{"id":100928,"date":"2016-07-27T17:16:40","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T21:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100928"},"modified":"2016-07-28T14:09:02","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T18:09:02","slug":"the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/","title":{"rendered":"The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read \u201cLook,\u201d the title poem from her debut collection<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from <\/em>the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection\u2019s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department of Defense, a <\/em>look\u00a0means \u201c<\/em>a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.\u201d)<\/em> At a time when the U.S. automates acts of murder, Sharif insists that war is still personal\u2014perhaps today more than ever. In one of its most quoted passages, she writes, \u201c<\/em>Daily I sit \/ with the language \/ they\u2019ve made \/ of our language \/ to NEUTRALIZE \/ the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS \/ like you.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cBy simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy<\/a><\/em>,\u201d John Freeman wrote in the<\/em>\u00a0Los Angeles Times, \u201cSharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers\u2019 hands for examination.\u201d<\/em> Look confirms what I\u2019ve known since 2014: Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle East. I spoke with her about her influences, the role of the poet in today\u2019s world, and the stories behind\u00a0<\/em>Look.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In an essay you wrote for the Kenyon Review<\/em><\/a>, you said, \u201cWhen I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as \u2018political.\u2019 Then, \u2018documentary.\u2019 And these two things seem to, for some, preclude aesthetic rigor.\u201d There\u2019s a popular conception that overtly political can\u2019t have aesthetic value\u2014that a political message degrades the aesthetics. Is your work a deliberate effort to rebut this notion?\u00a0<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

Clich\u00e9d, bad writing often means clich\u00e9d, bad politics, and vice versa. Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them. I think June Jordan is an exciting example. She was politically astute and radical, but she was also a classically trained pianist, so when you\u2019re reading her work, it\u2019s incredibly music driven and decided. It\u2019s exciting for me to think of poets that are allowing their politics to also be shaped by these aesthetic considerations, and wondering when the poetic will lead you to the kind of political surprise that a dogmatic approach wouldn\u2019t allow. These are the artists that live on the fringes of what is aesthetically and politically accepted.<\/p>\n

When I say \u201cliving on the fringes,\u201d I\u2019m thinking of Edward Said\u2019s idea of the \u201cexilic\u201d intellectual pursuit. It\u2019s this artistic presence continually outside, questioning and speaking back to whatever supposed \u201chere\u201d or \u201cwe\u201d or \u201cnow\u201d we\u2019ve created. The word fringe <\/em>is belittling in a way I don\u2019t intend\u2014I mean a nomadic presence, or a mind that is consistently on the run, and preventing these political moments from calcifying.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in how your family came to the United States, and how you experienced the country as an Iranian immigrant.<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

The dominant narrative of Iranian exile or displacement in the U.S. is one that\u2019s about people who were supporters of the Shah, who was a dictator, and were forced to leave after the Shah was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. That\u2019s not the only narrative, though. My parents were students in the U.S. in the late seventies, and as the revolution picked up steam, they went back home to Iran, and left again in 1983, and I was born en route out of the country. We moved to Texas so my dad could finish his studies there, and then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama, so my mom could finish her Bachelor\u2019s there, and finally we ended up in Los Angeles when I was in sixth grade. It was the first place I lived that had a sizable Iranian population. There\u2019s actually an Iranian population in Birmingham, but LA has the largest outside of Iran. At that time, it felt dominated by upper-class, well-to-do Iranians who were more into assimilation than my family or I was. I felt immediately ostracized by this group in middle school, when I came. I don\u2019t mean to make it sound like everyone was rich\u2014they weren\u2019t. We weren\u2019t. There are many different Iranian presences in Los Angeles, but I just didn\u2019t have access to them.<\/p>\n

