An Interview with Agha Shahid Ali

                                                                -by Christine Benvenuto

The following conversation with Agha Shahid Ali took place at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts in the late 1990s. His third collection of poems, The Country Without A Post Office, had brought him critical acclaim and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was preparing an anthology of ghazals for publication and writing the poems about his mother's death from a brain tumor that would become his last volume, Rooms Are Never Finished, published by Norton in November, 2001. Ali himself died of a brain tumor in Massachusetts on December 8, 2001.

On paper, Agha Shahid Ali was a poet of exile. His first three full-length collections-The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), A Nostalgist's Map of America (Norton, 1991) and The Country Without a Post Office (Norton, 1997)-are replete with songs of displacement and longing, with the loss of lovers, home, country, memory itself, with laments not only for his own past, but for the pasts of his parents and grandparents and the ancestors he never knew. But in conversation, the Kashmiri-born poet was a self-described happy man who expressed impatience with the notion of exile in the lilting Anglo-Indian accent he said Americans love.

"You constantly meet people who are immigrants and who say, oh, I feel like I've lost my culture and I've lost my roots, and I say, please don't be so fussy about it. The airplanes work. I mean, if you have a certain kind of income, whether you live in Bombay and fly to Kashmir, or you live in New York and fly to Kashmir, for a certain group it really makes no difference."

For Ali, membership in the group for whom airplanes work was a given. He was born in New Delhi in 1949 and grew up in the legendary Vale of Kashmir, in a culturally sophisticated, socially enlightened upper-class Muslim home. "There were three languages, Urdu, Kashmiri and English, spoken at home all the time, and poetry recited in these languages, and poets and musicians visiting and I would say it was culturally a very rich atmosphere," Ali recalled. "There was never a hint of any kind of parochialism in the home."

The family's tolerance extended to religion and Ali was educated at an Irish Catholic school, simply because that was the elite institution in Kashmir. "When I was a kid, I remember telling my parents that I wanted to build a little Hindu temple in my room, and they said sure. And then once I said I wanted to build a Catholic chapel with pictures of Jesus, and they said sure, they brought me statues of Jesus, they brought me statues of Krishna, they said go ahead, build your temple. It was a wonderful atmosphere full of possibilities of self-expression."

When Ali wrote his first poems at the age of twelve, he said it was only natural that the language of his pen turned out to be English. In his introduction to The Rebel's Silhouette (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), his translations of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali makes an unusual distinction between mother tongue and first language. For him, he writes, the former is Urdu, but the latter is English, and he is unequivocal in laying claim to both the language and canon of colonial legacy. "I do consider English in many ways a South Asian language," he said, elaborating in conversation. "I mean it's something worth pointing out to people that the third largest English-speaking population in the world exists in India. That is more people than the entire population in Canada. That gives people a sense of perspective.

A global perspective seemed to be second nature to Ali, who said he always knew he would come to America. He sent his poems out of India ahead of him, and claimed he didn't mind their initial failure to find a home abroad. "I used to send poetry out all the time, I never kept it at home," he laughed. "I never worried about rejections and there were zillions of them coming. I never took it personally, or maybe I was just shameless."

With a Master's in English from the University of Delhi already under his belt, Ali arrived in the U.S. in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. at Penn State with a dissertation later published as T. S. Eliot As Editor (UMI Research Press, 1986). He then went on to earn a Master of the Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona, a decision he said had to do with a shortage of job opportunities and a desire to spend some time writing in a part of the U.S. he'd never seen. He took his first teaching job at Hamilton College in upstate New York in 1987, moving on to the MFA in English program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993.

"I have never stopped writing poetry," he insisted. "With teaching, often you aren't able to work in as concentrated a manner as you'd like, but the point is, I make time for myself. At Hamilton I set Tuesdays aside, and I said on Tuesdays I'll do nothing that reeks of anything official even if I don't write a word. I will not shave, I'll stay in my pajamas, I'll watch soap operas, but I will do nothing concerning college, and many of the poems in Nostalgist's Map I did like that."

