Why poet and UC San Diego literature prof Kazim Ali wants to put poetry into your life
Poetry has been in Kazim Ali’s life for as long as he can remember, but he needs it more than ever now. And he suspects you might need it, too.
“For me, poetry is absolutely a comfort. It is a way of contending with everything,” Ali said by cell phone as he walked around his Normal Heights neighborhood. “We are expressive creatures, no matter who we are. We should all do something. Write in a journal, or do something expressive. You have to find something that will let you make something beautiful.”
Poetry may not have helped Ali all that much during his illfated appearance on “Jeopardy” 14 years ago (“It was really fun, but I did terribly,” Ali said of his last-place finish), but otherwise, it has been a beautiful partnership.
As a child growing up in a Muslim household, Ali — who was born in the U.K. and raised in Canada and the U.S. — found poetry in the recitation of the Quranand other religious texts. At 27, he discovered that poetry could be the source of a life reboot, when he left his job as a political organizer to get his Master of Fine Arts in poetry at New York University.
When Ali’s first collection of poems was published in 2005, poetry set him on writing spree that resulted in six more books of poetry, along with five novels, six nonfiction books and four translations. It also gave him a teaching career, which led to his current job as a professor of literature at UC San Diego.
And now, as our individual and collective worlds continue to spin in unpredictable and unsettling ways, Ali has written a book that captures this strange moment while also giving us the words that can help us cope with it.
Poetry to the rescue. Again. The book is “The Voice of Sheila Chandra,” whose title poem was inspired by the true story of the acclaimed Indian singer and her struggle with Burning Mouth Syndrome, an incurable neurological disorder that left Chandra unable to sing or speak without feeling physical pain.
Burning Mouth Syndrome is exceedingly rare, but the silencing of a voice struck a chord in Ali’s creative consciousness. What if the tool you needed to break your own emergency glass was taken away? Then what?
“It is a specific tragedy as it