Interview: Solmaz Sharif

Last fall, Solmaz Sharif visited Cornell for the Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series. In addition to reading to a packed auditorium from her two books of poetry Look and Customs, and having lunch with current MFA students, she generously agreed to be interviewed for the EPOCH blog. We spoke in September, days after the police killing of Mahsa Amini and the ensuing protests in Iran. Our conversation was wide ranging, covering ideas of lineage, to the challenges of literary production, and how the loss and transformation of desire impact language. 

Aishvarya Arora: Let's start with the title. Customs—in the sense of tradition, and in the sense of travel—are rituals we arrive through. In this way, customs are connected to the question of lineage—where do we arrive from? Who do our customs connect us to? As the book rearticulates and resists customs of American life, it also makes a parallel effort to rearticulate lineage. I am thinking of poems that are in conversation with or reference Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Ethel Rosenberg, and Forough Farrokhzad, among others. What do you think about the relationship between customs and lineage? How did writing Customs impact your sense of lineage?

Solmaz Sharif: So, I’ll say that lineage is not a word I think of often, strangely enough. I think lineage requires a sense of continuity and permanence that I have never experienced. I think by not having experienced it—and I’m not torn up about not having experienced it—to me that is the reality of what it means to build or understand myself as a inheritor of some kind, of various modes and languages and ways around me. Lineage–I mean, I think of a line. It feels so direct. That’s definitely not been my experience. My experience is more, frankly, appropriative—trying to figure out what are the rules and norms and like slippages of belonging. Where am I in or out of accordance with them? When I started writing the book, I thought I was just going to focus on customs halls, customs officers, that whole thing. But I also happened to be on tour with Look and I was being introduced to the customs of literary production in the US in a way that I hadn’t been before. I was very surprised, which I probably shouldn’t have been, but, I was surprised. I didn’t expect that writing Look would allow me to see, in part, how the sausage is made. 

AA: It’s harrowing.

SS: Then I started thinking about the customs of writing and literary production in general. What might it mean to, as a poet of the 20th century who is outside and inside language, to turn towards that again? Who are the models for that kind of ironic doublespeak inquiry, scorn, and critique? There are a number of Black American poets that I reference. Then there are also other influences that come from my attempts at translating a poet by the name of Forough Farrokhzad. And those translations, I won’t be publishing. In part because of seeing how the sausage is made. I might change my mind about that at some point or find a way to do so. One could say I found an Iranian predecessor and I claimed her. She has a poem where she asks a friend when they come over to bring her the gift of a window so she can look out at the alley below. The feeling I had is that I am at my own window and she is at her own window and we are kind of like looking at each other across this alley and not exchanging words. That’s kind of what correspondence has become in my writing. My writing has become more about speaking with the dead than out of the dead. Look feels very much like out of the dead.

AA: I love the word “correspondence” as an alternative to lineage. Correspondence is much more iterative, it’s much more exilic.

Regarding the customs of literary production, it sounds like you think that keeping aspects of that production private, such as the translations, can be a way to reassert your own, not exactly ownership, but engagement with those texts and materials. But I also bet everyone wants you to share them. 

SS: Even tonight, sometimes I really want to. Even now, with everything that is going on, I am thinking of her, her last long poem, Let Us Bring Faith to the Cold Season. It’s kind of staggering how that poem reads today even though it was written 50, 60, 70 years ago. I can’t do the math, I still think 1990 was 10 years ago. My math has been obliterated.

AA: Time is subjective, it’s soupy, I’m here for it.

SS: Time is not linear either, so who cares, yeah.

AA: I am interested in how poetry can reflect the conditions that precipitated its making. Your experience sharing Look precipitated the making of Customs. But then thinking more broadly about how conditions of displacement or loss of language also precipitated the writing of Customs.

I wanted to share this quote by Anne Boyer that felt connected. She says to look for “poetry of the moment that requires whatever symbol of why the poetry isn’t there anymore.” In Customs, your use of interruptions became this symbol for me. I noticed interruptions on the level of image—booms from a nearby air force base interrupting the peace of Joshua Tree in “Planetarium.” They also occur on the level of syntax—“He, Too” ends with the phrase “I am let in until.” The entire collection ends with the line “I pass through there so that” in the poem “The Otherwise.” Do you connect to that word, interruption? What do you think of interruptions in the book? But also, how were those moments of interruption generated in your writing process? I think of them as symbols of moments that poetry can’t actually occupy, in a certain way.

SS: That’s such a beautiful quote. I think when I was writing Look I thought of interruption as a sort of violence, whether committed against self, or committed by the self against one's environment. I’ve always been interested in form as a kind of interruptive force that bears down on the poem, in that way kind of diagnoses, in the case of Look state-sponsored violence, and in the case of Customs, just power in general. I followed that thread pretty doggedly, and I arrived at a place where interruption was this blessed opening. A reminder of all that can’t be named. Of the silences and the quiet that actually make the music of our lives. There feels to me a more collective gesture in the moments of interruption, because essentially we have to ask each other—now what? Or, what is that? Or, can you hear that? And I find myself moving more and more towards those moments in my writing. I’m thinking of Audre Lorde’s essays and June Jordan’s essays against silence and speaking out against silence, and the absolute murderousness of silence, as something that a poet speaks against. And I still believe that, I very much believe that. So I’m trying to think through, what are these other modes and models of silence? I just started using silence instead of interruption. That’s more how I think about it.

AA: As I was writing the question, and looking at the lines that had those moments of interruption, I was wondering—what is interrupting the sentence? And that’s exactly it—it’s silence.

SS: Especially in the last poem where I think about silence as a more collective possibility, and in “He Too,” it operates more as a condemnation. Not only of the officer in the poem, but of the reader who knows exactly, knows without knowing what I mean. You know that there is a limit to one being allowed in and you could probably articulate some of those limits for yourself. All the threads of that are present in Look, but my attitude towards them has changed a bit, as my feeling of where I’m writing out of has changed.