No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of \u201cme,\u201d I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse\u2014to go back to the exilic intellectual\u2014to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It\u2019s easy for me because I\u2019ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been important for me to write down as many narratives as I can, other narratives around the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian presence in the U.S., and also the possibility for Iranians to build coalitions with other Third World groups, as Iranians did in the seventies and eighties. That\u2019s the community I come out of. There\u2019s also a rift that happens between first and second generations, because the second generation has woken up to the fact that assimilation is not just a matter of your accent or class or education\u2014there\u2019s an \u201cin\u201d that you\u2019ll never be in because of who you are.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-Indian, and anti-Pakistani\u2014and on and on\u2014racism within the Iranian community. But my experience is one of obvious allyship between these communities. I\u2019m more interested in what brings us together and what our nearnesses are, but this can sort of dumbfound some members of the Iranian community. When I was sixteen, I went to this Iranian feminist conference, and Angela Davis was the key speaker. She referred to us all there as \u201cwomen of color,\u201d and some of the women in the older generation were squirming in their seats. It was the first time I\u2019d heard the term, and I thought, that\u2019s it. That\u2019s exactly what I\u2019ve been trying to name. Whatever struggle is deemed optional or needs to be postponed, that\u2019s my community. But that statement didn\u2019t make too many people happy at the time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Look, <\/em>to me, has a very female point of view. Women\u2019s relationship to combat\u2014though it\u2019s changing with the evolution of war itself\u2014is usually more oblique. We often play more supportive roles, though our experience is no less devastating. Is there significance to approaching war and surveillance as a woman?<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

Before I was even a poet, when I studied sociology, what I wanted to look at were media representations of women\u2014Palestinian women in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, for example. How are women described by media, or by state-sponsored language, in warfare, and how is that representation used to justify state-sponsored violence? Women are often purposefully brought into descriptions of what war is\u2014to justify the rescue of a nation, or to justify its decimation by showing its entire people as despicable or threatening, for example. By default, war seems to be just what happens to men on the front lines, during wartime. The boundaries of warfare\u2014who it affects and who it doesn\u2019t, and for how long\u2014are very much divided along gendered lines, historically. I definitely wanted to challenge those lines.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s power is in its observations of the long-term effects of wars on individuals and families\u2014some of its less-discussed casualties. I think part of the reason you\u2019re able to take this view is because you\u2019re a woman.<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

I think you\u2019re right. There\u2019s the old personal-is-political adage. But then, to be a woman is also to know that your body and your self and your mind are subject to and delimited by power at every turn, even in your own house, in your own lovemaking. There is no part of your life that has not been somehow violently decided for you by a narrative that was established before you were even born. This is not only true for women, right? It cuts across various identity strata\u2014queerness, race, class, ability, et cetera.<\/p>\n

But to have that sense of precarity or vulnerability questioned and challenged by misdirection\u2014for example, when you\u2019re told that you\u2019re overreacting, that what you think is going on isn\u2019t actually happening\u2014this is how the U.S. largely deals with warfare. They say, The war is no longer happening on this block, what are you talking about? That\u2019s something that\u2019s natural to my experience as a woman, and something that seems necessary to expose over and over again. I want to talk about how far-reaching these effects are and how intimate these effects are and how there\u2019s no part of our bodies or desires that are not somehow informed or violated by these atrocities. This is a conversation that began with my own gender.<\/p>\n

Audre Lorde\u2019s essay on erotics was a huge influence on me. When she talks about the erotic as a dark feminine power, that\u2019s an argument that could be made here, but I\u2019m not as comfortable making that argument myself anymore. I think all of these questions\u2014what is femininity, what is darkness\u2014and I\u2019m so up in the air about them myself that I don\u2019t really know what to say, other than that I feel, as a person and especially as a woman, that I am under constant threat and attack, and it\u2019s not just me that\u2019s happening to. Somehow, I want the work to show that every time you\u2019re washing the dishes, every shower, every grocery trip\u2014that\u2019s all informed by this violence, whether we\u2019re seeing it or not.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a constant awareness of surveillance in your work\u2014in one poem, you mention that you start every phone call by saying, \u201cHello, NSA.\u201d<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

