Qurat Dar, Non-Prophet

 

BE NOT AFRAID

Take the blessing in thee mouth
& go. The scripture on tattered wings.
Every word peeling from the skin. 

Where is my levelled mountain,
my parted sea? I wish the light would
moth toward me for once. 

Enough of the vacant angels,
the platitudes, the declawed gods. 

The trials I would endure to feel
the conviction of the trees.

I’m impressed by the meditative and exploratory “serious play” (what bpNichol termed it) of the full-length poetry debut by the former Mississauga Youth Poet Laureate Qurat Dar, her Non-Prophet (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. “The sunlit dargah knows / no prayer but that of survival.” Dar writes, as part of the poem “Snail Responds to the Ring of Crushed Eggshells / I Put Around the Lettuce,” “A porcelain cage that / could spear you in its shattering. Ask yourself: / do the dervishes spin or spiral?” As judge Kazim Ali wrote to blurb the collection: “I loved Non-Prophet for so many reasons: this book speaks to my own experience and history, it addresses questions of spiritual and daily live (and for many of us, those two are inseparable), but perhaps most importantly, these are exciting and immediate poems that continue the great legacy of Claire Harris. As Harris did in her poems, Qurat Dar bravely confronts a cultural imperative to silence or acquiescence with refusal; more than refusal, but response.” Claire Harris (1937-2018), for those unaware, was an award-winning Canadian poet based in Calgary, born in Trinidad, and who emigrated to Canada in 1966. As her online entry at The Canadian Encyclopedia offers: “Using such verse techniques as contrasting prose and poetry on the page, or alternating journalistic prose with the voice of prophecy, Harris dramatizes and makes public the psychological struggles experienced by radicalized women who face oppression.”

Set in three sections of tight, first-person lyrics—“DUST,” “CLOT” and “BREATH”—the poems of Non-Prophet write from a foundation of faith, of spirituality, one that the author/narrator works to understand on her own terms, not simply replicating or offering lip-service. “You were taught that to pray is to make / your mouth form sounds without meaning. / Reading suras like sheet music. Cradling / foreign words behind your teeth.” she writes, to close the poem “55:13,” “How fitting that your faith is just another language / you’re losing, or one you never learned to speak.” Dar works to articulate and engage on her own terms, which feels a normal enough experience around growing up, but with the added factors of cultural touchstones that seem to contradict how she has been raised to think, feel and approach her own spirituality; the added cultural factors of one spiritual context into another, the cultural collision between the onslaught of western culture and anything else it deems outside. This is, as much as anything, a coming-of-age book around spiritual faith and cultural identity, attempting to find balance amid what feels like chaos. “On a bathroom floor somewhere in Lahore,” she writes, to open the poem “Ablution/Absolution,” “I’m trying to find the delicate balance between / trying not to soak the tile and trying to wash / out an hour’s worth of hairspray and backcomb, / to look presentable for people that I’ve forgotten, / or who’ve forgotten me, maybe both.”

Again, that title, loaded with meaning through double entendre; reminiscent of the play the late Judith Fitzgerald offered as an early title to a work on the subject Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, “D’Arc and de Rais” (sound it out, you’ll get there). The full work later appeared through Ottawa’s Oberon Press as 26 Ways Out of This World (1999), a title I didn’t think nearly as interesting. Curiously enough, Dar even offers her own Joan of Arc poem, “Joan,” that begins: “It could never have been me. A woman’s platform is always a pyre.”

