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Inquisition
Di Kazim Ali
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Descrizione
During the 1982 air strikes on Beirut, Faiz Ahmed Faiz asked his friend Mahmoud Darwish "Why aren't the poets writing this war on the walls of the city?" Darwish responded, "Can't you see the walls falling down?" Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress. An inquisition is dangerous, after all, especially to Muslims whose poetry and art and spiritual life has always depended not on the Western ideal of a known God or definitive text but on the concepts of abstraction, geometry, vertigo. "Someone always asks 'where are you from,'" Ali writes, "and I want to say 'a body is a body of matter flung/from the far corners of the universe and I am a patriot/of breath of sin of the endless clamor/out the window.'" Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.
Informazioni sull'autore
Kazim Ali is the author of several volumes of poetry, novels, essay collections, and cross-genre texts. His collections of poetry include Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award. Ali is also an accomplished translator and the editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. He has taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary's College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a professor of Literature and Writing at the University of California, San Diego.
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Anteprima del libro
Inquisition - Kazim Ali
INQUISITION
May
And so it came my last day in the sunset, fog sluicing over me.
I turn east in the gaunt dawn and sue the blue dizzy.
At least in the unloving years I had my difference to wield.
THE EARTHQUAKE DAYS
In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been
the dinner bell but that’s odd
because I’m usually the one
cooking up if not dinner then
a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley
I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my resurrection,
the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck
the sun delirious.
That eclipse last week? Because of me
You’re welcome
The postman rattles up with your counteroffer and I’m off
to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague
because son you can read
in the dark and I have no
hiding place left
We walk hand in hand down the hill
into the Castro
avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but
because we already know all about this city, its engineered foundations,
its earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls
No tempest will catch us unaware
while we claim our share of
the province of penumbral affections —
You have no reason
to trust me but I swear I lie
down in this metal box as it thunders and looks
inside my brain. I am terrified nothing
is wrong because otherwise
how will I rewrite the maps unmoored
a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut
Who needs saving more
than the one who forgot
how the lazy cartographer mislabeled
his birthplace as Loss?
Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back
I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind
is at work and everything is at stake — I demand
statehood for my states of mind, senators
for my failure, my disappointment, the slander
and my brain unmapped reveals no
explanation for danger the ground untamed
I make paintings of nothing and
stand before them like mirrors
I only recently became a man but I do
not want to let go of my boy-weakness
instead I want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes
have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash
tantric animal governors to lay down
the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable
in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled
next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware
of what is about to hit her — that I am the answer to Bhanu’s question:
Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?
and so sick
I considered that sickness
could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven
shake me by the shoulders three times because they want me
to know that this world is worth its
trembling. At the next table over a mother
tries to reconcile her bickering sons
I have no brother but the one
I invent has always got my back, he drowns
out the mullahs so my mother can finally hear me
In a different book Jesus
never suffered, never was flogged or died
went whole into heaven without passion
Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places
unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother
of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season
trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates
make their latest explosive move:
to transubstantiate my claim
by unraveling this city down to stone
Everyone I know wants to douse
the fire, flee the endless aftershocks,
untangle every vexing question
You owe me this witness
I owe you flames
FLOWER GATE
Edged in petals I affix myself to the gate
at every appointed prayer hour
Seed pods scatter in silver dusk
Green cypresses minaret the sky
My disobedient body aspires and I
when music pierces inland hand in hand
devour this arbor of forgetting
and take one last shot at
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