Shazia Hafiz Ramji : Love in a Dangerous Time: An Interview with Stephen Collis

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Collis speaks with Shazia Hafiz Ramji about his latest book of poems A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks), which explores the climate crisis, the shifting meanings of “revolution,” and how poetry can bend time.

SHR: In the first section of A History of the Theories of Rain, “Future Imperfect,” you ask: “So what will happen between this unusually rainless November and an unspecified but nearing future when it will have warmed however many degrees Celsius above this present stretching global mean / asking for a friend.” You place us firmly in our moment of climate crisis when the “slow cancellation of the future” (in the words of Bifo via Mark Fisher) is taking place. I’m curious about when and where you began writing “Future Imperfect.” How did you arrive at this “vantage point” that speaks from within the crisis of the future and the climate crisis? And what led you here – to this tense?

SC: I began the sequence of prose poems the book begins with a few years ago. I don’t recall anything special or specific about the context, but I had been pondering the bent temporality climate change discourse induces for a while. This is especially the case when the discussion turns to the Anthropocene—the idea that we have entered a new geological era in which human-made conditions shape the planet’s entire physical makeup. Incidentally, I don’t love the name “Anthropocene,” since it erases important differences (like, who really did this—spoiler alert, it was the privileged classes of privileged countries); I usually refer to the present as the era of Geophysical Capitalism.

So, climate science rightly wants to tell us to hurry up—the situation is urgent—act now (and it might already be too late—look how BC is cooking). But when the discussion is about the so-called Anthropocene, we are invited to imagine the present from the distant future, where we can see that this was indeed the start of a new era, and that “our” impact on the planet indeed left a noticeable geological imprint. The “vantage point” of climate science is often a projection into a deep future from which we have erased ourselves, and some imaginary time-travelling geologist (or Mark Fisher!) looks at a dark seam in an eroded cliff face and says, “see that? That’s us fucking up!” So this tension—between urgency and the distant and hard to imagine future—is fascinating and crazy-making, and I wanted to live and write from the heart of that madness.

I think it also calls for poetry’s particular temporal imaginary. My favourite formulation of this comes from a letter from Charles Olson to Robert Duncan (this is from the 1950s), in which he writes: “time is a concrete continuum which the poet alone—I insist—alone practices the bending of.” I like this idea that poetry might be a tool particular to warping time—but, if the times themselves are getting bent out of shape (accelerated, compressed by the climatic conditions being imposed on the planet), what’s poetry to do? Bend it back into its former shape? Twist it around like a mobius strip? I’m not sure—but in this book, I wanted to wade deep into our temporal problem and see what could be found there.

SHR: How do you think poetry bends time now, compared to previous eras?

SC: Good question. I suppose what makes sense to me, and maybe what Olson was getting at too, is the compression of poetry—the capacity poetry enables to leap, spatially and temporally, across great gulfs in just a few lines, to bring disparate elements close together via the magic of a line break or a subtle lateral shift mid-line. Or (and it feels more like the poetry of physics/the physics of poetry to me), to bend space-time back on itself or stretch the linguistic material so a dreamt future comes suddenly close and into clearer view. Concretely what is this? I think poetry is so often enlivening the past, bending it back into view—an example I love might be Hoa Nguyen’s recent book A Thousand Times you Love Your Treasure, where she warps her recently deceased mother’s life as a circus performer into view. Or Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy, where time feels entirely elastic, an effect she achieves, I think, largely via the address (“Dear Machine,” “Dear Southern Ocean”), which draws distance into the immediacy of discourse. (Another poetic “bending” here is of course the bending of agency—who or what is addressable?)

These are just two examples from my nearest shelf. What, in part, seems to define poetry is its quick-footedness. We don’t have to narrate the connections. We just warp something new into view. Homer, Shakespeare, HD—it’s been going on for a long time. I’m not sure what’s different now about this practice—other than that the world itself has got more bendy. Maybe that’s one reason I often find myself wanting to slow the pace down a bit now. Paradoxically, that’s another thing poetry is good for—slowing things down. So maybe time-bending relates to the poet’s toggling through phases of acceleration and deceleration.