Through Dar’s Non-Prophet, she articulates her own seriousness beneath such performative gestures, and a sense of spiritual through the everyday, as Manahil Bandukwala offers as part of her own blurb for the collection: “As we hurtle towards annihilation, Dar combines rich Islamic and Sufi mythology with deepfakes and Teams lights. The poems loop and circle through destruction and renewal, diaspora and home, worshipper and worshipped.” “I / see a thousand patient / fingers where others / see God.” Dar writes, as part of “Waiting for the Moon to Howl Back.” Or “The opposite of eulogy is a prophecy,” a poem (with such a striking title) that reads with such being and purpose, and a repeated declaration of presence that the narrator appears to be directing, first and foremost, to herself:

and the clouds whispered to me that you will outlive this.
You will pull the stars from the sky with your teeth. Spit
them out, grinning. Your mouth bloodied brilliant. White-
hot with flame. You have taken blows that could fell giants.
Kept a quiet survival tucked below your tongue. You will
do this as long as you live. But how you will live, darling!
Weaving dreams like flowers in your hair. Laughing until
your lungs burst to fireworks. Loving and dancing as clumsily
as you do fiercely. Yes, my blood says that it is so, and a
river would sooner stop than lie. Yes, the darkness will
recede. A wave pulling reluctantly from the shore. You will
outlive this. Yes, even this.

reading in the margins: Kristjana Gunnars

I’m appreciating the reminder of how important Kristjana Gunnars’ novels were to shaping my early thinking on writing, thanks to The Scent of Light (2022), a reissue of her five novels—The Prowler (1989), Zero Hour (1991), The Substance of Forgetting (1992), The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996) and Night Train to Nykøbing (1998)—in a single volume, offered with a stunning introduction by American poet and critic Kazim Ali. “Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said,” Gunnars wrote, to open The Prowler, “but it is the only book I am able to write.” I most likely picked up second-hand copies of those first three novels somewhere in my early twenties, possibly from the now-defunct Richard Fitzpatrick Books, a store that sat somewhere along Ottawa’s Dalhousie Street. Returning to these novels, I’m startled by how deeply some of these sentences resonated, and became foundational for my thinking of, and approach to, composing fiction. The very notion that we write the books we do and in the ways that we do, in large part, because we simply haven’t the ability to write them in any other way. How did you do that, someone might ask. Practice, intuition, judgement. The question becomes unanswerable, beyond what might otherwise sound flippant. Experience.

I recently read a passage in Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s quiet night think: poems & essays (2022) that caught my attention: “Why do you write? was a question that I was often asked, and my answer for both weeding and writing was Rilkean: I must. Yes, there was something inherently futile with every weed I pilled, but I did so stubbornly, thinking of what Mordecai Richler said: Each novel is a failure or there would be no compulsion to begin again.” I was struck by Richler’s quote (I would be curious of the context around the original source), one that suggests a difficulty around such an adherence to scale: the massive narrative undertakings of his novels, writing hundreds of pages encompassing such a wide swath of detailed, world-building, narrative prose. The scope of works might be comparable to other Canadian writers of his era such as Margaret Laurence or Robertson Davies. Each novel, Richler said. Well, each novel of his, maybe. As with the example of Gunnars, my own sense of writing is not to encompass the whole world, or even the whole world of a space, but a particular portrait of a scene or a sequence. I don’t agree, I suppose, but it also doesn’t apply. But the difference in approach is interesting.

I spent a great deal of my twenties telling myself that I preferred the French-language aesthetic of writing interior monologues over the English-language aesthetic of the exterior description—pages upon paragraphs to describe every inch of a tree, for example, or what colour a particular character’s hair might be—none of which I considered required unless it is actually essential for the story itself. It took years to realize that my prose didn’t require dialogue, something I didn’t know how to include either way. I wonder now if it was actually through Gunnars that I became interested in novels propelled by language over cinematic scenes, and assembled via a narrative constructed through accumulation. Whatever else a book-length project might be, at least in my thinking, it is less all-encompassing than a kind of lyric, narrative burst, which relate to my early readings of writers such as Kristjana Gunnars, Elizabeth Smart and Dany Laferrière, all of whom also explored the form of the novel as accumulations, and of auto(biographical) fictions. “For eight hours we concentrated,” Gunnars writes, as part of The Substance of Forgetting, “not noticing time passing. Dawn turned to morning. The sun rose and shone on the water. Once we stepped out and watched the blank stillness of the water. The thick forests of the mountainsides mirrored themselves in the lake.”