Since teaching at the graduate level claimed less of his time, Ali no longer felt the need to set aside specific hours for writing once he arrived at UMass. "Something can trigger it off any time and I will just go and jot things down," he explained. "A phrase will occur somewhere, either spontaneously or someone will say something, a chance thing, and I'll say, ah, that can lead to a poem. Then I try to find time when I can be alone and work on the poem."

Ali said he penned the first two to three drafts of a poem in longhand, sitting or lying on the carpet, then typed as many as sixty to seventy drafts on his computer, generally taking anywhere from a week to three months to complete a piece. One poem, the haunting epigraph to Nostalgist's Map called "Eurydice," took a year.

"I was so interested in the idea of Eurydice and I wanted to do a poem from her point of view, so this was one of those cases in which it was a willed thing," he recalled. "I started working on this poem in which she's in a New York subway. I was thinking of that as a metaphor for hell, but it was getting very gimmicky. And then I thought of a Nazi camp and she started speaking and I got the first line. It was willed and yet not quite willed because I couldn't take it anywhere until I got that opening sentence. Then I wrote it the way I would write any poem, which is, the opening phrase has demands and I take it where I can."

One place Ali was in the habit of taking his poems was to James Merrill, a good friend and valued critic until his death in 1995. "I value him immensely as a presence in my work, and I would say he's in some ways the formal spirit guiding me through The Country Without a Post Office." That book is dedicated to Merrill, among others, and his loss continued to be felt, though Ali was fortunate in having three or four other friends whose opinions of his work were invariably welcome. "It's not that I agree with them always, but I will pay attention to what they say," he explained. "They give me the kind of feedback I might arrive at myself a year later."

Responding to the demands of form was another kind of challenge Ali took on from time to time, experimenting with traditional western prosody as well as writing in free verse. In recent years, he tried his hand at the ghazal, the Arabic lyric whose couplets operate within an exacting scheme of rhyme, repetition and syllabic consistency. Writing his own ghazals and editing an anthology of ghazals in English, Ali embarked on a small-scale campaign to rescue the form from the ill-or at least, muddled-use it has received from American poets.

"The form has really been utterly misunderstood in America, with these free verse ghazals. I mean, that's just not the ghazal," Ali insisted. "The ghazal has a very strict formal unity, with a certain cultural location, and so James Harrison and Adrienne Rich, though I like things they have done with what they call ghazals, those are not ghazals, they simply aren't." Ali praised John Hollander as a poet who has produced a true ghazal but he added that, once the form was understood, departures didn't offend him. "People have written sestinas of varying line lengths," he pointed out. "Once you've seen a strict sestina such as Elizabeth Bishop's, then of course it's wonderful to keep experimenting. But at least we know what the real thing is."

That kind of equanimity also characterized Ali's attitude toward the increasingly rancorous debate between adherents of formal and free verse poetry in America. Asked where he positioned himself in the feud, he responded without hesitation. "I don't. I mean, I just consider that a luxury a rich country can afford. To me, most of the arguments around it are really silly." But giving the subject a little more thought, Ali allowed that a real problem might lie at the heart of the dispute.

"I do think that because of the proliferation of MFA programs, a certain kind of free verse poem has become an utter cliche´," he said. "It has nothing to do with the innate nature of free verse, I think. It has to do with the fact that this has been the prevalent, received form now for twenty to thirty years and people have gone around thinking that they can just express themselves in these prosy lines and chop them up with some sense of discipline but no real questions being asked. I would say if free verse is becoming very easy, try sonnets, try sestinas. And if you are too facile in those, either reinvigorate them or try free verse if that's the tough thing for you, but keep deparitng, keep trying, that's all."

Fidelity to any single aesthetic, and in particular to the William Carlos Williams-inspired minimalism he felt dominated recent American verse, was utterly foreign to Ali's concerns as a poet. Pointing out the celebration of the ecstatic mode in the traditions he grew up with, he said he found Americans overly skittish about excess. "I say, well, you've had Walt Whitman and you've had Emily Dickinson, what's your problem? I find Walt Whitman absolutely excessive, and why not? I think that's great. Why should one write in that minimalist fashion all the time, given the fact that Americans have those examples?"

