Kazim Ali possesses many layers; he is an artist at once disconnected and connected to the world. On his Facebook page, under his photograph, in the space titled, “Write Something About Yourself," something that I have yet to do myself, he writes, "A Book in 35 Words: I was born on April 6, 1971 in Croydon, England, sandwiched between two momentous events in New York City—early that morning Igor Stravinsky passed away and later that afternoon Alice Coltrane recorded 'Universal Consciousness.'"

Initially, I was unable to meet Kazim in person, because we each occupied a separate region—he in Ohio and I in California—we met through our respective computers. I, wanting to know the sound behind his letters, had cheated and heard his voice read a few of his poems online. Upon our initial email introduction I told him that he is a vibrant reader; there is a beautiful balance in him. When I received his reply, he thanked me for my thoughts on his reading and went on to write about performance—the performance of his poem—and poetry in general—in time and space—and how it is important to him to understand sound as more having to do with space than time, justifying it, in a way, with his never having become a musician. Arguably, I think we are all regulated by space. Kazim’s poetry exemplifies space; there is a sense of location and orientation throughout his work, an understanding of where we are and how we decide upon the next chapter in our individual destinations. We had discussed family histories and he had inquired about my mother; he wondered about her ancestry before informing me that his is Egyptian, Iraqi and Persian—all by way of South Asia where, he wrote, “my family’s been since at least the early nineteenth century.” He then added, “the Persian's the most distant but also the purest: my paternal grandmother's maternal grandfather was Iranian, from Kerman. All my other grandparents and great-grandparents are mixed families from various ancestries."

I’ve always found it difficult to separate myself from my heritage; I know that that is not something one should do, but, when you’ve grown up on three different continents you begin to transfer your identity into, say, continental slots. I told Kazim that I am Persian, but that I left Iran when I was three and spent nine years in Germany before immigrating to California. Kazim’s poetry, as if aware of my past, seems to look into me; it asks me to question myself—challenge my identity in order to better understand its roots. There is an idea of “lostness” within most of us. However, what Kazim’s poetry offers is an interconnectedness of everything. There is an end—a direction—where, as readers, we find ourselves bound as well to that everything of which we have always been a part, but, for some reason, have neglected to recognize. I told him that I agree that sound relates more to space than to time, because even the spoken word is printed on some invisible field where our breath and our selective rhythms guide our words toward their respective places on that often undetectable landscape between the speaker and the listener. I then, perhaps to balance my two cents with my more commonly accepted obsequiousness, added an endearing suffix to his first name—a norm amongst Persians—“jon” (pronounced jaan), which simply means “dear.”

Nima Najafi – Kianfar
April 2009
Walnut Creek, California

Nima Najafi-Kianfar: Kazim, when you’re writing, do you think of Islam as a place or a setting? Or do you use Islam as a representation for something else?

Kazim Ali: Actually writing towards or about Islam has never been a conscious move in my writing. It’s taken me a long time to see the connections I have made between things we are given in Islam and how those things affect me spiritually. For example, during Prophet Mohammad’s night-journey to Heaven he was given many new instructions, one of the most important was the changing of the qibla or direction of prayer from The Far Mosque in Jerusalem to The Near Mosque, the Kaaba in Mecca. So on the one hand you are supposed to worship what’s close to you and not what’s far away. But why exactly is the Kaaba holy? Is it because it was built by Abraham on the site of Hagar’s exile? The house itself is empty inside and no one is allowed to enter except once a year someone goes in to sweep the interior. So at the center of worship is emptiness? But on the other hand, when the Prophet got on the winged horse that was supposed to bear him to Heaven it launched in the air and first landed on the rock in Jerusalem and then launched itself from there into Heaven. So though you maybe are supposed to worship the near thing, it’s the thing that is far away that is the actual route to Heaven. Too, there has been historical disagreement about the actual location of the so-called Far Mosque. Rumi dispensed with the controversy by declaring “The farthest mosque is the one within you.” If you take this in light of the statements above it comes very close to the Vedanta and yoga philosophies of the Hindu Vedas. So where does that leave you? Wrote Irani poet Sohreb Sepehri, “I am a Muslim/the rose is my qibla,/the wind is my black stone.”

NNK: In your essay, “The Architecture of Loneliness,” you incorporate and draw from Cristina Peri Rossi’s book State of Exile and you mention that, perhaps, the poems themselves were her “key to the house in Toledo,” referencing, in a way, the Jewish Diaspora. Can poetry be our home? Can poetry be our homeland?

