Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based poet, writer, and translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, the 2022 Arc Poem of the year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry, and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript G is out with Palimpsest press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems Daffod*ls is out with Pamenar Press. Their translation of Ghazal Mosadeq’s Andarzname is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse Fall 2025. Their fifth poetry manuscript Book of Interruptions is forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn Fall 2025.
rm: You describe your latest collection, Daffod*ls, as a work of “experimental dream-poems,” an extended, book-length poem that does seem quite different in tone and structure than what I’ve seen of your work prior. How did this book come about?
KM: I met The Publisher of Daffod*ls, Ghazal Mosadeq mid November 2022. A few weeks later she asked me if I had a manuscript sitting for consideration. I actually DID have a 110 page manuscript, but it was mostly frankensteined poems left out of other projects, and though I loved the poems, I didn’t like it as a book. I sent it to her, with the caveat that I had a new project in mind. The 110 page book I had sent ended with a 13 pages rough draft of the beginning of Daffod*ls. Ghazal was happy with the book as it was, but I asked if she’d wait until I finished the final “Long Poem” and make that the book Pamenar will publish. That Long Poem was the result of a few consecutive sleepless nights where I lay down in bed, speaking into my Zoom recorder, which I’d later make into poems during the first few hours of waking life. I simply continued the process with another 63 night recordings. I composed a 140 page long poem which I cut down into the book you see with the help of phenomenal Toronto poet Zoe Imani Sharpe.
rm: Apart from the, as you say, “mostly frankensteined poems” manuscript, do you see poetry manuscripts as individual projects? How do you see Daffod*ls differing from what you’ve worked on prior?
KM: Not usually no! I consider myself a “Chapbook writer”, which is why I produce so many chapbooks. Most of my “projects” are 20-30 pages long and perfect for a chapbook format. If you look at my first two books, you can clearly see that each are basically a collection of 3-5 chapbooks. Daffod*ls was different because I already had the momentum and wanted to try my hand at a “book” as opposed to writing “Poems” and letting them accumulate. Daffod*ls works so well as a book but I couldn’t get a single piece from it published anywhere!
rm: Well, arguably that can often become the drawback when attempting something book-length: the inability to excerpt something that appears self-contained. So then: if you were working chapbooks as your units of composition prior to this, how were your book manuscripts put together? Were you attempting to find chapbook-length sections that spoke to each other in a particular manner? Have you chapbook-length works that haven’t fallen into a book-length manuscript yet because it doesn’t seem to fit with anything else?
KM: Well my first book was basically the entirety of my first two chapbooks plus all the best writing I had produced after. My second book WJD, had a chapbook embedded within that I never published, but it started as a chapbook (it was called the Naive sufi). I’d say my first two books with Gordon Hill Press were mostly put together by accumulating my best work up to the editorial deadline. I write every day and every 2-3 months I tend to change style/substance into a different direction, it used to be a simple matter of time. Now I compose with the same vigor, but don’t rush the poems out the door like I used to, whether it be in journals or chapbook/book length projects.
rm: You said you see
yourself as a chapbook writer, but how do you see where your structure might
lead, now that you’ve the experience of composing something full-length? Are you
still feeling more comfortable with shorter projects? Do your projects connect
in any sort of way with each other?
KM: I’d say I’m willing and able to do book-length projects, but most of the time the projects I come up with end up spanning a maximum of 30ish pages. I could’ve pushed any of those projects into longer ones, but sometimes the project has a very clear ending. I’d say I love dedicating myself to a book, but whether or not I end up consistently doing that depends on how far a project can stretch organically.
rm: The collaborative G, a book you composed with Klara du Plessis, recently appeared with Palimpsest Press. How did this collaboration come about?
KM: It came about as a simple curiosity into a fricative both our languages shared: The voiceless velar fricative X. It began in the beginning of the pandemic when we both had much time to spare. we wrote the entirety of the book in 2.5 months.
rm: Can you explain what you mean when you say that “voiceless velar frictive X”?
KM: I can’t really explain it, its a consonant/fricative that the English language does not possess. “voiceless velar fricative X” is the way it is explained in the international phonetic alphabet.
rm: I found it interesting that both of you approached each other from and into what du Plessis recently referred to as a “translingual poetics,” which is something you are both deeply engaged with. How do you find your engagement with translation, or even two languages with divergent histories of poetry and poetic language, affecting the way you approach your own writing?
KM: Something that has been central to both our approaches to poetics generally, and to this book specifically has been Sarah Dowling’s Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism. I won’t get too deep into the contents of the book, but the fact that North American psyche has normalized the “monolingual” is deeply detrimental to linguistic curiosity, and something that both me and Klara profoundly rage against.
rm: You’ve translated numerous works from Persian into English, but have you done much much writing in Persian? Would you ever be interested in publishing a full-length collection of pieces composed in Persian?