Learning by example was Ali's own modus operandi, and his simple advice to students: "Read ravenously and be interested in being influenced." Given Eliot's famous maxim, "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal," it's fitting that Ali credited Eliot and his fellow modernists with teaching him the fine art of literary appropriation.

"I did learn this whole business of how to incorporate allusions and quotations into the fabric of your poetry, how you do it and make it your own, and how sometimes to quote something and not even acknowledge it," Ali said. "Will the reader get it or not? If they get it that's great, it's wonderful. I am a bit of a conservative or an elitist in this matter. If people are serious about poetry, they should know their Shakespeare, they should know their Milton. They should be devouring poetry all the time, and some of the pleasure is in recognizing."

Ali's poems give the canny reader much to recognize. Figures from Arabic legends, Shakespeare, and the Greek myths his mother told him as a child find their way into all his collections. Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant" is evoked by a poem called "Resume" and lines and phrases from an array of other writers are caught into the weave of Ali's own verse. One of his particular pleasures was discovering obscure references to his native land in western authors' work, and he took a connoisseur's delight in citing Oscar Wilde on the subject of Dacca gauzes in his first book, and in finding inventive uses for Emily Dickinson's half-dozen mentions of Kashmir (and Cashmere) in The Country Without a Post Office.

Ali said that India's political troubles made him ache for Kashmir, and this is especially evident inThe Country Without A Post Office, in frequent, if sometimes oblique, references to soldiers, curfews, searchlights and a city in ruins. But social concerns in Ali's work weren't limited to the country of his birth. In Nostalgist's Map, for example, he writes of a strike put down in Bisbee, Arizona in 1917, and of the Native American cultures whose destruction is evoked by a drive through the desert. According to Ali, a proclivity to mourn historical loss was an inescapable part of his temperament. "I think of people who because of historical forces have lost so much," he said. "I mean, these things are in my way of looking at the world. I'm in one way or another obsessed with all that."

Despite this obsession, overpowering grief is not a feature of Ali's work. Poems loop through a process in which an initial response to loss gives way to a highly postmodern anxiety to pull back from that response, coupled, at times, with a sense that in the act of turning devastation into art, the original experience of mourning that began it all may be squandered.

"When you're dealing with painful subject matter," Ali contended, "I would say definitely you need distancing devices. You can make that very choice to distance yourself a subject matter, a thematic and aesthetic issue. But to actually serve that material you need a formal distancing device because otherwise you might end up sounding simply hysterical. Even someone like Sylvia Plath, who is on the verge sometimes of something that may sound like hysteria-I don't want to use the word hysteria with her, I respect her much too much, but everything is so finely tuned. Like it's on the edge, but there is also a distance being maintained by that."

Writing on the edge may be an unavoidable condition for a poet exploring the borders between cultural and ethnic territories, but Ali seemed unfazed by the complications. "First and foremost I consider myself a poet in the English language," he maintained. "Then there are the various designations possible." He offered a long list of hyphenated identities by which he could be known, including Kashmiri-American poet, Indian-American poet, South Asian-American poet, Muslim-American poet. "All of those designations would be true, in one way or the other, and if they are used in larger ways I don't have an objection to them. But if they're used simply to restrict me, I'm not interested in them."

What did interest him was the work his particular position in the world enabled him to do. "I would say that because of certain kinds of historical forces, I am lucky to be imbued with what I'd call permutations of Hindu, Muslim and Western cultures," Ali said. "Because of the new interest in the literatures of the world, some of us have a chance to do certain things for the first time with the English language. This of course is all connected with the history of colonialism. Because certain things happen for the first time. I mean, Shakespeare happens at a certain time because England is finding its voice."

"With fiction, we're lucky that someone like Salman Rushdie occurred. Maybe many of us who've been writing in English in South Asia have prepared the ground for something like that to happen, let's say, with poets who are now in their 20's, that they might be able to do something like that in the next 10 to 15 years. Indian-English poetry is waiting for something major to happen."