SHR: I really admire your capacity for reinvention, and yet every time I read something by you, it seems very “Steve” to me (which is a compliment)! I’m thinking particularly about your thoughts on revolution and how what constitutes revolution for you changes with each book. In the second section, “Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written,” you propose that revolution “doesn’t have to be all / storm of bricks and tear gas clouds,” and that it can be “stillness” - “just the stillness / of potentiality / of bodies joining the mass / which starts to turn once / those stillnesses mesh […]” I love this idea of stillness as potentiality – not as an ascetic turning-away-from-the-world, but a receptivity to it. What does “revolution” mean for you now?

SC: These are great questions! I guess the image in this poem is relating the word “revolution” to its original meaning—to revolve in place, like a planet. So, at once spinning and still. But I think the poem is—playfully—trying to open up the concept of “revolution” for further questioning. It begins in a space of hesitation and self-talk: “I told myself to be revolution.” Like, the speaker’s not too sure they can live up to this (and neither am I!). But what if revolution was—“normal”? Part of daily life? A means of constantly turning over the social soil? Not dramatic and seemingly impossible—but almost routine. Something like that is being pondered here. The moment of revolution is also being zoned in on in the poem—time slowed down, the event about to happen, on the cusp where change—positive social change—is still the potential outcome. So much of what we call “activism” is lived in that moment—when you don’t yet know what will happen, but you are filled with the possibility of change.

There’s a lot of doubt here too. This poem pairs with another that also has the speaker “tell” themselves something about he word “catastrophe.” If “revolution” indicates a turning around, a “catastrophe,” etymologically, indicates a sudden overturning. When we use the word “revolution” in a political context, we usually take it to mean what “catastrophe” actually means: sudden overthrowing. There’s a lesson here—and it’s a sobering one. It seems more and more likely (to me at least) that revolutionary change will only come to our social order in the form of, or on the heels of, a catastrophe (I write this as the Gulf of Mexico is literally a swirling vortex of fire).

Another aspect of the “stillness” of revolution. I feel like, in my own life, I’ve shifted what I do in the world from what gets called “activism” (you aren’t very still when you are active) to what doesn’t always look very active, but might actually be more … sustainable. I’m not sure what to call this, but it relates to the work I do with refugee communities, primarily in the UK. We are working to build capacity in a terrible context. It’s slow work, about building relationships and trust over time. It doesn’t look very revolutionary, but it is life changing, and it’s about surviving catastrophe. This comes up in A History of the Theories of Rain via the persistent references to borders, movement, walking, etc.—it’s a key part of the climate catastrophe too—people, plants and animals, thrown out of their usual orbits and made exiles on their own planet. The climate’s “tipping point” pushes against the national “border” as two intersecting lines we have created.

SHR: I’m so grateful for the work you do with refugee communities and appreciated The Refugee Tales anthology immensely.

I think that acknowledging slowness is a crucial part of revolution now because this kind of temporal awareness emphasizes perspectives on the climate crisis and non-human kin. When do you think your activism began to embrace “stillness” and slowness?

SC: My sister, who died in 2002 and who had a huge influence on me, had this whole theory of the structure of sevens in our lives (my daughter, getting seriously into Tarot and astrology etc., also tells me seven is an important number for me specifically). 2014/15 fell on a seven year oscillation in my life; that’s when I got sued for organizing protests against the Transmountain Pipeline. For a variety of reasons, it was a bit of a soul-crushing time. But right then I got the invitation to write something for the Refugee Tales project, and to come to the UK in 2015 to perform it and walk with the group. No more life-changing thing has ever happened to me. And the whole thing was built on the idea that is wasn’t a protest march, but a movement (physically and conceptually) to support and sustain a community of some of the most vulnerable people in the world (the stateless). It was a project that demanded time, consistency, community building, and the sort of “stillness” that comes from a measured, seemingly perpetual walk—around, outside of, and in the gaps and lesions of the state. A captured walking—with people whose lives were often essentially frozen in time and place, whose movements were heavily proscribed.