KA: One wants to say that language is the only homeland. We do carry it into exile along with clothes, customs, food. Communities in exile tend to hold on desperately to what existed at the moment of separation. The version of Spanish spoken by Ladino communities (Spanish Jews exiled in the fifteenth century) bears much more relationship to the Spanish of that age than to modern Spanish. I think the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, about whom I also wrote in that essay, has done more than any other writer to bring the condition, punishments, and prizes of exile into poetry, both in terms of its form and language. What appeals to me immensely about Peri Rossi’s book is that it is so purely personal and not sociological at all. She writes in a couple of places about larger themes, but mostly it is about coffee, a dog in the street, things her mother used to warn her about…

NNK: Okay, let’s take that purely personal—the coffee, a dog, and the things her mother used to warn her about—and connect it to the far mosque with Sohreb Sepehri in mind. Is the ultimate journey, as is reminiscent of Rumi, the one we take within ourselves—is the ultimate destination simply inside of us? For instance, how do you challenge what is around you in order to reach and discover what is within you?

KA: Well, I think what’s inside and what’s outside is the same material. Certainly the same physical and spiritual struggles as they relate to the external environment of the planet exist in relation to the internal environment of the body. We’re each as individual bodies governed by the various “bodies” of external control—the corporation (body of capital), the government (body politic), organized religion. I think what Sepehri was getting at was that there is a purely internal and individual experience with the transcendent (whether money, god, or power, all of which transcend the individual human body and its small concerns) that is untouchable and unquantifiable.

NNK: In “The Architecture of Loneliness,” the self constructs our loneliness. You write, after looking at Mahmoud Darwish’s “A Poetry Stanza/The Southerner’s House,” about how Darwish wishes to transcend the “alienation and the barriers between objects and people.” Later, you add, “nations and even languages are mere fictions.” I’m wondering: can people transcend that alienation especially when everything around us is fiction?

KA: We have been given this life to try.

NNK: In your book, The Fortieth Day, there is a poem that I am drawn to that is titled “The Art of Breathing.” This poem deals with that transcendence from the alienation that separates us from ourselves as well as our world, but it also unites us by giving us a scene from the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna debates whether or not to attack Karna, his cousin and kin. First, what made you decide upon the Bhagavad Gita in your poem/poetry? Second, is there a statement of unity here? Is there a statement of some kind of unity throughout your poetry? And, finally, how can writers destroy their own alienation—as you quote Krishna telling Arjuna that by shooting Karna he will destroy his own alienation?

KA: Well, at least part of that poem’s subject is whether one should want to destroy one’s own alienation. One’s alienation (or anger, or sadness, or selfishness) is part of one, yes? It is a hard, hard choice for Arjun to make and I am not sure I am utterly convinced by Krishna. So perhaps I am condemned to countless more lives in which to work it out, but that too is a form of a gift I suppose.

The poem itself came when I was writing an essay about the poet Reetika Vazirani. She had, herself written an essay years earlier called “The Art of Breathing,” which was ostensibly about her relationship to yoga (it has been anthologized in a collection of essays about yoga) but which I found to be truly fixated on the fact of her father’s suicide. Vazirani, later that summer, also committed suicide and so I found myself in this really vexed position of trying to think about yoga and why it could not save these people from literal self-annihilation, compounded by the fact that a lot of yoga philosophy is about a metaphorical act of “cessation of identification with the mind’s fluctuations.” Those “fluctuations of the mind” are what we westerners commonly think of as the “self” but yoga is trying to teach you that those are not the self at all. In yoga the mind, or sense-making organ, is not the self but only another organ (different from the actual physical tissue of the brain).

The poem came out of all of that thinking and I suppose was a meditation on the possibilities and fears inherent in this destruction of alienation. Because Karna, though the general of the opposing army is not actually Krishna’s distant cousin, but his secret half-brother. No one discovers this until after the battle is over and Karna has been killed. Alas.

NNK: Coincidentally or intentionally, the poem after “The Art of Breathing” is “The Far Mosque.” You state in the notes section of The Fortieth Day that this poem is spun around some lines from Rumi’s poem of the same name. Is there a connection between Rumi and your book The Far Mosque? For this poem, what was the process you employed in order to capture a part of Rumi and maintain your own voice? Was it the subject matter that attracted you originally?

KA: Rumi is in my head conceptually. I only know him through the English translations, most of which have been made from later Turkish translations of Rumi’s actual “writing,” which wasn’t written but recited and copied. But I know a lot of Sufi and mystical philosophies. I’ve found lines of Rumi in Vedic writings but I don’t know who is quoting whom and I don’t think it matters. In my poem “Dear Rumi” I really just had to dream him, trance him, spin him from air. I was not formally or linguistically influenced by the actual translations of Rumi I have read, though I have high regard for Coleman Barks and his work in bringing Rumi to an American readership; also his excellent translation of the spiritual notebook of Rumi’s father, called “The Drowned Book,” is a wonderful contribution to the field of poetry.

