Relevant to the Day (20/09/19)
I read Dorothy Porter last night
and her surrender to desire slunk into
my sleep left teeth marks on my dreams.
I woke hard as the morning. My unit is full
of desiccated flowers a breath could undress.
We tread carefully around this death. Outside:
the light, pink and blue, a spring sea bobbing
at the window, wanting, if not the wind
to keep it lively, a seasonal surety
no longer available. I watch it wither on loop.
We have filled this place with ourselves, love.
Nothing can change that. Yet I keep the doors
shut, and rarely let a room inhale for what
it might bring in: a breed of vanishing
insect, a common bug or waft of play
from the park, a spontaneous shriek or
demand for order, a stink—basically
what is not us. My timeline delivers
the slaughter of Afghani pine nut farmers
into our open hands & I seethe again
at the wounds in the world, the futility
of witness: they called it an accident, as if
what matters is deliberation & not
the remote ordered destruction
of families by other families.
I do not know how to mourn
an accident and a family—I decide
there is no such thing as accidents.
I am sick with uncontrollable intimacies.
I don’t understand how we are functioning.
We have seen and heard everything two
humans can share. Sometimes, like today
I ask even love to leave while I am naked
and I put a thin wall between us, a matter
of inches, the smallest distance I can bear
and I hear love say one plant is still alive
it seeks the sun, it bends toward its outer
kin, separated by a foggy pane of glass
and as you say it I know it, the peril
of belief, that something unlikely
only moments ago, could so swiftly
burst into being and this is why I fear
I insist on calling you love.
Vidya: Tell us about your artistic practice.
Omar: Well, I’m a poet. I think I’m supposed to answer this question by outlining a kind of rigour, by making of myself and my art a system which is understandable as a labour deserving of a wage. Except I hate this system and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Everyone should have enough money to live, period, and nobody should have too much. I write haphazardly, but prolifically—I have written and published two books of poetry in the past six years, alongside many essays and articles—mostly because I don’t do anything else and don’t have much of what others would consider “a life”. I am obsessed with the forces which have shaped me into who I am, with the fallibility of memory, and the absolutely awful state of the world.
What prompted this poem?
Love. Romantic love is the new force in my life—I turn 30 next month—and it has altered everything in it, particularly my relationship to desire, but to suffering as well. I haven’t figured out precisely how, or why, I’m just trying to pay attention to it. Thus far in my work I either dig into the past or into the present, with the latter always being more difficult. That has something to do with the way memories accrue resonance and a false sense of permanence or stasis, where ‘now’ is light, frantic, and meaningless by comparison: you gotta get to work, your neck hurts for some fucked up reason, your mum keeps calling you or hasn’t called for ages, you need to figure out what to have for dinner, how you’re going to pay for the eight hundred things you need to do in the next six months, and you have all these memories you’ve been subconsciously investing more and more into until they are less like images and more like sharp rocks digging into your eyes. That’s before you even think about what’s going on! Politics? Fucking hell.
So, anyway, I’ve been increasingly interested in the way we dismiss ‘now’, and I’ve been writing a sequence of poems each called ‘Relevant to the Day’ where I try to catch something of the slipstream fuckery, the unreasoning chaos of social media, to hold down the moment and preserve of it what I can. In this case, on this day, I had been reading about the massacre of Afghani pine nut farmers, which seems to have already been forgotten, and I wanted to sit with that and to show as honestly as I know how to the way it registered on my home. It is damning, or it should be.
The ‘I’ in this poem seems fraught, at a kind of ethical crossroads of how to be in the world.
I don’t think there’s an ethical way to be a writer. It’s always going to be fucked up to some degree or other, a weird melange of privilege and arrogance that will undoubtedly influence the people in your life whether they consent to it or not. There’s something truly ghastly about the authority inherent in focused, crafted language. I think that’s one of the reasons I am attracted to it, as someone who has felt both powerless and subject to the negative authority of language for most of my life. I haven’t been getting out a lot lately, so many of my recent poems have been situated in or around my unit, the ways in which I open and close, leave and return. It’s about boundaries, about what we let into our living, spaces and bodies.
Yes, I love this poem’s sense of the hyper-awareness of boundaries: the outside and the inside, but also those that exist between two people, two intimate bodies.
I’m not sure you can ever have a dissolution of boundaries even with two people deeply in love, but I also want to be clear here that I’m not talking about a static wall, I think it’s more like water, it shifts and transforms—it can be deep or shallow, it can freeze or dissipate, can be murky or reflective. If you look at it that way, then it’s not a barrier as such, and your intimacy is not defined by how “close” you are or whether you can “undo” it. You should aim not to control it but to understand it, and so in the poem, when a sudden change asserts itself while the narrator is naked and he asks “even love to leave”, you can look at that with shame or sadness, but there’s more to it than that. First, there is beauty in love listening. Second, it is from outside, from that change in perspective, that he learns something new.
I often feel like poetry as a mode—and ‘Relevant to the Day’ is an example of this—is particularly suited to questions of how the political and deeply personal live together.
I think poetry is the perfect mode for these questions, for the very reason many people say they don’t read poetry: it’s sentimental. Like any kind of writing, you can express and explore critical thought, but it also allows and encourages you to pair it with emotion, your lived response to those thoughts and the actions that accompany them. Patriarchy is responsible for this stupid state of affairs where emotion, particularly positive emotion, is frowned upon and assumed to be lesser than or at least separate from rationality, which is obviously untrue. You can tell by how the angriest man in the room is always the one shouting about logic. I’ve been that angry fool often enough to know. In Australia over the past few years we’ve heard our politicians pleading with us not to be compassionate, not to be emotional, on subjects ranging from refugees to the climate crisis; in America, you have the president and Republican Party ruling purely through emotion, driving always toward fear, hatred, and disgust.
Poetry reminds us, always, that you can’t think without feeling. It gives us a way to understand how those thoughts and feelings interact; operating without that crucial human understanding is what has lead us to disaster time and time again.
Any reflections on editing as part of process?
I love editing! I love the sensation of cracking open a sentence and taking from its shell whatever half-alive thing was curled in it. The one major difference in my work this year stems from how much more time I have to sit with my poems, as a PhD student with a stipend I’m no longer tied so much to my freelance income, and I am relishing the drafting stage a great deal more now. I try to see whatever I send into the public as a work-in-progress anyway so as to not be hindered by perfectionism, but last year for example I published 18 new poems. This year I have published two new poems (not including my book, of course). I enjoy being edited, as well—any avenue that provides me with another way into the poem, another way to understanding, is to be welcomed. It makes me a better writer.
Who are some poets you’re currently reading or commonly turn to?
I’m currently revisiting the great Mahmoud Darwish’s “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise”. Other poets I’ve enjoyed recently: Derrick Austin. Aria Aber. Rick Barot. Jay Bernard. Isaiah Hutchinson. Selena Tusitala Marsh. I commonly turn toward the brilliances of Jericho Brown, Tracy K Smith, Samuel Wagan Watson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eduardo C Corral, and many, many others—we could be here for days!
About the author
vidya rajan is a writer, editor and performance-maker. she currently lives in melbourne and is a writer in residence at the malthouse theatre. you can get in touch on twitter.