I wonder if this makes any sense? One thing the pandemic did was enable me to be an even more closely involved organizer with the UK group, since almost everything we were doing was on Zoom. It’s all about capacity building in the midst of an open-ended struggle to legitimize people’s presence where they happen to be—ridiculous that this is even a question. People should always have the right to stay where they are or leave where they are. Climate change is one thing pushing people to assert this right.

None of this is to say anything against protest as such. But protest always needs a grounding in community and movement building, or else it can devolve into frantic thrashing around (and I’ve been a thrasher for sure). Sometimes that’s a long road to walk. And that ain’t easy in a world in crisis, a world where everything feels urgent, and you want to respond quickly.   

SHR: Throughout the collection, you use propositions and the scientific language of logic. For example, in the opening pages, you write: “The possible is simply what either is or will be true. If it will be that p will never the case then p / right now / will never be the case.” And in the last section, “A History of the Theories of Rain,” you use the letter/symbol/glyph “x” to suture and mark fissures in line and sentence: “Spray of shrapnel across cosmos x fraction of stars spiralling planets x planets traipsing through Goldilocks Zones x chemical pathways out from mineral to bio …” I imagine it to be a kind of positionality: an intersection point, perhaps inspired by the graph/line chart you’ve included of the “Hutton’s theory of rain.” Can you speak about the “x” and the influence of Hutton’s theory of rain? 

SC: I love this reading—it isn’t exactly what I had in mind—but I love it! I think this is how the back-slash works throughout the book—it’s the only consistent punctuation I use—an inflection point between different possibilities. In the passage you are referring to, the symbols are intended to be multiplication signs: this times this times this. It’s my rendering of the Fermi Paradox, the equation physicist Enrico Fermi came up with to explain why we weren’t being inundated by alien visitors—why the universe seemed quiet, and like we were the only ones out there. It’s an equation to explain why, if there are so many billions of stars and planets, and so many billions that could support life, we don’t hear from anyone else. Maybe what we think of as “advanced” civilizations are a rarity and a short-lived crap shoot. Maybe, like us, they tend to fry themselves before they get far out into space.

Happy, right? But I think the Fermi Paradox can also be used to remind us that, well, there’s no place like home, and we can’t just crash this planet and go buy a new one somewhere else, like the Elon Musks of the world seem to be thinking. Capital and privilege again.

As far as Hutton goes, well, this is all about the source text, which includes this graph. I’m using a 1960s meteorological text, from which I borrowed my title. And it’s all about time again too—planetary time and human time tripping over each other. The majority of the language in the title poem is taken from this source text, which I read vertically, across its lines, assembling what I could, adding little things here and there. I also saw it as a kind of divinatory practice—an attempt to read, against the grain as it were, news of the coming climate catastrophe back into a text written before there was wide knowledge of that problem. And, on top of that, it’s a sort of love poem: while it’s an older poem I first worked up some time ago, I re-worked it in the summer of my 25^th wedding anniversary, so that’s there too—climate emergency + love in a dangerous time.

SHR: There were times when my throat knotted up (from the feels of scrying and love!) while reading A History of the Theories of Rain. That must’ve been the rain coming …

Thank you for writing such a wholesome, thought-provoking, hope-giving and hope-defying book, Steve. I’ve been changed by it – there’s nothing quite like your poetry!

 

 

 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji was a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Awards for her poetry published in Event magazine. Her writing has been shortlisted for the 2020 Bridport Prize for International Creative Writing (UK) and nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes. It has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Maisonneuve, Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing, and is forthcoming in Arc and Vallum. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Shazia’s fiction has recently appeared in the short film, Colour Study, available on CBC Gem. She is at work on a novel.

Stephen Collis is the author of six books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). Other titles include Anarchive (New Star, 2005, also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013), Decomp (co-authored with Jordan Scott, Coach House, 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016). An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012).

Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.

Stephen Collis’s SFU website: sfu.ca/people/scollis/

Shazia Hafiz Ramji : An Interview with Bahar Orang, author of Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty

 

 

 

Bahar Orang is a writer and physician-in-training living in Toronto. She has a BASc from McMaster University and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She completed her MD at McMaster University, and is now completing specialty training in psychiatry in Toronto. Her poetry and essays have been published in such places as GUTS, Hamilton Arts & Letters, CMAJ, and Ars Medica. Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty is her first book.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Bahar, how did you come to “beauty”? 

