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I needed to revisit the subject matter once again in a poem called “Dear Shams,” which I have included in my current unpublished manuscript.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.
