Kazim Ali

Poet Details

b. 1971
http://www.kazimali.com

Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim
parents of Indian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-
SUNY, and an MFA from New York University.

Alis poetry collections include The Far Mosque (2005), which won Alice James Books
New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (2008), and Sky Ward (2013). Alis
poems, both lyric and musical, explore the intersection of faith and daily life. In a review
of The Fortieth Day, Library Journal noted that Ali continues his task of creating a
rejuvenated language that longs to be liberated from the weight of daily routine and the
power of dogmatic usage . . . writing in the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Ali is clearly a
poet of ideas and symbols, yet his words remain living entities within the texture of the
poem.

His prose includes The Disappearance of Seth (2009), Bright Felon:

Autobiography and Cities (2009), and Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and
the Undocumented Divine (2015). He is also the author of the novel Quinns
Passage (2005), which was named one of the Best Books of 2005
by Chronogram magazine.
 In 2003 Ali co-founded Nightboat Books and served as the presss publisher until 2007.
His newest books are The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017)
and Anas Nin: An Unprofessional Study (Agape Editions, 2017).

He has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and his
poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry. Ali has been a regular columnist
for the American Poetry Review and a contributing editor for the Association of
Writers and Writing Programs Writers Chronicle. He is a former member of the
Cocoon Theatre Modern Dance Company.

Ali has taught at Oberlin College and the low-residency Stonecoast MFA program at the
University of Southern Maine. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

In January 2014, Ali was a featured writer for Harriet.

Home

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BY KAZIM ALI
My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.

After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping
my chin.

My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered

on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.

Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from

the house.

The Sunni Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark
out of Prophet Mohammads heart, thus making him pure, though the
Shia reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.

Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers
himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under
the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren
Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.

In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and
God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all
creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for
their sake.

Gabriel, speaker on Gods behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can

I go down and be the sixth among them.

And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go
under the blanket and be the sixth among them.

Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group
under the blanket admits him to their company.

Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.

Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.

In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps

to the site of Maula Alis pilgrimage.

I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.

I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English

in a book called Know Your Islam, dark blue with gold calligraphed
writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with
marks above and below the letters.

I didnt learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the
language itself.

Gods true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence
of stars.

When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know
where he was being led.

When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.

And said, Father, where is the ram?

Though from Abrahams perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice

his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.

Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.

I learned Gods true language is only silence and breath.

Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and

as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to
protect his health.
Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the
steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.

My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair
was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet
and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.

At which point I realized my hair was curly.

My fathers hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.

The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his
hand before I left.

There are two different ways of going about this.

If you have known this for years why didnt you ask for help, he
asked me.

Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a
Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss
the book.

There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to

be punishable by lashings and death.

Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.

Should I travel out from under the blanket.

Comfort from a verse which also recurs: Surely there are signs in this
for those of you who would reflect.

Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are
knownQuran, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.

There are a hundred othersBhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song of

Myself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black Buffalo
Womansomewhere unrevealed as such.

Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the
annotations.

What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering

to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.

She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy
of the Imams names. My name: translated my whole life for me as
Patience.

In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top,
thirsting for what.

My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage.

She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she
would give a new son.
I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sisters first
son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my
telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of herperhaps meaninglessthat I have never

forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God
will still welcome you.

My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

Kazim Ali, "Home" from Bright Felon. Copyright 2009 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by permission of
Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)

==
Rain

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BY KAZIM ALI
With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.

No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. Ive written:

Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.

The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.

If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.

The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Kazim Ali, "Rain" from The Far Mosque. Copyright 2005 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by permission
of Alice James Books.
Source: The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005)

==
Refuge Temple

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BY KAZIM ALI
REFUGE TEMPLE

254 Purdy Street, Buffalo, NY, childhood home of Lucille Clifton

There will be another storm always on the air

Or in the air or are you the air
Cold unrecognizable following
The inside road
This vessel bears one through
Snow or time to find the house
Paint peeling and maybe unfamiliar but the address
Is to a place that doesnt exist anymore
An empty lot
Now owned by the woman
Next door who leases it to a
Storefront church that needs the space for parking
I take a selfie with the snowbank
254 Purdy Street
Sunday morning they will plow and cars will fill the place
Worshippers filing next door
Names of the family who lived here forgotten
Sayles their name was Sayles
Well theres Miss Bowden says the neighbor
Who lives over there
Ninety years old
Lived here her whole life
If anyoned remember she would
Though if the house dont hold against the world
And the body dont hold against the world
Snow falling down
What can hold
The church house the neighbor next door
The snow Old Miss Bowden
This empty lot
We empty now
Everybody drive home
Song done over
Snow river hover
House is gone
Stormsent era
That Miss Bowden may remember
The twelve-fingered girl who lived here
We tell the neighbor: her name was Lucille
Playing in the street
Afraid of the dark
Bringing the light