Bahar Orang: I think I’ve always cared about beauty, or followed beauty, or attended to beauty. Though I didn’t quite start from a place of wanting to write a book on beauty. Beauty emerged as a sort of tying thread in that endless, iterative revision process. I slowly realized that this thing that I was getting at - that relational dark matter, that deep and strange connectedness, that practice of attentiveness, that commitment to making life more livable - I would name it beauty. 

Shazia: I love that. The commitment to making life more livable reminds me of what Dionne Brand said: “the ruin of history visited upon a people does not wipe out the steadfastness of beauty.” Brand shifted something in my mind about beauty, which was previously tied to Romantic notions of the beautiful and the sublime. While reading your book, I saw how the quotidian can be erotic, how the tangle of life can be beauty, and it struck me that beauty is a way of looking, being, knowing, and that it takes practice. Who were your guides and influences while writing Where Things Touch? 

Bahar: “The steadfastness of beauty” - that’s stunning. Beauty really is so steadfast, it’s at once a refusal of violence and an opening towards something new.

I was reading so many poems while writing, I was swimming in poems, every time I sat down to write I had to get inside so much poetry before I could write a single word. Poems by Solmaz Sharif, Linda Gregg, Sharon Olds, Forough Farrokhzad, June Jordan - it was really such a pleasure and a joy to study beauty with poems that challenge and move me and that I love so much. Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema was also important to me, especially the film Close-Up, whose last scene taught me about the pace of beauty, the very slow, quotidien - to use your word - pace of beauty.   

SHR: How did you study beauty? Did you develop a practice of looking, stillness, attention, care? 

BO:  It’s probably all of those things (stillness, attention, care). Another word I might associate with the “pace of beauty” – a word I’ve become somewhat obsessed with – is rupture. There is an essay by Christina Sharpe called Beauty is a Method, and in it she writes, “I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible.” The word rupture also appears on the first page of Where Things Touch, where the speaker considers each fragment of writing as a kind of rupture. We live now in capitalist time, colonial time, empire’s time, linear time, rapid time, time swallowed up by work, by pain, by grief, empty time, time whose pace is bound by measures of productivity and domination. Attending to beauty, especially in the everyday, is a rupture to that time, that pace, and inside those ruptures, time opens up, time becomes capacious, and we catch a glimpse of different shapes for time, of other ways of being.

I have read that walking is important to your writing practice. Do you think walking does something to the pace of writing for you, or to the sense of time in your poems?

SHR: I love everything about “rupture” as you’ve described! It really hones in on the idea of rest as resistance,  joy as resistance, and now beauty as resistance.

Walking is a rupture for sure. I notice that when I walk I pay attention to the world with curiosity and openness … there’s something that feels effortless about the state of mind that comes with walking and taking in the world. It definitely changes my sense of time. I’m able to sustain a thought for much longer when walking. When I write after a walk, I’m able to hold many more tangents and bring them together at the same time.

There’s a passage halfway through Where Things Touch in which you say, “All our essays and poems are made up of echoes and reconfigurations of each other. Do we return to the same ideas, the same refrains, by habit or by virtue of the thought itself, where some thoughts are essentially generous, new things to say each time?” How do you reconfigure and make it new? 

BO: More and more I believe that there are no new ideas, no original thoughts, and every theory of beauty, or of freedom, or of liberation, is actually ancient. Of course, each time we grapple with those questions there are different manifestations, different kinds of potentialities that open up, but every idea emerges from so many histories, and is deeply enmeshed with those histories. Every reconfiguration, then, is made anew by the specificity of that encounter.

On a different scale, I think that many writers and artists have a set of preoccupations that they return to with every project, in ways that can be unpredictable or strange or quiet. And I think those returns are really amazing and can reveal surprising relationships between things. Sometimes I realize with a jolt that the seeds of what I’ve just written can be found inside what I wrote so many years before. Have you had this sort of experience? 

SHR: So beautifully said.

In my undergrad days, Kierkegaard was my favourite. A line by him still stays with me: "repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward.” 

