check it out, but in case you don't, here's a few to strop your razor with. Mike Young is writing--

Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.

1) Exposed revision
Example: Alice Fulton’s “About Face“:

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It’s intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

1b) Variation: Revision by way of “I mean”

Example: “Confession” by Suzanne Wise:

I can only imagine
how hard it must be for you
to believe me. I mean, to hold
blame. I mean, to be you.

2) Starting a line with the final clause from a previous line’s sentence and finishing it with a single short and often fragmentary sentence.

Example: Jack Gilbert’s “Searching for Pittsburgh”:

The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.

3) Abstract epistolary: Using “Dear [abstraction or common object]” in the title or first line.

Examples: Countless. Dear Body: by Dan Machlin, “Dear Final Journey,” by Lynn Emanuel, which begins, “Dear Noose, Dear Necktie, Dear Cravat”

4) The “blank of blank” construction

Examples: From “Marriage Proposal” by Sarah Messer: “I want to be trapped by the cage of your ribs”

From “Synchronized Swimming” by Angela Sorby: “How did decay work its way into the theater of water”

From “I want you to see me” by Kate Greenstreet: “Red and blue and the white of my transparency”

5) Use of “etc.”

Examples:

From “Mezzotint for A” by Ben Lerner: “My better half had left me so I wrote her hemi- / stiches in the half-light of my halfway house, etc.” Jessica Fjeld’s On Animate Life: Its Profligacy, Organ Meats, Etc.

Fun stuff. Watch this space later on next week. I have some muddling-about ideas on Hayden Carruth that I'm going to put up here.

Call for Submissions:A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

I'm so motivated by this I might even write something new.

From Stacy Lynn Brown:

The editors, Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz, are pleased to announce a call for submissions for A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.

We are seeking poems that work within the literary tradition of persona poetry: poems written as dramatic monologues, whose speakers employ masks, or whose character and voice are different from the poet's own.

Please submit up to 5 unpublished poems. We will also consider poems whose rights have reverted back to the author.

All submissions will be accepted electronically. Please send an email to the editors at facesanthology@gmail.com with the poet's name and "Submission for Persona Anthology" as the subject line, with the poems as an attachment.

The submission deadline has been extended to February 15th. We look forward to reading your work!

Reading Basil Bunting and Karl Shapiro today. Bunting surprises me in good ways, Shapiro, not so much.

Reasons to Fuck Poetry

My my my. I found this in Absent recently, through someone's linkage, sorry I can't recall whose. Well worth a read if you've ever tried to ride ol' Poetry into the sunset. If ever you wanted to have hot hairy sex with a satyr, this piece is as close as you'll probably get. Hooraw.

1) Poetry invited you in earnest. Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany. Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked.



2) Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry. English professors, high-school English teachers, poetry librarians, and poets at writing workshops all do their best to define a canon of poetry. As paid lovers of poetry, they set a few of their close friends alongside the Bard, Goethe, and two or three multinational poets who are there to prove that they’ve done some homework. They publish in journals, and talk to middle-class, white students in the nation’s elite universities. These individuals, these self-made doyennes, who get paid to make love to poetry, nonetheless defy in their very institutional rigor the kind of open, unlaced escape that poetry has been trying to execute since at least Mallarmé. If they really loved poetry, they would be helping her do what she really wants to do, which is to remake society. Instead, they grow old and fat, drinking and smoking with a few of their contemporaries, rarely traveling, and never introducing her to new people. Poetry secretly hates them.