3 Questions with Sarah Ghazal Ali
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies, selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, and forthcoming with Alice James Books in January 2024. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Palette Poetry and a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. Find her at sarahgali.com.
Xu Li chats with Sarah about her work from Issue 70, out now. Sarah will also be reading at our launch party tonight! Register here.
Sarah, I’ve been so taken by the variety of forms that I see you employ across your poems—there’s the triptych, your ghazals, the poem in the form of a genealogical tree, to name a few. I’m thinking of a tweet by Claire Schwartz, that form is part of the non-language of a poem—“[the] non-language thing that poems always feel to me like they’re trying to touch, as atmospheric, as the light and weather of it.” What has been the most exciting or possible form for you to write in?
Thank you for your close reading of my work, and for braiding Claire into this conversation. She has been a dear, dear friend and mentor to me, so I’m delighted that your question springs from a thought of hers. I am drawn to form for precisely this reason, a kind of striving toward that, to me, is at the heart of poetry as an endeavor. I think of poetry as beseeching, and while the essence of that is wordless and visceral, it helps to step into a shape: prayer, liturgy, ceremony. To that end, the ghazal has been the most charged form for me. I wrote an essay trying to capture my thoughts about it, but I feel like there will always be more to think through! I find it to be a form of inexhaustible depths. I came to it through Urdu music first, so I am always trying and trying (and failing) to write ghazals in Urdu, to return to the language I first received them in. It’s exciting, and terrifying, and endlessly frustrating.
In your interview at the Rumpus, you’ve talked about the omission of matrilineal elders in familial records, and in your poetry, the violences of erasure enacted by patriarchal traditions: “Without a place in history [for these women], my manuscript is trying to parable one into being.” I was wondering if you might speak a bit more about the parable and its relation to poetry?
In Dear Memory by Victoria Chang, there’s this incredible question: “What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed?” I think the project of my first book, Theophanies, is to answer that question, to constantly come up against the truth that there is no answer. There is no single form, rather, forms, all adding up to an attempt at a matriarchal parable. The archetypal parables are the teachings of Abrahamic figures and prophets. They’re extended metaphors that they used to reach people, right? By imagining and dreaming and straining to hear the missing voices of the matriarchs, I am reaching right back.
Parables often have some kind of moral or lesson associated with them, so I won’t say that poems are all parables. But there's something generative there for me, something electric in pairing the two. Parables ask: what do I live by? How should I pass my days? And poems ask: how am I to bear it?
Is there anything you’d like to share about your poem, “Cicatrix,” that we don’t know?
Just that scars are never silent or fixed, no matter how much nations try to convince us that they are. The 1947 Partition continues to wound India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and their diasporas, 75 years later.