12 or 20 (second series) questions with Qurat Dar

Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (icehouse poetry 2025) for which she received the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. She was the City of Mississauga’s third Youth Poet Laureate and a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I think my first book mostly changed my life by showing me I could actually write a book, and that it was worth publishing. I competed in poetry slams for around two years in undergrad, and while only a few of the poems I competed with made it into the book, I can still see its influence. I love a punchy line or a bit of clever wordplay. Generally, poetry slams have a 3-minute time limit per poem – I found it a bit of an ordeal writing poems that long. My poems have gotten much shorter since I stopped competing. Since I was used to writing for performance, it’s only more recently that I’ve started trying my hand at more formal poetry and working with how the poem looks on the page.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually always wanted to write speculative fiction and wrote a terrible novel or two in high school, but the external motivator of poetry slam ended up pulling me towards poetry. Having a community of peers that I could write, perform, and compete with (for better or worse) kept me writing poems.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It’s a mixed bag. My favourite is when (rarer than I’d like) an image or concept sticks with me for a few days and then when I sit down to write the poem comes out all at once. More often a poem comes out of bits and pieces I’ve collected over a while (in my journal, notes app, and in random Word documents) and finally found a unifying thread for.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem for me usually begins with a single image or line and (ideally) snowballs from there.

For Non-Prophet, the “book” emerged after I already had the poems in hand (spanning eight or nine years!) and could see the patterns there, see what I kept circling in my work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

As a recovering slam poet, I love doing readings! Hearing how a crowd responds to your poems is a form of feedback too. It depends a lot on the audience though, performing to a room that’s dead quiet is brutal. Audience interaction is probably what I miss most from my slam days.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

To be honest, often I don’t know what questions my poems are asking until a while after I’ve written them. In Non-Prophet a lot of the questions are asked directly in the poems themselves. Largely, they revolve around identity and belief.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of the writer (and artists in general) is to surprise us with our own capacity for feeling.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, working with editors improves not just the poems themselves but has made me a better poet. A pair of fresh eyes (or multiple) lets me see what’s effective and what’s awkward or confusing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

That any piece of art will end up different than how you imagined it initially and that is okay, even good. Writing is a process of discovery for me and too much planning bogs me down.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (works for the page to more performative works)? What do you see as the appeal?

I had a bad habit of leaving my poems in paragraphs instead of putting them into stanzas, but besides that it’s felt pretty natural. I try to write poetry that bridges the page and the stage. I find poetry that balances the two to be more compelling – it’s engaging enough to hold your attention but has layers of meaning to sit with and investigate.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a routine for writing poetry, I tend to just write poems when I get the poetry itch.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I like making Pinterest boards and playlists for writing projects so I can return to the specific mood/atmosphere I had in mind. Mostly I just have to give myself time.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

French fries and gasoline. I’m a child of the suburbs.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature and science influence my work a decent amount. I currently work in stormwater engineering so I’m always listening for concepts or terms from work I can pull into my poetry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I think every writer I read influences my work in some way. My peers in the Maza Arts Collective bring me so much joy, inspiration, and encouragement: Anjalica Solomon, Cassandra Myers, Franz Seachel, Kiran Shoker, and Namitha Rathinappillai.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d love to write for different mediums – comics, videogames, film.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I wasn’t a writer, maybe I’d be less mediocre a flutist/guitarist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I was a huge bookworm as a kid, so naturally my childhood dream was to be an author. Of the art forms, I feel writing has fewer barriers to entry as well.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Most recently I read What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher – really enjoyed it. I don’t watch many movies alas.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a sci-fi manuscript!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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.