The U.S.\u2019s surveillance capabilities are not lost on me, and we\u2019re pretty aware of this history\u2014or maybe we\u2019re not, actually. It\u2019s definitely been in my awareness over the course of writing this book, and it\u2019s something I did want to highlight. When we think of political repression, for example, or of a police state, we think of something that just happens abroad in Eastern European countries, or in Iran, whereas I understand America as the nation of COINTELPRO. How do we realize, again, that all of our lives, no matter who we are, are being surveilled, some more than others, and that we\u2019re living in an increasingly repressive environment? How do we realize that whatever we see to be happening \u201cthere\u201d has already happened \u201chere\u201d?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The poems in Look<\/em> are united thematically\u2014the majority of these poems include rewritings of terms from the Department of Defense dictionary. I find this kind of conceptual project very interesting. Did you set out to write your first book in this way, or did it morph over the course of writing?<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

It became much larger than I anticipated, and I had to just stop it, basically, because it\u2019s a conceptual frame that could continue ad infinitum, which is true of a lot of conceptual practices. I did not know it was going to be what it is. I discovered the dictionary in 2006, and it was another year or two until I actually started using it. I thought I was just going to write one poem that deals with the dictionary\u2014then I realized I could write a whole book in response. As soon as I realized that, I started looking at other books that do similar work. M. Nourbese Philip\u2019s Zong!<\/em>\u00a0was a huge influence. That came in a later iteration of the manuscript. Later, too, I was directed to Code Poems<\/em> by Hannah Weiner. Earlier on, there was Rukeyser\u2019s The Book of the Dead<\/em>.\u00a0Martha Collins\u2019s Blue Front<\/em> invited and encouraged a more personal narrative. With each discovery, the manuscript would shift in response\u2014I\u2019d think, This has already been done, or, I haven\u2019t tried this thing yet, I didn\u2019t realize I could do this. It started as a rewrite of the dictionary, and wanting to redefine the terms to reveal the truth beneath the terms. It then evolved into revealing those terms as a part of our lives everywhere, daily in the U.S. I think the last major piece that went into it was the long elegy, \u201cPersonal Effects,\u201d that I wrote for my uncle, and that was probably when I thought that it was pretty much done. That was the last major piece the book needed.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen you mention June Jordan over and over in interviews. I know that you studied in her Poetry for the People (P4P) program at UC Berkeley and list it as a huge influence in your development as a poet. I came across this quote from her\u2014 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

The task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks \u2026 I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Can you talk a little about the program and why it was so important to you? What do you think your role is, as a poet?<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

There\u2019s this vein of self-affirmation that runs through that generation of radical poets\u2014this need to define and affirm a collective identity that is otherwise despised. That\u2019s actually one place where I feel I split off. Maybe it\u2019s a generational thing, maybe it\u2019s just because I think of poetry, right now, at least, in the way Dunya Mikhail, the Iraqi poet, described it\u2014as diagnostic, rather than curative. I think June was a poet of vision, and I think that I\u2019m more reflective. I haven\u2019t quite gotten to that moment of vision yet. I just trust and know that certain lives need to be looked at very closely, and need to be grieved, and need to be considered\u2014and affirmed, I guess.<\/p>\n

The P4P program was the most rigorous education I\u2019ve ever received. It\u2019s an amazing pedagogical model that June Jordan set up after decades of teaching. My understanding is that she was teaching an African American poetry course in the African American Studies department at Berkeley, and a women\u2019s poetry course in what was then the Women\u2019s Studies department, and she\u2019d walk into these classrooms, and one class would be predominantly African American men reading African American poets, and the women\u2019s studies classroom was predominantly white women reading women poets separately. She thought, These two classes need to be in the same room, and they need to be talking to each other. That\u2019s how she came up with P4P, which was housed in the African American Studies department.<\/p>\n

Each year, the program would focus on three different ethnic groups that we would have to learn to somehow define and describe a history of. When I took the class, it was one of the few\u2014if not the only\u2014class that was teaching Arab and Arab American poetry on campus. She started doing that right after the first Gulf War started.<\/p>\n

As a student, you were in a class that you\u2019re co-teaching with other undergraduate students and members of the community. You see a poetry that\u2019s not being taught, and that you yourself know zero about, and instead of just lamenting that you\u2019ll never have the expertise, you just figure it out. You read as much as you can, and you get up in front of the class and give a lecture. Maybe you fail publicly, but it has to be done. When you see work that\u2019s not being done, you go and you do it. You don\u2019t wait for someone else to.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t really seen a model that is so pedagogically complete and radical anywhere. It was her attempt at Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s \u201cBeloved Community.\u201d It was the closest I\u2019ve gotten, for sure.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Jordan was all about building multicultural alliances. I wonder how you, as an Iranian American, interact with the various racial justice movements in America that\u2014at least at the moment\u2014are dominated by discussions of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism.<\/p>\n

SHARIF<\/p>\n

I think we need to be very, very specific in naming the racism, the multiplicity of racisms, we face. Meaning anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, for example, must be named and highlighted. This does not preclude my own involvement or visibility as an Iranian American, and I shouldn\u2019t be the measure by which this conversation is had, anyway. I think the more specific we are, the more inevitable it becomes to see the relationship between various powers. If we are naming the arrest of black men without charge and without trial, for example, well, I have something to add to that, something that wouldn\u2019t be added if the conversation remained \u201cwe all face racism.\u201d The more specific we become, the more obvious the relationship between these oppressions, the more dangerous and visionary the conversation.<\/p>\n

You ask about movements. I do want to step back for a moment and say I believe all action is political, and poetry is an action, so I believe poetry is political, period. I have a hard time, though, saying that my poetry is activist, or that poetry in general is activist. For me there\u2019s an important distinction to be made. I don\u2019t want to front. As political as my work might be, and as much as I might be thinking about how these things play out globally, as much as I might think or write about anti-Black or anti-Latinx racism, I haven\u2019t been to a meeting in a long time. That\u2019s the most direct way I can put it.<\/p>\n

Zinzi Clemmons\u2019s debut novel, <\/em>What We Lose, is forthcoming from Viking. She currently serves as deputy editor for Phoneme Media, and lives in Los Angeles. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read \u201cLook,\u201d the title poem from her debut collection.\u00a0Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection\u2019s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":954,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[23566,10421,23567,9350,1596,14045,18179,3388,4746,23565,23569,10716,23568,7738,11102,7221,165,23570,2426,6661,23564,16092,183],"class_list":["post-100928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-arab-americans","tag-audre-lorde","tag-department-of-defense","tag-dictionaries","tag-documentary","tag-edward-said","tag-graywolf","tag-hannah-weiner","tag-iran","tag-iranian-americans","tag-june-jordan","tag-look-3","tag-m-nourbese-phillips","tag-military","tag-nsa","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-for-the-people","tag-politics","tag-racism","tag-solmaz-sharif","tag-u-c-berkeley","tag-war"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The poet discusses her first collection, \u201cLook.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif by Zinzi Clemmons\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 27, 2016 \u2013 In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read \u201cLook,\u201d the title poem from her debut collection.\u00a0Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-07-27T21:16:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-07-28T18:09:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/solmaz-sharif2.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"423\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Zinzi Clemmons\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Zinzi Clemmons\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"16 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Zinzi Clemmons\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/678746f1707830fc039882bb16cedcf1\"},\"headline\":\"The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-07-27T21:16:40+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-07-28T18:09:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/\"},\"wordCount\":3134,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/solmaz-sharif2.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Arab Americans\",\"Audre Lorde\",\"Department of Defense\",\"dictionaries\",\"documentary\",\"Edward Said\",\"Graywolf\",\"Hannah Weiner\",\"Iran\",\"Iranian-Americans\",\"June Jordan\",\"look\",\"M. 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