“I have sometimes thought: it is possible there is no such thing as chronological time. That the past resembles a deck of cards. Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” I held on to this passage of The Prowler for more than a decade. Thinking back on it now, the notion of memory as a deck of cards shifted the foundations of how I saw the construction of narrative prose. A deck of cards, or a photo album: each section imparts the possibilities of the next. The novel I fumbled to compose across the mid-1990s, titled “Place, a novel,” was a collaged-suite of self-contained bursts that attempted to hold itself together across a very loose narrative, akin to how my twentysomething self understood Gunnars’ novels. It didn’t cohere, but it was certainly the narrative structure I furthered across my two published novels—white (2007) and Missing Persons (2009)—as well as my current work-in-progress. As Ali writes as in his introduction to the new edition:

The struggle of the writer to transform or transmute life into literature in a meaningful way may be why in each book there is a fluidity of time (the story as it happens, but also the narrator writing the story) as well as place (Denmark/Iceland, Winnipeg/Portland, BC, Interior and Coast, Trier/Hamburg, and Denmark/Saskatoon/Calgary). The shifts in time and space are required by the core structure of each book: a writer is writing a book. She writes the book and she tells you about what it was like to write the book.

There is such a lovely and lyric interiority to her passages. Gunnars’ novels exist as much through ideas, theory and speculation, writing internal monologues over descriptive scenes, and writing out the ways in which one writes, far beyond simply offering a story told through sentences. As the opening paragraph of The Prowler reads, in full:

Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said, but it is the only book I am able to write. It is not a book I would ever read from. I would never again stand in front of people, reading my own words, pretending I have something to say, humiliated. It is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer. Yet it is, in my throat, stomach, arms. This book that I am not able to write. There are words that insist on silence. Words that betray me. He does not want me to write this book. The words make me sleep. They keep me awake.

So much of my articulations on Gunnars’ work appear in the past tense, although that shouldn’t suggest I’d been absent from thinking about her writing across those intervening years. More recently, I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of her poems in 2016, snake charmers : a cycle of twenty poems, for an event we were both participating in through the University of Alberta’s department of English and Film Studies, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their writers-in-residence program. A bit later, I produced a chapbook-length essay of hers as well, a moment in flight: essay on melancholy (2020). “There are fragments of eternity in all passing things.” she writes, as part of that essay, suggesting a clear linkage between those early novels and her current work, although the essay was restructured into a long poem, set as the opening sequence of Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (2022). I’m not sure why the difference in structure, but it does alter the flow, just a bit. I am still looking into it.

Benjamin Garcia, Thrown in the Throat

Averting the Gaze

mom didn’t know I was gay

because she chose not to see

like the maidens of Pompeii

that were instead two boys

we’d now call gay we found

in a last embrace his head

on his chest we might change

our minds about who can hug

who and girls might be boys

people don’t stop being people

like the iis at the end of Pompeii

all on their own tongues do things

without us when we aren’t looking

the least of which is holding hands

Selected by Kazim Ali as winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series is Benjamin Garcia’s stunning full-length debut, Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a collection that swaggers, sweats and sings through a first-person lyric that explores the politics of identity, from sexuality to that of the immigrant, challenging the role and the question of who exactly is the outsider. Their poems are refined and emotionally open, occasionally wildly so. As they write as part of the poem “Self-Portrait as a Man-Made Diamond,” “because there is nothing for me / in immortality’s tundra // to even chip my teeth on. I couldn’t / live that way now, much less // after. Composure / and bling have never been // my thing.” Garcia’s is a lyric that both questions and declares, interrogates and makes known that they, as immigrant and queer, are the point from which all else is other.

This is not a metaphor: when I say that I lived in the closet, it’s because I lived in the closet.