I think that when we experience that jolt, we’ve remembered an earlier iteration of something, but it’s made new through the specificity of our aliveness in the present time - our specific encounter with the world. 

That jolt often feels like I had already known what I was going to write on some level, without knowing it consciously. And when it happens I feel that I’m a part of something much bigger.

Please tell me about your jolt experiences? Did you experience that recognition with Where Things Touch?

BO: I love that idea by Kierkegaard. Repetition, as a kind of recollection, is so important to the world-making possibilities of beauty. How every repetition of beauty, or every recollection of beauty, is like an insistence of beauty, an insistence of other arrangements for life – and we are back to beauty as steadfast.

About ten years ago, I wrote a short play for an English class, and I remembered it being mostly about trauma and exile, but when I recently encountered it again, I was stunned to see that it was also a play about beauty. Even back then, I wanted to understand, what can beauty enact where there is violence? 

SHR: <3

 

 

 

 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She was named a “writer to watch” by the CBC and her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes. She is at work on an autofictional novel.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji : Poetry Is Like Prayer: An Interview with Zeeshan Pathan

Zeeshan Pathan is the author of The Minister of Disturbances (Diode Editions, 2020). He attended Washington University in Saint Louis as an undergraduate where he studied poetry with acclaimed poets including Mary Jo Bang and Fatemeh Keshavarz. He speaks several languages and translates from Urdu, Turkish, & Persian. At Columbia University, he completed his graduate thesis in poetry under Lucie Brock-Broido, and worked with other talented poets & translators including former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand. Zeeshan is interested in world literature and literary theory, the poetry of the Middle East and India, and he also writes short fiction. He has been invited to several prestigious writers’ conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poetry is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and other journals.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Zeeshan, your collection, The Minister of Disturbances has just won an award! Tell us about the award and how your publication journey’s been so far?

Zeeshan Khan Pathan:  Hi Shazia, pleasure to speak with you here. My journey toward publication for the collection has been full of twists and turns since I started sending out the manuscript at the end of 2017. The manuscript has had some very interesting feedback and praise from various quarters of the publishing industry. In fact, the manuscript was a finalist for the 2018 Kundiman Prize, the 2018 Diode Editions Book Prize, the 2019 Eyewear Sexton and Beverly Prizes, the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards in June of this year, a finalist at Trio House Press’ open submissions period in 2019, and finally it won the 2019 Diode Editions Book Prize earlier this month along with Nancy Chen Long’s manuscript. The book and I, as I like to say sometimes in jest, were also semifinalist nearly an equal number of times so there was a lot of anticipation that the book would ultimately find a good home. So, I am eternally grateful to Diode Editions and editor Patty Paine for taking the leap of faith and giving my book a wonderful home & the prize! The award allows the work to have a certain amount of visibility and results in publication, which is of course, any poet’s dream!

SHR: When did you begin to write poetry?

ZKP: I came to poetry after my aunt Shabnam passed away suddenly from ovarian cancer. In my freshman year of college at Washington University in Saint Louis, I was supposed to major in sculpture and film but in my English 1 course, I met a poet named Stephanie Pippin and she saw that I was going through a crisis… and so she lent me a copy of Carl Phillips’s poems who happened to have been one of her teachers at the University when she was doing her MFA. Of course, back then, I thought that all poets had been dead since Emily Dickinson, or only existed in languages with revolutions in their recent past like Farsi, Urdu, and Arabic. Later on, I went on to study with Carl, Mary Jo Bang, and other poets at WashU.

This decision to study poems and make poetry my main focus really came as a result of Mary Jo’s encouragement and early interest in my work. It was around 2008 and she had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award. I was in her workshop not knowing really anything about her except that others had said she is a wonderful poet. It wasn’t until the workshop had ended in early spring and I had been fully spellbound by her teaching and her love for poetry... that I really began to understand who exactly had been my teacher. I read her book Elegy that summer with great attentiveness and amazement. I ultimately went to Columbia University to study with the great Lucie Brock-Broido and the legend Mark Strand, who I had met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in the summer of 2010. These early teachers gave me the hope and faith that poetry can be not only one’s career, but a life, a lifetime.