AA: As you were describing that relationship to silence, I kept seeing this image of arrows pointing to an undefined absent space. The work of Customs is to encompass silence. Does it then become the work of readers, and different readers, to occupy that space of silence? Certain readers can enter that space, and others cannot. Is that a way to write work that cannot be co-opted by people in power?

SS: I do think it’s all co-optable, though.

AA: I’m going to sit with that for a moment. I appreciate you saying that.

Something else that always stays with me about your work, across both books, is how you cleave violence with intimacy or desire, these more vulnerable states. Look opens with the line “Exquisite a lover called me.” In Customs, “Without Which” describes a speaker happy to be alive in a “little city” made of the view from their lover’s bed, before we quickly turn to all the “Ofs” that same speaker is without. There are so many other desired relations in the book—between the speaker and language, between the reader and the writer's language, between the speaker and other lost loved ones. One of my favorite images is the one where you talk about leaving desire at the door, but it tapped its empty bowl, scratched at the door.

In your interview with David Naimon on the Between the Covers Podcast, you describe how the shift from a conceptual frame in Look to a more singular lyric “I” in Customs allowed you to “diagnose” different “power” in your writing.

How did the shift in frame between the two books change your approach to “diagnosing” intimacy? How did your use of the lyric “I” shape your handling of the relationship between violence and intimacy? Between alienation and desire?

SS: So, I wasn’t an English major. I was a sociology major because I wanted to talk about power. I wanted to understand power. The discipline was frustrating because desire had no place in it, grief had no place in it, elegy had no place in it. People essentially had no place in it. And really, to me, that’s where power is challenged and enacted most acutely. Be it the policing of desire and of grief, or the rebellions that are borne of it. Where is your hard-nosed political economy read now? That did not get us here. Wanting to dance got us here. And that’s not even my jam, I don’t dance. But I think that we see it time and time again, and we forget it time and time again, historically. I turn to poetry because of the erotic, because it was a space of the erotic and because of the elegy. I could mourn and make love. Those are the things that I wanted to do, things that poetry can do.

My relationship to desire kind of changed because I went to Iran in 2014 and it was over for me. In part because I was traveling with an Iranian man at the time who I was dating, and who was having a very different experience than I. And in part because most people had moved on. There’s almost this sense of returning after not having returned for so long that's  burdensome. I felt like a burden. This feeling of—are you here or not here? Make up your mind. Because we can’t do that thing. We can’t decide when you are or aren’t. You decide. It was really painful to face. And with these things, I lost the deepest kind of central force of my desire, this kind of longing and belief in some kind of imagined, not just country or place, but shelter, that existed for me, and would have existed. Once that was gone, I didn’t want to write anymore. I didn’t want to do much of anything, anymore.

AA: It’s such an animating force, desire, longing for something.

SS: There is no point in talking when you don’t have desire, there’s just no point. I have a middle section in “Without Which” where I am just trying to name that breakage.

AA: Tracing the breakage.

SS: I can’t fix it, I can’t change it, I can’t get myself out of it and look back on it.

AA: So better to just occupy it in a certain way.

SS: That’s when I realized there’s a tenacity to desire that can’t be denied. You think it’s gone, it’s not gone. You think it’s over, it’s not over. It would be so much less painful if it actually ended, but there’s always a deeper and greater loss that’s waiting. And so, it became unmoored, my desire became unmoored from material things, material body or self, or other, or beloved. Those things have become more abstracted from me, which I have become surprised to find, since I am pretty dogmatic about materialism.

AA: In some ways, the dislocation of desire reduces it down to the core of the feeling. That’s kind of freeing in a certain way, it’s not in any container, it’s just this force that wants to keep living.

SS: It’s brutal.

AA: To close us out, I wanted to ask one last question. In your work in general, and in Customs, you take so much care to complicate the idea of a lost homeland and of a lost language, which is not an easy position to occupy. At once, the book attends to and troubles the affective spaces that emerge from those losses. Kristeva’s concept of “frugal musicality” that you introduce early in the book, in the poem “Beauty”—that concept really shaped my reading of the book on a conceptual and aesthetic level. For me, frugal musicality also really connected to the process of writing poems—how creating poetry in itself requires so much loss, a ceaseless creation and discarding of language. How did creating the “frugal musicality” of CUSTOMS change your own relationship to language? What did you cut in the process of creating the book? Certain poems or themes that did not make it?

SS: So much didn’t make it into the book. I always think I have a book idea, then I start researching that book idea, it’s going to be a book of essays, I have a million things to say about it, a million notes.

AA: A book of essays! That’s the most words! That’s when the language gets to stay.

SS: Then all of a sudden it just becomes a bag of shriveled limes, and a poem. So, research is my happy place. Gathering is my happy place. And argumentation is another thing I really enjoy, statement is a thing I really enjoy. And yet when I go to lay an argument out, I think, do I really need to say all that? Does anyone need to say all that? Is it not enough to put this image here?

The frugal musicality also came out of that snapping of desire, the depressive state that Kristeva is naming in that moment. I’ve always loved frugality, I’m pretty Pound-ian, which is scary. Efficiency, even though I hate that word. I like it to be just enough, and not any more. I don’t like ornamentation. But now I wonder, will that hold? Does that hold? I’m not sure. One of the animating questions of my life, especially coming in as a non-literary person, coming in as a person to poetry–what makes a poem a poem? Why does this thing that I’m saying have to be a poem? At what point does it require a change? There is something about poetry’s protection of the excessiveness of our lives, the inconsequential, the irrelevant, that I have yet to honor fully. That’s my next challenge.

*

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley.