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.