SHR: How has your relationship to your writing changed since you began?

ZKP: When I first started to write, it was almost involuntary. I had angst and angst wanted to go somewhere. I knew visual arts and painting & drawing. But after a few years of doing sculpture, I started to move toward the written word. I felt a longing that I could not describe and language became the medium for expression, a vehicle, and an obsession. As I continued my studies and met different poets, I learned from them how to handle the act of writing and willing it into being, so that it became less of a faraway thought or dream, but more of a daily practice, and an energy that I might actually be able to control. Of course, there is a huge aspect of writing which is still a mystery to me and even now having completed my MFA at Columbia University a few years back, I still feel that the poem is always on the way and yet nowhere. I have to will it into being and I have to let the poem have its way with me, as my mentor Lucie Brock-Broido used to say.

SHR: Why poetry?

ZKP: Why not? Poetry for me, as Forough Farrokhzad, the famous Iranian poet, once remarked, is like prayer. I think she said… poetry is the same thing for me which religion and prayer might be for religious people. She had said that in her wisdom and I have always felt that after I became a poet, I could no longer pray in the normal ways anymore. I was exiled from all that tradition of Islam even while absorbing it. My prayer became the poem and my hopes were that poetry would live like a chant uttered into the atmosphere. Or like a reading from the Quran, or the Torah, something mystical happens when we read poetry, and it gives me a reason for staying on earth & not becoming a total recluse hiding in my home writing letters to those who are no longer here. Poetry is a door like Blake suggested. It is really the doors of perception for me and for those who love to read literature.

SHR: I completely agree with Farrokhzad! How does where you live affect how you feel as a “poet” or as a “writer”?

ZKP: I have lived in many places including Los Angeles, Saint Louis, Memphis, Chicago, New York, Barcelona, and Istanbul. In these various cities, I’ve made friends and more than the space or city itself, it was the friendships that affected my poems. I do think, however, that living near the sea in Istanbul and seeing the Islamic way of life closely but in a developed country (and in a sense, being cut off from my earlier American way of life), changed me as a poet. I understand that I will be a poet wherever I go, and that I will always be exiled from a certain aspect of being American even when it is always America which I write about in my poems. That said, I want to learn the languages and poetries of the people in all the cities & countries I visit. I feel grateful that somehow in my twenties, I was able to see many places and encounter these very big cultures in person. It would not be false to say that writing poetry is the same for me everywhere. I will still be me. It is the poem that will change.

SHR: How does your work life influence your writing?

I’ve been a student for many years and I have had the singular privilege of studying more & longer while keeping my writing as my main labor because of fellowships and scholarships from both Columbia and Washington University. However, when I was in Los Angeles, I did work one full year (before grad school) for Equinox, which was a celebrity gym there. It was probably the most “unpoetic” thing I have ever done. But I met lovely people there in the company and it gave me a sense of discipline & structure which otherwise poets don’t always have automatically. I hope to pursue a PhD in Poetry in the very near future and I am certain that I will teach workshops in poetry fairly soon now that the first book is finished. 

SHR: Who and what are some of your influences?

ZKP: I am greatly influenced by my teachers including Mary Jo Bang and Lucie Brock-Broido. I love the elliptical poets, Emily Dickinson, the sonnets of Donne and Shakespeare, the poets from Spanish and Arabic (I am thinking Darwish and Adonis), Persian poetry (especially Rumi, Farrokhzad, and Hafez) has long been my favorite. I have learned to read Turkish during my Istanbul years and I also admire Nazim Hikmet very much. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was an early influence from the Urdu and I continue to read Lorca, Ghalib, and Alejandra Pizarnik with incredible delight and astonishment. On a final note, I will say that young poets should read widely and read against their own style. This technique has always kept me engaged as a reader and writer.

Thank you for this interview, Shazia. It’s been a pleasure to talk poetry with you. Thanks for allowing me to share some of my ideas before the release of The Minister of Disturbances.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Maisonneuve, and is forthcoming in Event and Canthius. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC, and her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a co-editor for Watch Your Head, an anthology on the climate crisis and is at work on the fourth draft of her autofictional novel.