SALON DES REFUSS

East Side, Cleveland, OH, apartment building of Julie Patton

In the house of Julie Patton

Bumblebees do sing pollen
In the cave of ears
Every thing listens
Jimi, Barack, and Marilyn Buck
The saints of the place
In vigil of excellent beings
Light poles hold typical beasts
Though here they empty themselves
Into me
Orange spaces do make
A world again for though the gods are mythic
The goddesses spin
Dear Julie sing
Me through the long hallway
The dark one sleeved in your mothers
States of mind
State of mine is the one that opens my body
In heat through dark and salted moments
Body is a book
House does quiver
Unwritten the way of how to find you
House is the book
In the language of feathers that launch
Whose heart could race
Winter air winter season that rushes
How we in dark are slung
The dark that opens its hallways
Time mastered by Shiva and Hanuman
I did stand in the empty space
Filled by snow
Then here in the sun-flirted front room
Watched by Saint Nina Simone and Saint Joan Baez and Saint Buffy Sainte-Marie
I wonder forward in Sapphic tongue
Who is remember me
Who is open me with their tongue
Who languages the space of a house that dont exist
Better thought sun see Julie sing sanctified
Sing swung sing one and one and one and one

SCHOOL HOUSE

Barrington, Rhode Island, right near the Bay, home of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander

When she gives me directions and describes it to me

I expect a red-room schoolhouse
Driving across the water from Providence
Into the stream-laced far shore
Far shore where a boat unlands
To determine the shape of what isnt
There I drive past wrong streets
Wrong houses places whose bells I ring
Stranger in the forest and dark-skinned too
Where do I belong
From the bathhouse I came
Where I worshiped at all manner of strange altars
Does this make me more or less human
Tongue makes you human
And how it translates the body into language
To find the door as it was described to me
Frosted glass and Japanese characters lining it
School saying the language of the sun
No sums add up here
But she calls me in
And I frown to know long to know
What holds the house against the world
How will words survive the dissolution of the body
Of the planets core
Sore and soar it came down through the cloud cover
Gray-white curtains
House of a dozen languages
At the cold lake the far away lake
She grabbed me post-lecture where I told about how
I could not translate the words of the poet until I came to her own sun-loved city
She begged me to always love all manner of strangers
I thought she meant the regions of the body
Id have promised her anything though years later in Rhode Island
Named for an island no one can find
Lover I love you forever
House that disappeared
Books that live in the air
Island that no one knows
While on Purdy Street good people park their cars in the snow
Go inside and sing
We dont have nothing more than this anymore
No planet no lover no words no nothing no more
Source: Poetry (April 2017)

==
Renunciation

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BY KAZIM ALI
The Sailor cannot see the Northbut knows the Needle can
The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines
Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced

Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her

The careful matching of the papers edges was a road back

One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged horse

Taken from the Near Mosque to the Far Mosque

Each book likens itself to lichen,

stitching softly to tree trunks, to rocks

what was given into the Prophets ears that night:

A changing of directionsnow all the scattered tribes must pray:
Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here
Well you be found here, foundered and found

Kazim Ali, "Renunciation" from The Far Mosque. Copyright 2005 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by
permission of Alice James Books.
Source: The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005)

==
Speech

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BY KAZIM ALI
How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural:
Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell.

Shes been nominated for the position of Featured Saint

on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate

me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding

the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open.

Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron.

Letters that I could not read.

Why I feel qualified for the position

based on letters I could not read amounts to this:

Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference

between the broken gates and the forbidden letters.
So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints?
How might we otherwise remember

without an image to fasten in that lonely place

the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever?

Without an icon or church, spell gates of Hell.

Spell those years ago unfolding.

Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read.
Spell fling yourself skyward.

Spell fever.

Kazim Ali, "Speech" from The Far Mosque. Copyright 2005 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by
permission of Alice James Books.
Source: The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005)

==
Ramadan
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BY KAZIM ALI
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving months

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.

The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets

into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,

thirst makes clear the starving pattern,
the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment

The secret night could already be over,

you will have to listen very carefully

You are never going to know which nights mouth is sacredly reciting
and which nights recitation is secretly mere wind

Kazim Ali, Ramadan from The Fortieth Day. Copyright 2008 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by
permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
Source: The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008)