I became unsatisfied with the end of the poem “Dear Rumi” in which I tried to figure out how Rumi was able to overcome the crippling loss of his teacher and friend Shams-e-Tabriz. I found a spiritual answer in that poem but the fact of grief is so physical and so much about one’s physical position in the world that I needed to revisit the subject matter once again in a poem called “Dear Shams,” which I have included in my current unpublished manuscript.

NNK: How important are other poets’ poetry for you in the creation and development of your own poetry? Is it a necessity? Should it be a necessity for all aspiring writers?

KA: Absolutely critical for me. Olga Broumas, Jean Valentine, Fanny Howe, Donald Revell, Lucille Clifton, Meena Alexander, Myung Mi Kim, Jane Cooper, Mahmoud Darwish, Agha Shahid Ali and Susan Howe have all been tremendous, unspeakably important influences in terms of how I try to approach the poetic form. Also in terms of just sheer bravery to speak at all. I also read lots of poetry by my peers and am amazed by the richness and beauty of the contemporary poetry being written.

I have a wide range of influences though and draw much from visual artists like Makoto Fujimura, Zhao Wou-ki, Agnes Martin and Hans Hofmann, from dancers Jose Limón and Kazuo Ohno, from musicians and composers like David Lang, Pauline Oliveiros, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, from filmmakers Wong Kar-wai, Maya Deren and Satyajit Ray. There are so many different writers and artists that feed me.

For example with my new book of lyric essays, Bright Felon, that is coming out from Wesleyan University Press. I wanted to write a book in bits and pieces. I wanted to talk about my life. The breath and bravery to do it came from reading Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines, the architecture of it as a book in pieces came from reading Nathalie Stephens’ book Touch to Affliction, and the microscopic level of how it moved from sentence to sentence and image to image was very much supported by a reading of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s work. You would read this book and the books I claim as its influences and perhaps not see any connection at all, but those were the secret sources. Of course Carole Maso's as well as David Markson's works are quite obvious influences in terms of form and style.

NNK: I noticed, while reading as well as after having finished The Fortieth Day, your continuous incorporation of numbers, seasons, instruments, letters, and various images of water. Were you aware of these thematic elements while working on The Fortieth Day? Or did you become aware of them appearing later, after the editing process or, perhaps, after other people, like nosy interviewers, pointed them out?

KA: Some of these themes developed over the long course of writing the manuscript. But a lot of the recognition came at a later stage. I did not thread them through with intention, though after I started to see patterns I was able to consciously shape. For example I had a single three-part poem that was about a correspondent who would not answer the writer. I later split this poem up into its three parts and scattered them at the beginning (“Vase”), middle (“Interrupted Letter”) and ending (“Suture”) of the book. I also found myself with a sequence of poems called “Morning Prayer,” “Afternoon Prayer,” “Evening Prayer,” and “Night Prayer,” which originally I opened the four sections with. It later seemed to feel better and make more sense for those poems to come second in each of the four sections of the book.

Other patterns emerged not only within the book but between books. There are poems in The Fortieth Day which quote lines or images from poems in The Far Mosque, for example the poems “Dear Sunset, Dear Avalanche,” and “Sleep Door” which each quote lines from the same poem in The Far Mosque. There are hidden (and not-so-hidden) sequences within and between the books as well. The Far Mosque ends with a poem called “July,” while The Fortieth Day includes a poem called “August.” The poem “Dear Lantern, Dear Cup” picked up the prominent imagery from the poem “Morning Prayer” and expands on it. So there is a lot that was composed, but only after seeing what was emerging from the surface.

For example in my new book manuscript (tentatively titled “His Lost Book”) it was only after I put the full manuscript together that I found how many drowning boys there were in the book. I’d been writing about the image of drowning since The Far Mosque, but here you had actual boys drowning, building boats, being abandoned in the middle of the ocean. At first I thought they were all different boys, there was Pip from Moby-Dick, there was Icarus, there was Ishmael—but as I revised and looked closer I found them all to be Icarus. There is a sequence now that is threaded through the book, Icarus flying, Icarus falling out of the sky, Icarus floating in open water, Icarus sinking below the surface. The myth ends there—the boy drowns. But in my book he sinks to the bottom of the ocean. He hits the ocean floor. Come to think of it, my novel Quinn’s Passage ends with Quinn in the ocean, beneath the surface of the ocean, trying to decide whether he should breathe or drown.

NNK: Why do you tend to access drowning and the ocean?

KA: I can only guess. Perhaps it is my profound and untouchable loneliness. Perhaps rather it is my metaphor for the individual soul adrift in a divine consciousness he does not recognize as such. So in a way it is not a fear of drowning that drives Icarus or Pip or Quinn, but a desire to drown. That’s dark. I’m currently proofing my new novel The Disappearance of Seth and found in it a scene where one character holds another character underwater. But in the scene it is not played as metaphorically at all.