KM: The only poem I ever wrote in Persian, was to impress my grandfathers. They both read it and were highly impressed by it. Sadly they both passed away a month or so after that Persian poem, and I felt a certain disconnect between me and Persian writing afterwards. My Grandfathers were my only audience for my Persian language poems, and after their passing I never felt like writing in Persian ever again.
rm: How important is sound on the page as you work?
KM: It depends project to project. For Example, Daffod*ls is entirely reliant on sound, since I did not “Write” the poems, I spoke them into a recorder and wrote them down afterwards. BUT I do also sometimes enjoy writing convoluted poems that may not be the most pleasant poems to read out loud. In general however, I’d say sound is incredibly important to me. The trajectory of vowels guide every poem of mine.
rm: The way you describe the composition of Daffod*ls seems comparable to the late Jack Spicer, who claimed himself as a “receiver” that simply wrote down what he was sent from the “Martians” into poems, or Jack Kerouac writing out his dreams each morning into prose. Is that how you saw working this particular manuscript?
KM: Definitely. While launching this book online with Pamenar press I realized that the Winter 2023 season of Pamenar Press’s offerings (J.R. Carpenter’s The Pleasure of the Coast, Rhys Trimble’s KOR, Sally-Shakti Willow’s Rite and my book) are all eerily united in their work with “received language.” I guess that’s where the “Experimental” part of the “experimental dream poems” comes from? As you know better than I do, “Experimental” is such an unbelievably opaque term. It’s perhaps harder to approach “experimental poetry” as a topic, than it is to approach it as actual poetry hah.
Something that comes to mind very clearly here, is that in the beginning, the writings sounded very A.I. Generated. This method (experimental or not!) was language that I’d personally claim to be “receiving” from my “subconscious” in the first layers of pre R.E.M. sleep. Therefore it made me at the same time realize that perhaps A.I. is not fully conscious, but sub-conscious.
rm: So do you consider this process to be one that creates work less “composed” by you than your consciously-written work?
KM: well there’s a great deal of editing at play, but I’d say the editing is mostly omission. I don’t change words or even their chronology. The phrases you see have been spoken with the exact same chronology, just that sometimes they have been compressed. Cutting is my personal favorite tool when editing (I even consider it a “writing tool” if that can even make any sense?). but in short, I’d say yes. Its much less “Conscious” than my past work.
rm: I would suspect that considering yourself simply receiving the poem from an outside or unconscious source might allow you to be more receptive to the accident or the unexpected. What do you consider your relationship to the accident?
KM: Hmm... I’m going to perhaps show a certain lack of linguistic knowledge here, but to me personally, an “Accident” implies that every participant has entered the accident without intent. I’m not going to call “received language” an accident, since I entered with every single bit of intent. I’d perhaps say its more a “ritual of truth-making” akin to Tarot, Astrology or Bibliomancy. One side is an unchanging, unwavering constant that can create infinite possibilities based on the receiver. When it comes to such rituals, I always enter willing to recieve.
rm: Fair. I’m curious about your approach to the poem. What is it that first brought you to the poem, and what do you think the form allows you that might not have been possible otherwise?
KM: Its interesting because even though I’m a poet, I don't like writing “poems” much, simply because I tend not to like reading stand-alone poems. I like reading books, so I keep trying (and often failing) in making books. Daffod*ls is perhaps my first... success if we can call it that. But your question is definitely aimed at something else. I’d say I like the expanse that poetry gives me. I like how it breaks down narrative, how it breaks down linear grammar often, how it fragments. I feel like that’s exactly how my mind works. I actually have trouble reading novels. I don’t do well with narratives. In that way poetry really serves me.
rm: I wanted to loop back to your work in translation. How does your work in translation interact with your own writing, or vice versa, if at all? What is it that your work with translation allows?
KM: Translation plays a very important part in my writing cycle. I guess every writer has at least a 2 part routine of 1. reading and 2. writing. Every time I translate it creates a 3rd step in the cycle, which is strangely BOTH reading and writing, but also neither at the same time. I consider it like a prompt: there’s something already there that I need to create work UPON and ONTO. It gets me going!
rm: You’ve already another book, Book of Interruptions, forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn for 2025. What was the composition process like for that manuscript, and where does it fit within the chronology of your two recent titles?
KM: Book Of Interruptions is a project I started immediately after my book WJD with Gordon HIll, and its a book deeply entrenched in the political intricacies of the middle-eastern psyche. I began the project briefly after reading my dear friend Anahita Jamali Rad’s Still, which interacted heavily with the Iranian-American Scholar Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s works. In the process of writing “Book of Interruptions” I read every single book by Mohaghegh, took 3 online classes with him and listened to tens of hours of lectures by him through the centre for research and practice. I’d say Jason Mohaghegh is the heart of “Book of Interruptions” and his analyses on the intersections (and interruptions) of Western modernity and Eastern past, present and future, are seminal to my work in that book.
The
author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End,
(ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of
uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the
best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible
Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty
(University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. He is the current
Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s annual international poetry festival.