You might, too, if you shared a one-bedroom apartment with eleven other people and a pet: mother, stepfather, brother, brother, brother, uncle, aunt, cousin, cousin, cousin, cousin, dog. Then there’s me, the surplus. (“The Great Glass Closet”)

Their are shifts that emerge from attention as much as perspective, and their lyrics are constructed out of empathy, understanding and a deep attention, such as the incredibly powerful “Reasons for Abolishing Ice,” a poem that manages multiple references, threads and complex ideas in a comparatively straightforward and emotionally devastating manner. The poem begins:

because the ice age is over now                                    ice

because this isn’t our first winter                                  ice

because the polar caps are melting                               ice

because hands up if they say freeze                              ice

because it’s getting hard to breathe                              ice

How does a poet manage to accomplish so much so quickly? I’m rather amazed at the strength of this debut by such a witty, smart and sly poet I haven’t encountered the work of, prior to this. In an interview with Garcia posted July 1, 2020 at Foglifter, conducted by Dan Lau, Lau responds:

It’s interesting. Thrown in the Throat moves through so many different intersectional topics. It’s particularly queer. It takes many positions and interrogates alterity in different ways. Yeah so I just wanted to frame the beginning of our conversation with the book’s threshold, the entrance poem. You’ve set up the intention to situate the reader in the context of an interrogation by considering what this language in question is. You go on to translate the language in question into other poems in this book placing the reader in the perspective of Latinx folk, the undocumented, the queer, the colonized, the erased or the ones that are in the middle of being erased right now. How can you help us make sense of all these languages in question for us?

BG: I think that the book as a whole is trying to pinpoint exactly what that “language in question” is, which keeps shifting throughout the book. The language in question series is trying to grab at the shiftiness of language as an idea. Whether that language has to do with “how do I, as somebody who has inherited a colonized history, work within English and Spanish? Finding things that are beautiful in it but at the same time things that are terrible. Finding a way of going forward with that, of not excusing it. Acknowledging it, but also making something new.

Or whether it’s our interpersonal use of the “language in question.” It’s how we interact with our loved ones. The ways that we may hurt each other without intending to or even the ways in which we police each other with what language we use within poetry. What’s acceptable and what’s considered beautiful in poetry? What has been left out and what are those factors? Who decides what language is appropriate and what’s not? So, I think the “language in question” poems are constantly searching—and, in some ways, they don’t give up searching. They don’t arrive at an answer. It’s more about questioning that language. It’s like that language has been used in criminal ways. So, like, by colonizers but also by people speaking English as an adopted language. How people from communities with accents or who don’t speak “properly” sometimes get treated like the way they use language is criminal. There are a few different ways in which I try to explore these overlapping issues.

From the Fishouse: an audio archive of emerging poets

Pearl Pirie recently pointed out this website of American poets' readings and question-and-answer sessions. A pretty large archive of new and newer writers, it includes a ton of worthy American poets: Barbara Jane Reyes, Beth Bachmann, Evie Shockley, Ilya Kaminsky, Kazim Ali, Laura McCullough, Mark Yakich, Mathew Zapruder, Paul Guest, Paula Bohince, Philip Metres, Purvi Shah Betsy Sholl, Rachel M. Simon, Rachel Richardson, Ravi Shankar, Reb Livingston, Reginald Harris, Richard Siken, Rick Barot, Rick Noguchi, Robert Farnsworth, Robin Beth Schaer, Sandra Beasley, Sarah Manguso, Terry L. Kennedy, Thorpe Moeckel, Tim Seibles, Tom Thompson, Tony Barnstone, Victoria Chang, Vievee Francis, Xochiquetzal Candelaria and Yona Harvey.

Pretty envious, this. Should we try to convince them to include Canadian poets as well, or should someone here simply attempt to construct our own archive?

Their website self-describes as:

Poets Q & A:

From the Fishouse is designed to be, in part, a resource for teachers and students of contemporary poetry. What better way to learn about poetry than from the mouths of those who practice the art? Listen to poets talk about writing, the writing process, and about particular poems featured here at the Fishouse. Below are links to more than 500 audio files of poets talking about their craft, arranged by author. These Q&A files can also be accessed through the individual poets' Fishouse pages.