NNK: What is your editing process? And should writers consider working with thematic elements when constructing a collection or other literary endeavors?

KA: I cannot write sequences with intention. I think of “subject” of a poem the way I think of “subject” of a painting. Georges Braque said, “I can never plan the painting before beginning, I insist that it make itself under the brush. The painting is not finished until the original idea has been obliterated.” I think it is important to work. In my novel The Disappearance of Seth, I had six main characters and several very supporting characters. One of those, Jack, kept popping up over and over again. I wrote more and more about him. The people who read the book kept commenting to me about Jack. Finally in the last revision of the book, I saw all the threads come together and wrote three new sections and he is very much one of the main characters of the book now.

I write lots of things at once and then have to work on them all, together, over the course of time. Frequently there is a break for me where I have to put things away and work on new things and then go back to them. The Far Mosque I put away in October 2003 and did not look at again until August 2004. The Fortieth Day I started writing in October of 2003 and put away in August of 2004 until about May of 2005. I worked on a third manuscript in the 2005-2006 academic year—this is the book, about forty pages of handwritten poetry (I write by hand until at least the third or fourth draft of a book and then I type into the computer to revise the typescript) that I lost. The rupture of losing that book transformed both The Fortieth Day (because I went back and included poems from memory from the lost poems) and also my new project which came to be called “His Lost Book.” This book I mostly wrote out from my journals in June of 2008 and then did not go back to work on them until about November of that same year. I have been working on them since then.

So I hope you can see that planning, either in terms of an individual poem or in terms of a book itself, is not really part of my process. But I think this is a very personal thing; and writers have to find their own path.

NNK: The Fortieth Day, much like “The Architecture of Loneliness,” deals with matters of identity and place and the belonging nature of us, as a people, within both of those contexts. Can I assume that identity and place play important roles in your literary developments? For instance, the last line of your poem titled “August” states, “What you seek to fit into will not cease.” How important is connection, belonging, and finding yourself/allowing others to find themselves to you and your work? I know I don’t need to point out that your first poem in The Fortieth Day is titled “Lostness.”

KA: A lot of the drama comes from the fact that an individual wants to join with the larger consciousness (call it Divine if you want or call it community) but wants to preserve itself, wants to know itself. Can you have both? When I lost my poems I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to write again. I was sitting on a meditation cushion trying to do zazen meditation, which is the last place in the world I wanted to be, staring at a blank wall in silence, when the first two lines of the poem “Lostness” came into my head. So I went from there to silence. This poem itself has no subject, or I should say the poem interrupts itself and a new subject appears. It does not turn thematically but sonically from the word “rain” to the word “train,” and so in that sense the new realization is purely unplanned.

I am lost—aren’t all of us? The single narrative poem in the book, “Four O’Clock,” which also closes the book, seems to encompass all of these themes into it; it is a completely true story of the time my grandfather wandered off to buy chocolates and then didn’t show up at home again. The police eventually found him and drove him home.

NNK: How much do you depend upon your own life in order to give to the life of poetry? I suppose I am seeing poetry as a living thing; do you believe poetry to be alive?

KA: I am alive. Language that moves through one is likewise alive—though it can do fantastically destructive things. One hopes, in an age when the flow of capital and resources from place to place on the globe has become more important than the flow of blood through the circulatory systems and breath through the respiratory systems of the billions of individual human bodies on the planet, that poetry and art can lead back to ourselves from this alienated and disembodied state we have now found ourselves in. As Regina Spektor touchingly sings, “Suppose I kept on singing love songs/just to break my own fall…”

NNK: Yes—exactly—those lyrics actually remind me of a moment in your poem “Horizon” where you deal with the discovery of one’s self through the discovery of one’s world—as unknowable as it may seem. I see them resonate in your lines, “At its freezing point wind shatters” and “send me to the earth’s end—I have never seen it.” After it shatters, wind will become wind again, but what can be gained by seeing the earth’s end? In “Horizon” I feel a withering inside; you start me off “numb in the storm wanting an answer” and I am left wondering what is the answer? Or what is the question for which we all need/want an answer? The irony here is that at the earth’s end I could only find more questions—

KA: Where is the horizon? It’s not a real place. It disappears upon approach. It is the limit of sight—nothingness. In Moby-Dick, Pip goes inside because he sees nothing but nothingness and then in his mind sinks below the surface of the sea. Paul Virilio says the horizon used to be the lip of the infinite, but now that limit is the screen. And in the screen is not the nothingness of the horizon but the everythingness; so, we have to contend with a new form of insanity—the insanity of everythingness, the saturation of signs as Baudrillard put it.

How do we get through it? I don’t know; but these are questions I think about.